Introspection
by Omer Berkman
[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]
The day before he was connected to the ventilator, he still had time to open the old notebook and summarize the main points: He lived for 83 years, in 12 different apartments, slept with 9 women, 4 of whom he loved, raised 2 girls, received 1 award of recognition for outstanding employee, but the salary did not cover the expenses. He thought whether to also write about 1 global epidemic, but in the meantime decided not to, it could wait. In any case, his family did not think to engrave any of this on the tombstone.
Omer Berkman lives in Israel, together with his wife, two sons, two hens, and a ghost of a black cat. He is a Hebrew writer who has published a non-fiction book and a theater play. His work — prose and poetry — has appeared in many Hebrew magazines. One of his short stories was recently translated into English and published in Halah, the literary magazine of Jerusalism. In his spare time, he works as a developer in a high-tech company that tries to measure the global digital traffic in the World Wide Web, an action similar to compressing human behavior into raw numbers.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Introspection”? The first version of the story was written in Hebrew, before the world knew about a virus called COVID-19. It was an attempt to write a resume for a man, a simple and ordinary person, compressing a full life into two lines. The story was already quite universal before, but when I tried to say something more personal about this man, and added the sentence about a global epidemic, I thought it should have been written in an international language as well.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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