Daniel Torday

My shul is in Philadelphia, directly across the state from Pittsburgh, where eleven Jews were murdered in October at the Tree of Life Synagogue by an anti-Semite with an AR-15. To have been young and Jewish in this country in the ’80s and ’90s was to have lived in a subconscious state of fear. That was my idiosyncratic experience, anyway—unconscious, inarticulable fear, the product of knowing enough of the “never again” canon, of a Jewish education that emphasized Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi and Deborah Lipstadt, Schindler’s List and Shoah and Night and Fog. In the ’60s and ’70s, the facts of the Shoah were being recovered. No one needed to be reminded not to forget while actively endeavoring to remember.

Now he saw that the dog wasn’t barking at the contractor at all, but at the sinkhole. It was like he was waiting for something to come up out of the ground. “Weird little guy you’ve got there,” the contractor said. “His name’s ECKEETA,” Edgar said. “We just got him yesterday.” The contractor stared at the dog while ECKEETA bared his teeth at the sinkhole, barking and barking and barking.