Help Me, Rhonda & Other Stories

This collection includes fourteen stories, roughly evenly divided between those that occur in Israel and those that occur in the U.S., with a couple occurring in vague, exotic places, one of them even in an imagined Greenland. The lead—and by a considerable margin, longest—story, "Help Me, Rhonda," is about two American immigrants in Israel, a man and a woman, the former divorced and the latter single, who meet by chance and try to navigate the difficult maze of fear, doubt, and need that their encounter prompts in both of them. Most of the stories in the collection are also about encounters between men and women and their joint (or not so joint) quest, sometimes quixotic, for harmony and understanding. A common theme is geographical or cultural distance, or some other sort of obstacle. Some other stories are about a quest for a different kind of harmony, dealing with mystical aspiration and the yearning for transcendence.