Eating Olives at the End of the World

This was one of the first stories I wrote for Autocorrect, my new book that’s coming out in the U.S. next week. I wrote it at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, after seeing a story on the news about two women fighting violently over the last pack of toilet paper at a Los Angeles supermarket. It felt like the end of the world. A few years later, when the massacre of October 7 happened and I knew how the end of the world really felt, I realized that the story is actually about the Gaza war. Now all that’s left is to hope that in a year or two, I won’t suddenly understand that in fact the story describes an even worse reality, one I don’t know yet.

Illustration by Natasha Geffen

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Housekeeping Note:

As requested by readers, my narration of the story in English is followed by a bonus recording. So if you hear me talking to you in a weird language after the story ends, I’d like to assure you that I’m not mumbling a spell to conjure up the spirit of Lilith or trying to hypnotize you into joining the Mossad. It’s just me reading the story in Hebrew.

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Translated by Jessica Cohen

The story was first published in The New York Review of Books