Contemporary Authors

• The Worlds We Think We Know ( short stories) Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 2017

1. The worlds we think we know : stories LCCN 2016032464 Type of material Book Personal name Rosenfeld, Dalia, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title The worlds we think we know : stories / Dalia Rosenfeld. Published/Produced Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 2017. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9781571311269 (cloth : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3618.O8348 A6 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Bar-Ilan University - http://english.biu.ac.il/faculty/rosenfeld-dalia

  EDUCATION

  1998: MFA in fiction writing, Iowa Writers Workshop, University of Iowa

  1994: B.A. In Jewish Studies, Oberlin College

  PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

  2014-present: Instructor of Fiction Writing, Bar Ilan University, Israel

  2011-2012: Free-lance editor for University of Virginia dissertations and academic papers

  2010-2011: Instructor, Israeli Literature in Translation, University of Virginia

  2009-2010: Editor, Cammad Ltd.

  2009-2010: Instructor, Modern Hebrew Literature in Translation, University of Virginia

  2009: Instructor of Fiction Writing, Writers House, Charlottesville, Virginia

  2008: Hebrew instructor, University of Virginia

  2004-2012: Hebrew teacher, Congregation Beth Israel, Charlottesville, Virginia

  1999-2001: Instructor of English Composition, Piedmont Community College

  1998-1999: Instructor of American-Jewish Literature, After-School High School Program, Beth Israel Synagogue, Roanoke, Virginia

  1998-1999: Creative Writing Teacher, Maury River Middle School and Lylburn Downing Middle School, Lexington, Virginia

  1998-1999: Hebrew Teacher, Washington & Lee University Hillel, Lexington, Virginia

  1998-1999: Fiction Reader for Shenandoah

  1996-1998: Graduate Instructor, Rhetoric Department, University of Iowa;
  Instructor for memoir writing, Iowa Summer Writing Festival;
  Fiction Reader for The Iowa Review

  1996-1998: Hebrew Teacher, Agudas Achim Synagogue, Iowa City, Iowa

  1994-1996: Research Assistant to Prof. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Hebrew University, Jerusalem;
  English Instructor, Henrietta Szold School, Jerusalem

  AWARDS

  2015: Creative Writing Grant, Artist Committee, Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption

  2015: Honorable Mention (one of two) for 2014 Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers, Boulevard Magazine (“Daughters of Respectable Houses”)

  2015: Shortlisted for Bosque Fiction Prize (“Vignette of the North”), judged by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  2015: Honorable Mention, Fiction Open Contest, Glimmer Train (“Daughters of Respectable Houses”)

  2015: Semi-finalist, Iowa Short Fiction Award (“The Worlds We Think We Know”)

  2014: Finalist, Very Short Fiction Award, Glimmer Train ("A Foggy Day")

  2014: Semi-finalist, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Competition, Mid-American Review ("Invasions")

  2013: Finalist, Fiction Open Contest, Glimmer Train ("As Far As The Eye Can See")

  2013: Finalist, New Ohio Review Award for Fiction, judged by Stuart Dybek ("Thinking in Third Person")

  2012: Finalist, Very Short Fiction Award, Glimmer Train ("The Four Foods")

  2012: Winner, Editor's Choice Award, Carve Magazine ("Floating on Water")

  2012: Finalist, Short Story Award for New Writers, Glimmer Train ("Flowers of Galilee")

  2012: Winner, Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, Bellingham Review, judged by Robin Hemley ("Swan Street")

  2012: Finalist, Short Story Award for New Writers, Glimmer Train ("The Worlds We Think We Know")

  2011: Second Place Winner, short story contest, Moment Magazine, judged by Nicole Krauss ("Infections")

  2008: Winner, Mississippi Review Prize, judged by Frederick Barthelme ("Bargabourg Remembers")

  2008: Finalist, short story contest, Moment Magazine, judged by Jonathan Safran Foer ("Infections")

  1998: Finalist, short story contest, Story Magazine, judged by Lois Rosenthal ("The Easel")

  1997: Winner, short story contest for Jewish fiction, Jewish Education News, (“The Encircling of Yehuda Har-Even")

  Last modified: 4/05/2017

• Milkweed - https://milkweed.org/author/dalia-rosenfeld

  Dalia Rosenfeld
  Dalia Rosenfeld is the author of The Worlds We Think We Know, a collection of short stories called “A profound debut from a writer of great talent” by Adam Johnson. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has appeared in publications including the Atlantic, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, and Colorado Review. Her work has been supported by a grant from the Artist Committee at the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, and has been recognized by multiple awards, including the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and the Mississippi Review Prize. She teaches writing at Bar Ilan University and lives with her three children in Tel Aviv.

• Dalia Rosenfeld Home Page - https://daliarosenfeld.weebly.com/about.html

  ​Dalia Rosenfeld is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and creative writing instructor at Bar Ilan University in Israel. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her stories have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, The Forward, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, and AGNI. ​​She is currently writing a novel entitled, The Physics of Time Travel.

• Dalia Rosenfeld Home Page - https://daliarosenfeld.weebly.com/c-v.html

  Dalia Rosenfeld
  Modigliani Street 6/6
  Tel Aviv, ISRAEL
  Tel: 050-635-5559
  E-mail: drosenfeld1026@gmail.com

  EDUCATION
  1998: MFA in fiction writing, Iowa Writers Workshop, University of Iowa

  1994: B.A. In Jewish Studies, Oberlin College

  PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
  2014-present: Instructor of Fiction Writing, Bar Ilan University, Israel

  2011-2012: Free-lance editor for University of Virginia dissertations and academic papers

  2010-2011: Instructor, Israeli Literature in Translation, University of Virginia

  2009-2010: Editor, Cammad Ltd.

  2009-2010: Instructor, Modern Hebrew Literature in Translation, University of Virginia

  2009: Instructor of Fiction Writing, Writers House, Charlottesville, Virginia

  2008: Hebrew instructor, University of Virginia

  2004-2012: Hebrew teacher, Congregation Beth Israel, Charlottesville, Virginia

  1999-2001: Instructor of English Composition, Piedmont Community College, Charlottesville, Virginia

  1998-1999: Instructor of American-Jewish Literature, After-School High School Program, Beth Israel Synagogue, Roanoke, Virginia

  1998-1999: Creative Writing Teacher, Maury River Middle School and Lylburn Downing Middle School, Lexington, Virginia

  1998-1999: Hebrew Teacher, Washington & Lee University Hillel, Lexington, Virginia

  1998-1999: Fiction Reader for Shenandoah

  1996-1998: Graduate Instructor, Rhetoric Department, University of Iowa;
  Instructor for memoir writing, Iowa Summer Writing Festival;
  Fiction Reader for The Iowa Review

  1996-1998: Hebrew Teacher, Agudas Achim Synagogue, Iowa City, Iowa

  1994-1996: Research Assistant to Prof. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Hebrew University, Jerusalem;
  English Instructor, Henrietta Szold School, Jerusalem

  PUBLICATIONS
  THE WORLDS WE THINK WE KNOW (book manuscript)
  Forthcoming with Milkweed Press (May, 2017)

  PUBLICATIONS (short stories)
  INVASIONS, in The Colorado Review, 2015
  A FAMINE IN THE LAND, in FICTION, 2015
  THE FOUR FOODS, in The Los Angeles Review, 2015
  THINKING IN THIRD PERSON, in Agni, 2014
  INFECTIONS, in Moment Magazine, 2012
  AMNON, in JewishFiction.net, 2012
  THE NEXT VILONSKY, in Michigan Quarterly Review, 2012
  FLOATING ON WATER, in Carve Magazine, 2012
  SWAN STREET, in Bellingham Review, 2013
  NAFTALI, in Jewcy, 2009
  BARGABOURG REMEMBERS, in Mississippi Review, 2008
  THE OTHER AIR, in Zeek Magazine, 2008
  THE CEILING, in Covenant, 2007
  THE EASEL, in Midstream, 2006
  TWO PASSIONS FOR TWO PEOPLE, in Shenandoah, 2005
  CONTAMINATION, in The Atlantic Monthly, 2005
  THE HAT, in Tikkun, 1998
  THE ENCIRCLING OF YEHUDA HAR-EVEN, in Jewish Education News, 1997
  A TIME TO PLANT, in Midstream, 1994

  PUBLICATIONS (non-fiction)
  BEN YEHUDA’S NIGHTMARE, in The Jewish Journal (Los Angeles), 2015
  EATING LIKE VOLES, in The Jerusalem Post, 2015
  PAY ATTENTION, YOUR NEW LIFE IS ABOUT TO BEGIN, in The Jerusalem Post, 2015
  COULD TEL AVIV CURE MY SON’S DIABETES? in The Forward, 2015
  SEEING CLEARLY IN TEL AVIV, in Jewish Journal, 2014
  A LIZARD'S EYE VIEW OF WARTIME IN ISRAEL, in The Forward, 2014
  UNDER FIRE IN TEL AVIV, accepted by NY Post, 2014
  PUT ON A HELMET, in The Jerusalem Post, 2014
  THE SILENT TREATMENT, in Jewish Journal, 2014
  TALKING THE (JEWISH) TALK, in The Times of Israel (blog), 2014

  AWARDS
  2015: Creative Writing Grant, Artist Committee, Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption

  2015: Honorable Mention (one of two) for 2014 Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers, Boulevard Magazine (“Daughters of Respectable Houses”)

  2015: Shortlisted for Bosque Fiction Prize (“Vignette of the North”), judged by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  2015: Honorable Mention, Fiction Open Contest, Glimmer Train (“Daughters of Respectable Houses”)

  2015: Semi-finalist, Iowa Short Fiction Award (“The Worlds We Think We Know”)

  2014: Finalist, Very Short Fiction Award, Glimmer Train ("A Foggy Day")

  2014: Semi-finalist, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Competition, Mid-American Review ("Invasions")

  2013: Finalist, Fiction Open Contest, Glimmer Train ("As Far As The Eye Can See")

  2013: Finalist, New Ohio Review Award for Fiction, judged by Stuart Dybek ("Thinking in Third Person")

  2012: Finalist, Very Short Fiction Award, Glimmer Train ("The Four Foods")

  2012: Winner, Editor's Choice Award, Carve Magazine ("Floating on Water")

  2012: Finalist, Short Story Award for New Writers, Glimmer Train ("Flowers of Galilee")

  2012: Winner, Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, Bellingham Review, judged by Robin Hemley ("Swan Street")

  2012: Finalist, Short Story Award for New Writers, Glimmer Train ("The Worlds We Think We Know")

  2011: Second Place Winner, short story contest, Moment Magazine, judged by Nicole Krauss ("Infections")

  2008: Winner, Mississippi Review Prize, judged by Frederick Barthelme ("Bargabourg Remembers")

  2008: Finalist, short story contest, Moment Magazine, judged by Jonathan Safran Foer ("Infections")

  1998: Finalist, short story contest, Story Magazine, judged by Lois Rosenthal ("The Easel")

  1997: Winner, short story contest for Jewish fiction, Jewish Education News, (“The Encircling of Yehuda Har-Even")

• Jewish Book Council - https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/_blog/The_ProsenPeople/post/interview-the-worlds-of-dalia-rosenfeld/

  Interview: The Worlds of Dalia Rosenfeld
  Sunday, June 04, 2017| Permalink
  with Adam Rovner

  Dalia Rosenfeld, a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, moved to Israel two years ago to reinvent her life. And though she has been publishing sharply observed literary fiction in American journals and magazines for two decades, The Worlds We Think We Know (Milkweed Editions) is her first collection. The wait for these twenty new stories has been worth it.

  Adam Rovner: The Worlds We Think We Know has already garnered praise from major American writers, including Adam Johnson, Cynthia Ozick, and Gary Shteyngart. Shteyngart has called your work “very funny, Jewish and wise.” Are you conscious of being a “Jewish writer?” What does that mean to you?

  Dalia Rosenfeld: I wish I knew! I was hoping I was far enough removed from the immigrant experience to be unqualified to answer that question, but here I am, suddenly the holder of a second passport, a new immigrant to Israel. But that doesn’t help much either, because the days of linking “Jewish writer” to immigrant status are pretty much over now. If the question implies loyalty to a people, I feel that strongly outside the context of writing, but on the page my loyalty is to language. Jews owe their survival to the power of the written word—you can’t take your land with you into exile, but you can take your stories—which is not to suggest that focusing on language alone makes one a Jewish writer, but feeling at home in language constitutes a major part of the Jewish experience.

  AR: Your prose certainly demonstrates that you feel at home in English, but can you really use a non-Jewish language to convey Jewish sensibility?

  DR: I don’t know if such a thing as a “Jewish sensibility” exists. What I do know is that there are certain states of mind or being that I associate with Jews, and that my Jewish characters often possess. For one thing, they are conscious of a collective past, but rather than this past functioning as a unifying force, my characters find it hard to feel rooted in the present. It gives me great pleasure to reference the Jewish past because doing so connects me with what is familiar and offers a sense of comfort and continuity: a poppy seed cake burning in the oven, a Yiddish phrase, a story from the Torah that a bar mitzvah student couldn’t care less about. Maybe it’s this seeking a conversation with the past that makes one a Jewish writer?

  AR: The collective past in the guise of the Holocaust appears in your title story and several other standouts. Can you speak about why the Holocaust’s long shadow enters your work?

  DR: Until recently, the Holocaust shaped my identity more than any other chapter in Jewish history. My father is a Holocaust scholar, and I grew up in a house in which the entire living room was given over to books on this subject. While my friends were reading Jane Eyre, I was reading about the Jews of Vienna being forced to clean the sidewalks with toothbrushes. What’s interesting is that I never felt burdened by this history; haunted, yes. Absolutely. Because it wasn’t just the books: it was also listening to the stories of survivors who came to see my father. When you relive your own memories, it’s traumatic, but when you experience another person’s, it’s something abnormal, unsettling. And it’s those haunted echoes that appear in my stories, sometimes just with a single image, such as a survivor reusing a tea bag until it resembles a shriveled walnut. Since moving to Israel, my preoccupation with how Jews died has shifted somewhat to how they live.

  AR: Who are some of the writers who help you understand how Jews lived yesterday and how they live today?

  DR: A partial list in no particular order would include Israeli authors Yaakov Shabtai, Yoel Hoffman, A. B. Yehoshua; American writers Rivka Galchen, Cynthia Ozick, Bellow, Malamud, Nicole Krauss, Jamaica Kincaid; Europeans such as Bruno Schulz, Kafka, Leo Perutz—a now obscure Austrian novelist (not to be confused with Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz)—and both I. B. and I. J. Singer.

  AR: I can see the affinity your collection has with many of these writers. What I mean is that your stories often depict a sense of displacement. Sometimes it’s geographic—Americans in Israel, Russians in America, cosmopolitans in small towns. Why are uprooted characters so common in your stories?

  DR: I’m drawn to characters whose actions are informed by an inner logic they themselves are not aware of, and that is guided—as you put it—by a state of displacement, sometimes forced, sometimes self-imposed, in which fixed boundaries fall away to give the characters a chance to redefine themselves. But they often squander the opportunity by engaging in a series of missteps, or self-sabotage, such as in my story “Swan Street,” where Misha, the protagonist, moves to America only to end up in a kind of voluntary exile, avoiding situations that would allow him to settle into his adoptive homeland. At the end of a story, I always discover the same thing: that human behavior is inscrutable—but still fun to write about.

  AR: That comedy of human inscrutability comes across in your stories, many of which possess a wry sense of humor. Is humor difficult for you to write?

  DR: I honestly wasn’t aware of this wry humor people keep pointing out until they started pointing it out. There’s no doubt that it’s healthier to find the humor in horrible situations than to stew in your own juice—something that I tend to do in real life. One of the purposes humor serves is to highlight our vulnerabilities without being held hostage by them.

  AR: Many of your characters are women who reveal their vulnerabilities while at the same time demonstrating resiliency. Are you conscious of writing resilient female characters?

  DR: I think a lot of writing happens on an unconscious level. The craft part is a conscious thing, but what motivates the characters to do what they do—they’re just like us, acting on impulses, intuition, instinct, feelings, all those things that can’t be explained rationally but that ultimately make us human. While I don’t divide the world into male/female, I find it hard to argue with a phrase I recently came across describing men as “expressively economical” with their emotions. This implies that women are not—that women are something else. And it is this “something else” that makes it hard to speak the same language, to enter into a realm of closeness that both sides desire, but in different ways. The resilience of a character comes when the love she seeks isn’t within her grasp, but still she can find beauty in the world.

  AR: Your characters often seem lonely to me. Is writing a lonely activity for you?

  DR: No! Writing is an antidote to loneliness. It’s what connects me with the world and helps me understand it better. Especially since I write in cafes, and in Israel people never leave you alone. For the last week, the same man has come up to me every morning and said, “Did you change that part of your story I told you to change?” He had shared some Persian proverb with me months ago, which I liked but altered a bit, and he was of the conviction that I should leave it the way it has been for the last five hundred years. I probably shouldn’t have showed him what I did with the proverb, but at the time I wanted to thank him. This morning he abbreviated his question to a single word: “Nu?”

  AR: Nu? So what are you working on now?

  DR: I thought I was working on a novel called The Physics of Time Travel in which an American woman moves to Israel and imagines parallels between her personal life and the trajectory of her adopted country. When I read the first chapter, I realized it was a stand-alone story and my interest in the theme had been exhausted, but in a good way. In a way that allowed me to write a second story about something totally different, and without feeling guilty about it. I’m now fifty pages into a second collection called The Physics of Time Travel.

  Dalia Rosenfeld is the author of The Worlds We Think We Know a collection of short stories called “A profound debut from a writer of great talent” by Adam Johnson. She teaches writing at Bar Ilan University and lives with her three children in Tel Aviv.

  Adam Rovner is Associate Professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. He is the author of In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel (NYU Press), a narrative history of efforts to establish Jewish homelands across the globe.

The Worlds We Think We Know
Publishers Weekly.
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p55.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Worlds We Think We Know
Dalia Rosenfeld. Milkweed (PGW.dist.), $16 trade paper (248p) ISBN 978-1-57131-126-9
In this moving collection of stories, Rosenfeld examines Jewish, Israeli, and American experiences by examining their
many intersections and divergences. The stories, centered on such subjects as the dynamics of a kosher co-op at an Iowa
college or an American struggling to find comfort in increasingly combustible Tel Aviv, explore competing senses of the
self and the struggle to connect with places and cultures that are at once familiar and alien. This is felt most strongly in
the titular story, when a young woman falls in love with an Israeli soldier while caring for his father, a Holocaust
survivor living in Jerusalem. Even as she opens herself up to the possibility of true love, there is a distance between her
perceptions of Israeli life and the cultural worldview of both her romantic interest and his Zionist father. In "Daughters
of Respectable Houses," another standout, love of a book by a Jewish writer is just one of many similarities between
two women who at first consider themselves worlds apart. With humor and sadness, Rosenfeld illuminates how the self
is at once informed by and wholly separate from culture. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Worlds We Think We Know." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 55+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971607&it=r&asid=cd2f9b393e2048d359632a1689a1c692.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485971607
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Rosenfeld, Dalia: THE WORLDS WE THINK
WE KNOW
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Rosenfeld, Dalia THE WORLDS WE THINK WE KNOW Milkweed (Adult Fiction) $16.00 5, 9 ISBN: 978-1-57131-
126-9
Stories about Jewish life--in all its painful absurdity--in the United States and in Israel.Rosenfeld's debut book of stories
is funny, touching, awkward, and wry. In most of the stories, not all that much happens: instead, Rosenfeld deals with
the quotidian and the absurd. In the title story, a young woman volunteers to keep an elderly Holocaust survivor
company. Mostly, she watches him eat onions. "Lotzi ate it with bread, one slice for every three bites of onion, and
washed it down with a cup of tepid Wissotzky made from old teabags reduced to the size of walnuts." In "A Foggy
Day," a girl takes piano lessons. In "The Other Air," a woman can't stop sighing. Almost all the stories are told in the
first person, and most of these narrators share a common voice. Then, too, there are certain images, or motifs, that recur
throughout many of the stories: lemon trees, migraines, pianos, and books--more than books: some of her characters
read compulsively, for hours, for days, almost unceasingly. Rosenfeld writes with a dry, sardonic deadpan. Her
characters are lonely, homely, maladroit creatures. In "Vignette of the North," the owner of a vegetable stand finds that
an artist across the way has painted her stand. "Simona stared at a crumb that had settled on the painter's beard and
wished it away. As the object of artistic inspiration, she felt almost entitled to brush it off herself." She invites him to her
home to finish the painting "without all the distractions of the market." She expects him to add her into the painting. He
might as well stay for dinner. "I'm a very good cook," she informs him. Inevitably, she's disappointed. Readers won't be.
This collection charms with quiet, wry humor.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Rosenfeld, Dalia: THE WORLDS WE THINK WE KNOW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480922026&it=r&asid=68ecbd5501d702421700167a8854d910.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480922026

"The Worlds We Think We Know." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 55+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971607&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017. "Rosenfeld, Dalia: THE WORLDS WE THINK WE KNOW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480922026&it=r. Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.

• Jewish Book Council
  https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-worlds-we-think-we-know
  Word count: 838

  The Worlds We Think We Know
  Dalia Rosenfeld

  Milkweed Editions 2017
  264 Pages $16.00
  ISBN: 978-1571311269
  amazon indiebound
  barnesandnoble
  Review by Ranen Omer-Sherman

  In her debut collection of short stories, Dalia Rosenfeld displays a refreshing way with the raw stuff of life, taking special delight in awkward encounters, mismatched pairings, uncertain destinies, and sexy indeterminacies.

  The Worlds We Think We Know contains stories that touch both the heart and mind and Rosenfeld is a skilled alchemist who does not particularly care to answer every question readers might have about her restless, maladapted, or otherwise unsatisfied characters but instead rewards us with deep and sometimes startling glimpses into the mysteries of love and human connections of all kinds. As the title itself hints, Rosenfeld’s stories move fluidly across time and borders yet each delves into the familiar, intimate spaces of difficult, sometimes wounding relationships between lovers, spouses, parents, and children. And her sophisticated mastery of a range of tonal registers, styles, and voices ensures that each of these poetically fragmented stories feels fresh and distinct. And happily that range often proffers deft touches of levity, as when the protagonist of “Flight” sardonically declares, “I threw my arms out in the most Jewish way I knew how, which is to say not at all, having grown up in Indiana.” Or when one narrator foreshadows the likelihood of a disastrous outcome of a double date set in an Indian restaurant when she casually observes that the two couples sit “within arm’s length of a statue of Kama, the Indian love god who was burned to ashes after trying to rouse the passion of the greater god Shiva.” And here is the beleaguered narrator of “Invasions”: “It was a bad habit of my mother’s to always send me old Yiddish novels in translation. She thought that if I spent enough time back in the shtetl, I would stop complaining about my life in Ohio and realize that scouring the Food Lion for organic broccoli was nothing compared to the forced conscription of ten-year-old Jewish boys into the tsarist army.”

  As that moment of rueful self-awareness suggests, Rosenfeld’s characters can find themselves unmoored or caught up in pasts that stubbornly make claims on the present. In “The Next Vilonsky” an old man’s errand to the corner makolet (grocery) in Tel Aviv turns into an epic odyssey into introspective memories. Elsewhere, Rosenfeld veers into decidedly stranger realms such as in “Swan Street,” where an invisible wife abandoned in Eastern Europe haunts her husband’s every step in America. In the aftermath of a brutal mugging, the professor of “Bargabourg Remembers” struggles to commit every visceral detail of the incident to memory but instead finds himself in thrall to the phantom of a lost love. As soon as I finished it, I found myself rereading “Floating On Water” with great pleasure. It’s a deeply knowing, sensual, and often very funny paean to female friendships, without a false note of sentimentality, that interweaves love along with the petty jealousies and exasperating demands that are somehow inevitably part of the fabric of even the most sustaining relationships.

  The Shoah quietly intrudes into some of these empathic, risk-taking stories in the kind of small yet indelible ways that deliver more profoundly unsettling psychological insights than they might otherwise in the hands of a less subtle writer. And though many of Rosenfeld’s beleaguered characters are quite verbose, she is equally skilled at handling the kinds of silences that take us deeper into her characters’ self-awareness and also their capacity for compassionate understanding of others (even when it is at the distance of some decades), such as the narrator of “Liliana, Years Later,” who recollects her childhood piano teacher: “Liliana never spoke of her broken heart, just as I do not speak of mine now, because when one tries to put pain into words, the words themselves become agents of new pain, like fresh paper cuts, and cannot be used again.”

  Rosenfeld, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop who currently lives in Tel Aviv, proves a reliably mordant observer of imperfect and vulnerable characters struggling with unfulfilled appetites and desires, in language that consistently dazzles. Even the shorter works have lingering power, conjuring up richly immersive places inflected by whimsy and perhaps a touch of the uncanny, and are occasionally heartbreaking. In a few stories they seem to hint at more than one reality. She displays a keen awareness of loneliness as the essential human condition, yet grace notes of humor inflect even her more melancholy stories. There are moments when her portrayals of the foibles of misfits and unreliable narrators or cryptic urban encounters are appealingly suggestive of a Raymond Carver or Grace Paley sensibility (their quiet epiphanies, little notes of grace), but mostly Rosenfeld is unlike any writer you’ve ever read and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

• Chicago Review of Books
  https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/05/09/the-isolation-of-the-worlds-we-think-we-know/
  Word count: 838

  The Isolation of ‘The Worlds We Think We Know’

  BY ARAM MRJOIAN
  MAY 9, 2017
  COMMENTS 0
  9781571311269_d0163.jpgBlind spots in human perception are difficult to identify. In order to operate comfortably on a day-to-day basis, people must rely on apparent truths of the sensory world when interacting with people and places. Dalia Rosenfeld’s robust new collection of short stories, The Worlds We Think We Know, considers the implications of such personal isolation in the context of cultural identity. Divided into pristine chapbook-size bites, the twenty stories in this collection take readers across Israel and the United States to examine the different ways in which Jewish heritage affects the lives of its characters.

  In examining this theme, Rosenfeld adeptly distinguishes her central characters in each story by employing first person or close third person point of view. In maintaining a sole perspective, Rosenfeld draws attention to the social and cultural means by which humans attempt to connect and create intimacy, whether with members of their own communities or disparate ones. In other words, keeping a short distance from the main characters forces them to talk about important aspects of their identities on their own terms.

  For example, in the title story, the narrator takes care of an elderly Holocaust survivor named Lotzi at a retirement home in Jerusalem and falls in love with his son.

  “I spoke to Lotzi more that day than in all my other visits combined. I told him about my life in New Jersey, the strip malls and the synagogues, and about my parents, who had raised me to be the kind of Jew who could plant a tree in Israel without having to stay and watch it grow. I told him about my fondness for movies, and about another survivor I visited who always spun a globe while she spoke. I told him I liked falafel.”
  The inherent isolation of human perspective limits the narrator to sharing the concrete ways in which she relates to her religious and secular identity. Additionally, this choice showcases the narrator’s vulnerability. She can’t know if Lotzi or his son is invested in her longwinded biography. Such scenes set a somber tone throughout many of the stories, but perhaps more importantly reveal how lost or distant one can feel from their own culture. Rosenfeld seems interested in how people hold on to inherited aspects of themselves—in this case, Judaism—and the gifts and onuses created by attempting to fit into distinct subject positions.

  The Worlds We Think We Know considers many quotidian gaps in community as well. In “Invasions,” a couple named BJ and Rona find that the weekly trash pickup is the most intimate way in which they derive information about the people in the houses nearby.

  “We knew our neighbors from the recyclables they left out on the curb every Friday morning. Most were beverage containers: sodas and juices and cheap beers whose smell followed you as you walked up the street. In the paper bins were pizza boxes and newspapers—many still rolled up and rubber-banded—and an occasional assemblage of cardboard flaps that had recently housed a television or piece of faux-wood furniture from Walmart.”
  The suggested message is that humans are limited in what we know about the world around us. To go beyond a neighbor’s trash, one must interact with the neighbor. This is exactly the case in “Invasions,” as Rona must physically walk across the lawn to her neighbor’s front porch to enter his world. It is only then she begins to understand who is living next door.

  Throughout these stories, Rosenfeld provides tight, empathic plots and steadfast pacing. The Worlds We Think We Know confronts how individuals define themselves in terms of collective identities and touches on the universal fear of realizing that inherent truths are not necessarily concrete. This exploration looms with grief spanning generations, but it also showcases good humor and lighthearted self-awareness. Rosenfeld’s stories ultimately capture the dissonance created by generational and geographical boundaries, as well as the complexities of finding comfort in our religious, cultural, and social selves.

  FICTION
  The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld
  Milkweed Editions
  April 25, 2017

  Dalia Rosenfeld is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in publications including the Atlantic, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, and Colorado Review. She teaches creative writing at Bar Ilan University and lives with her three children in Tel Aviv.

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• Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/08/the-worlds-we-think-we-know-by-dalia-rosenfeld/
  Word count: 1488

  BODIES TESTING BOUNDARIES: THE WORLDS WE THINK WE KNOW BY DALIA ROSENFELD
  REVIEWED BY CATHERINE CAMPBELL
  August 8th, 2017

  In Dalia Rosenfeld’s beautiful debut story collection, The Worlds We Think We Know, there is a prevalent theme of foreign bodies testing boundaries, rendered through wonderfully crafted vignettes and longer narratives in which vivid scenes show us the clarity, satisfaction, or longing we experience when attempting to get to know someone. The collection plays with relationships in all their forms: how people connect, disconnect, and try to connect with each other and with their surroundings.

  But Worlds isn’t a typical slice-of-life story collection, and it is Rosenfeld’s mastery of craft that makes each story notable. Readers are plunged into that difficult-to-attain space between conventional and magical realism, a space where each moment is heightened through Rosenfeld’s careful choice of language, dialogue, and scene structure.

  In these twenty short stories, readers can better understand those distinct borders of culture and heritage, particularly Jewish cultural identity, through the eyes of Rosenfeld’s characters. In most of the narratives, there is a weight of Judaic history carried by the characters, with Jewish history serving as a background to who they are or how they found themselves in their current situations. In “The Worlds We Think We Know,” the story begins with an American woman’s regular visits to an elderly Holocaust survivor’s home, for no explicit purpose, it seems, than to connect with the old man and spend time with him. The woman becomes romantically involved with a soldier who also has a connection to the elderly man. In “Flight,” a Jewish college student is head over heels for a Jewish boy named Danny. She decides to hold a private piano concert for him, but must navigate the tensions strung between her own identity, Danny’s ambivalence, and her closest friend and supporter, Kyo, who is clearly in love with her. In “Daughters of Respectable Houses,” an intellectual housewife is determined to fix up her new acquaintance Sophie, a modern Israel historian, with a nice man while Sophie is scholar-in-residence in the States. But when the question of Sophie’s sexual orientation arises in conversation, the narrator must question her own assumptions of love, freedom and partnership.

  Rosenfeld’s stories are primarily told from the first-person views of different women, their names withheld, their narratives set in sometimes unnamed locations: they could be young women sitting next to any of us on the bus, walking down a sidewalk, or socializing in a cafe in the United States or in Israel. The location informs the atmospheric details for each character’s situation in which she finds herself, but it is ultimately the relationships and human interactions in each story that drive the collection. This is Rosenfeld’s gift through her craft: she heightens our longing to cross borders into belonging, to make the foreign experience more intimate through detailed scenes and surreal, pitch-perfect dialogue. Rosenfeld takes the notion of place—whether it is an American woman visiting Jerusalem or a young girl growing up in Paris—and sets it in the background as an additional layer for the reader to enjoy. The author draws attention to the interactions between two people and the ways we place—or attempt to place—ourselves into each other’s lives.

  To draw that focus to how relationships develop, Rosenfeld introduces exquisite dialogue that feels almost too polished, too well-timed, which can grab the reader’s attention with its surreal quality. In “Vignette of the North,” a tomato stall clerk named Simona becomes fascinated with her sidewalk neighbor, a talented painter. She longs to insert herself into his life and become a muse, a subject of his art. One day she approaches him to begin a conversation:

  “The painter was drinking a bottle of water now and wincing as the cold liquid hit his teeth. ‘The last dentist I went to had a better eye than me,’ he said. ‘He saw a whole menagerie of savage animals feeding on my gums. The farther back he looked, the more species he saw.’

  ‘That’s quite a vivid description.’

  ‘You should have seen the bill.’”

  In “The Gown,” a new mother navigates the small daily challenges of life after giving birth. Once discharged and home from the hospital, she decides to order a pizza. The delivery man arrives and sits down on the couch, waiting for the woman to fish out her checkbook and present payment. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be an important scene, but in Rosenfeld’s hands, every piece of dialogue speaks on another level:

  “I wrote out a check for eleven dollars and placed it on the table. ‘How many pizzas do you get to take home every night?’ I asked.

  The delivery man got up from the couch and unzipped a gray plastic pouch. ‘I could take home two of whatever’s left, usually green pepper or onion, but I only eat food that existed in the time of the Bible, and pizza’s not one of them.’

  I lifted a slice of pizza from the box. ‘That must be an incredible burden.’

  The delivery man shrugged and walked around the room as I ate. ‘Nothing in life should be a burden,’ he said, pressing his nose against a bay window.”

  The opening lines of each story are another of the collection’s greatest strengths. The author opens each story without flourish or poetics but carefully chooses words to draw the reader in. In “Daughters of Respectable Houses,” the narrator opens with, “I’m not sure why I spotted Sophie’s coat before I spotted Sophie, since her coat was arguably the least compelling thing about her.” And in “Flight,” the story opens: “Kyo was waiting outside the practice room to accompany me to lunch, just as he waited every morning to accompany me to breakfast, or to class, or to the conservatory, where he often stood within earshot for the duration of my lesson, the cast of his shadow silhouetted against the door.”

  Relationships can be awkward, horrible, and heartbreaking, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be funny. Readers may be surprised to see darker topics laced with Rosenfeld’s wit and humor. These moments become a breather in otherwise claustrophobic, intimate situations. In “Flight,” as the narrator and Kyo walk together into the kosher co-op for lunch after music lessons, the narrator observes: “Inside, the Jews were at it again—that is, Danny, the most visible Jew among the kosher co-oppers, with his black velvet kippah and wispy beard, was already retaliating one of the daily assaults on his identity, delaying our lunch by several critical minutes.”

  In “Floating on Water,” the unnamed narrator discusses her new-bud relationship with her friend Prema.

  “‘Either this guy I’m seeing is a complete loser, or I am,’ I said, trying to interpret the dream for myself. ‘Which do you think it is?’

  ‘Have you lived a life of sacrifice and charity?’ Prema pressed.”

  Rosenfeld also plays with the boundaries of epiphany. Each character is capable of introspection for her situation, whether in the immediate moment of playing a piano solo for two men—one she loves, the other who loves her with unrequited determination—or reflecting back upon a beloved music teacher after heartbreak. In “Floating on Water,” the narrator becomes involved with David, her coworker. “David was handsome, I could not deny that; he was the kind of man who would wake up in the morning to examine his chin in the mirror and end up lingering over the rest of his face.”

  The Worlds We Think We Know is a profound debut that carefully undermines the foundational assumptions we have about other people. Those closest to us, no matter how we want to control the situation, can slip away like sand. We think we know someone and can emotionally reach them when, in actuality, their invisible histories keep us at arm’s length. Or we suddenly realize more about a stranger’s deepest vulnerabilities through a passing interaction than we could ever realize about ourselves. After reading Dalia Rosenfeld’s collection, I personally was left wondering where the borders of our lives and cities begin and end, and who built them in the first place.

  There are distinct borders in cultural identity: ones we draw around ourselves to feel secure and like we belong, as well as ones that history has drawn for us, whether we like it or not. Dalia Rosenfeld is not afraid to plunge into empathic, fictional explorations of those borders between regions, cities, apartments, and most importantly—people.

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