The White Album

white-album-crop9,000 miles from their Galilean childhood, Amir drove north bearing gifts: white hydrangea from his seaside garden, and his version of the girl she’d been. Rifling through Lili’s old photo albums, they found his mother making shakshouka; pretty Narda dancing, celebrating harvest. The sole image of Amir and Lili together—fourteen, awkward, beautiful, they sit on his parents’ sofa, Lili looking at the photographer, oblivious, Amir gazing only at her. Now, on the precipice of middle age, Lili willed Amir to kiss her, and when he did, opened her blouse for him to kiss the scar the bullet left behind.

Lee Romer Kaplan, former civil rights lawyer turned fiction-writing English professor, spent her youth shuttling between Israel and Berkeley, California, and her adulthood careening between coasts along the Oakland—NYC corridor. She’s gearing up to query agents for her first novel, The Flight of the Lesser Kestrel, a recent finalist for the James Jones First Novel Contest and the Dana Award, set in Jerusalem during the first Lebanon War. Find Lee on Twitter @leewritinglife.

 

Photo credit: Derek Bridges

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