Tzaddik stories first emerged in the 1990s in the blogpost “And this part is true,” then reemerged in a novel that followed Malkah’s occultation on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific exactly when her father, the Tzaddik, got stuck in southern Tunisia unable to cross the Sahara.
Instead of protecting her, the Tzaddik was traveling in North Africa with his buddy, Rav Gavriel, who got unbearably sick right about then and they had to stay put somewhere between Douz and Tozeur.
And there I left them all, missing in action, unable to complete their journeys. Thirty years later, both Malkah and the Tzaddik’s adventures had changed unrecognizably… Mrs Tzaddik also appears in many of the original tales, so if you read them, you’ll know why she was omitted from Malkah’s Notebook: she would have completely taken over.
Posts
The Back Story
When I was a child, my father gave me a book. It was about the Aleph-Bet letters, and how they lived. In it the letters each had a story to tell of their adventures.
The Stones I Cannot Place
My mother’s ‘passing’ has crippled my writing. And apparently that’s not all. It would be unfair to blame her, per se, because that would be rude…
Secrets of the Tzaddik
He wanted it spelled ‘poppa’ not ‘papa.’ He was definitive about that, but not about much else. I always wondered why. It seemed anachronistic, that spelling, but maybe that’s the point.
Sages of the Zohar
The deaths of our greatest sages, like the deaths of our ancestors, can be an almost unbearable loss. This loss—and the attempt for reunification—is one of the themes in the Zohar, The Book of Radiance.