August 18, 2005
Thicker Than Water: New Gina Ochsner fiction in The New Yorker
A few months ago I blogged that my old college friend Gina Ochsner has just released her second collection of short stories, entitled People I Wanted to Be. This week I noticed that Gina has a new piece of short fiction in the current (August 22nd) issue of The New Yorker, entitled "Thicker Thank Water." The story begins as such:
In the spring of 1988, Vasya Brkic, waking from a dream in which she was a wolf, bit her husband's neck and killed him in the bed they shared. The following spring, Marti Cosic, a saxophonist in a klezmer band, went crazy and killed his fellow band members-all seven of them-then beat himself to death with his saxophone. One year later, after swimming naked in the newly thawed River Daugava, Semyon Iossel, an unemployed engineer, built a flying machine and died after falling from a great height. His grieving widow distracted herself for a year by giving lectures on the dangers of gravity, then succumbed to a mysterious urge to throw herself in front of the Riga-Tallinn train and was pulped on the tracks.
Every spring, like clockwork, there was another death in the small community of Russian Jewish émigrés in our little town just outside Riga. Each time, Father, who worked at the cemetery just beyond our house, was one of the first to hear about it. The black phone in our kitchen would ring, and off he'd go to dig the hole. Mother was not very enthusiastic about this phone, which had been installed, she said, only to deliver bad news. “And who makes all this bad news?” she asked as we crowded at the front door to watch the approach of the coffin of Galina Gorskilevna, a young copy editor who had possessed frayed nerves and a rope strong enough to hang herself with. “Foreigners!” Mother answered her own question. We squinted at the long procession of women dressed from head to toe in black who followed the coffin. Behind them was a line of men in the black hats that Rudy once told me in confidential tones were called Schwartze Nipples.
Mother shook her head. “Everything they do is always so overstated and dramatic. Why can't Jews die quietly, like the rest of us?”
To read the rest of this story, click the New Yorker story page here. Gina's last story in The New Yorker was "The Fractious South". Gina's debut collection of short stories, The Necessary Grace to Fall, won the Flannery O'Conner Award in 2002.
