The Last Jew in Foster: A Short Story by Michael Fine

By Michael Fine

©2025 by Michael Fine

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

–

Alana Cohen didn’t hate Purim, but it wasn’t her favorite Jewish holiday by a long shot. On Purim, Jews commemorate ducking a disaster 2500 years ago:  a powerful politician named Haman organized a little ethnic cleansing, designed to kill all the Jews of Persia, who had been brought there in exile 70 years before, after Jerusalem was sacked by King Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 BCE.  But a Jewish fixer named Mordechai turned the tables on Haman, leveraging his connection to the new Queen, who was his cousin and adopted daughter, so-called, and thus Jewish, a little fact not known by anyone at the time.  There’s ethnic conflict.  The Jews end up killing 75,000 of Haman’s people, in self-defense, we hope, but maybe it’s more gruesome than that. Then the Jews live happily ever after, more or less.  Or not.

(After the Purim story, Jews were allowed to return to what is now Israel.  And then, after five hundred years of very messy politics, one side asks for Roman help to defeat the other (also Jewish) side.  The Romans come and end up taking over, which sparks a series of revolts that end with the death of 1.5 million people, more or less. The Romans sack Jerusalem again in 70 CE and send the entire surviving Jewish population into exile, this time to Rome itself as slaves, as what is now Israel was swept clean of Jews, who won’t return for 2000 years, a return that has its own profound messiness.)

Complicated sexual politics as well, with lots of unspoken questions about how women were treated.

Oy.

On Purim, Jews read the story, dress up in costumes, try to obliterate Haman’s name by noisemakers whenever his name is read aloud, have carnivals and put on plays called Purim spiels, and are required by Jewish law to get drunk on wine, to celebrate their and our survival.

Not a simple story.  Lots of conflicts between how people may have thought and acted 2500 years ago and how we live and act now, or, at least, think we do, given that the more things change the more they seem to stay the same.

Purim made Alana Cohen uncomfortable but she celebrated it anyway and thought of it as a time for kindness and humility, not drunkenness or costumes, understanding that tragedy and sadness can overwhelm us again at any time, that our survival to this day is no guarantee that any of us, or even our people as a whole, will survive into the future, and that we will not survive without acts of kindness and decency, without what the prophets and the Talmud calls chesed, or lovingkindness, which, survival or not, gives human life value and meaning.

So on Purim, Alana gave money to the poor, baked hamantaschen (little triangular cakes filled with preserves that are shaped to remind us of Haman’s hat) for the synagogue, and arranged to deliver Shalach Mones, small paper bags or little cardboard boxes of food and candy and a little something to drink, to people in the community who were scattered about, so they and we would always remember our connection to one another.

She did so quietly, silently bearing shame and discomfort, thinking of the pain and suffering in Israel and Gaza today, of the hostages and of ruined buildings and so many lost lives, so many people maimed and killed, regardless of who was right and who was wrong in all this, which seemed impossible to know.  Human life is precious, she thought. Holy. And the world seems to have returned to barbarism, a barbarism in which we play a part, wittingly or unwittingly.

Every year at Purim, which happens in late winter, as the sun is rising higher in the sky, just after the ice melts but before the ground thaws, before the flowers push out of the earth again and before the stems of the brush reddens, when spring is a promise built on the hope that spring always comes despite the chaos of human lives and our choices, Alana would get a list from the synagogue, and on Erev Purim ( the day and night before Purim) she’d pick up a cardboard box filled  with smaller boxes or brown bags at the synagogue and load that cardboard box into her Subaru Impreza, and then set out.

She drove to West Warwick, Lincoln, Johnston, North Providence, Greenville, Coventry, Scituate or Western Cranston – places where no one thought Jews lived, but where a few Jewish people who weren’t that connected to the community lived anyway, as if in secret.  Some deliveries were to little condos or garden apartments.  Some were to McMansions or palatial estates.  Others went to horse farms. The People of the Book had become the people of the dissipated suburbs, the people of the strip mall and elegant living, which looked to Alana lonelier and more isolated than elegant.  Some had long driveways.  Others had a BMW parked outside on a short driveway surrounded by manicured hedges.  Still others had a pickup truck in the driveway or an RV, connected to house current by an orange extension cord.  One house that badly needed paint had a yard with a Skid Steer, six old cars and rusting pickups, and four boats wrapped in white plastic parked out front.

Who are we? Alana wondered.  Who have we become?  What have we become?

One address was in an old mill.  It took Alana half-an-hour of walking down deserted corridors and climbing rickety staircases to find what she thought was the right door. When no one answered her knock, she left the Shalach Mones on the entry mat at the door, hoping that the person it was for would get there before the rats and mice.

Another house had a chicken coop and chickens running in the yard.

Some people answered the door in slippers and a robe.  For others, there was a man or a woman at a desk who received deliveries.

Most people didn’t answer their doors at all.  They had doorbell cameras, and many had dogs that barked and barked when Alana rang the doorbell.  It was often hard to know if anyone was home, but sometimes, even often, Alana heard people shuffling about inside, sometimes talking.  She’d hear a TV that was on.

But those people rarely came to the door.  You can’t blame them, Alana thought.  They don’t know me.  They didn’t know I was coming.

The last house was in Foster, almost in Connecticut.  It was early evening.

They had just moved the clocks forward, so it was still light at 6 PM, but the day was overcast and cold, with spitting rain mixed with snow.

Alana was ready to be done.  She was tired.  She worried that the wet roads might freeze over and make her trip home dangerous.

A cold March wind was driving the rain and snow, buffeting her car as she drove.  Good thing I have all-wheel-drive, she thought.  But then she remembered what her husband  said, that all-wheel-drive makes you go but it doesn’t help you stop.  Driving on slick roads was dangerous, all-wheel-drive or not.

The GPS took Alana west into the country, into chutzbahova, into the wilderness, on a state road almost to the Connecticut border.  The GPS had her turn onto a small road that ran north, and through more twists and turns.  She drove past a solar farm and through deep woods, the road twisting and turning, dropping into a valley and across a one-lane bridge, then rising again to follow the contour of low hills.

There were once cows here, Alana thought, as she passed ancient, lichen covered stone walls and rusted barbed-wire fences.  There were once dairy farms and apple orchards.

But now the land appeared abandoned – just houses set back from the road, occasional garages, yellow earth-moving machines parked here and there, rusting tractors and old farm implements, abandoned in what used to be fields.  She drove around a small lake, which had waves whipped by the wind washing over the shoreline near the road, and shore birds floating above the lake in the wind and rain.  Lights from houses glittered across the lake.   The road rose again, and her GPS said that the destination was only nine hundred yards ahead on the left.

Then the GPS lost its signal.

Alana put on her brights although it wasn’t yet dark enough for her headlights to illuminate the road before her.  A strong wind blew.  There was distant thunder and lightning.

The road became dirt.  The overgrown trees from both sides of the road closed in over her, so it felt as though she was driving in the dark through an endless tunnel of branches.  Many of the trees were dead, their bark peeling off, killed off by an insect infestation perhaps five years before but still standing like tombstones in the gathering dark. A flock of ghouls, haunting the woods.

At each driveway there was a mailbox, and some still had red newspaper boxes below the mailbox.  There were bright blue house numbers below some of the mailboxes, numbers which glowed when Alana’s headlights fell on them.  Some driveways had two, three, five, or seven or more mailboxes.

Which driveway was it?  How was it possible to know?

Alana drove as slowly as she could. She crept forward, her eyes searching the roadside.  She looked again at the address that was written on the box that contained the Shalach Mones, and then back at the mailboxes and the road.  She looked again and again in her rearview mirror to see if anyone else was coming up behind her.  They drive so fast on these country roads, she thought.  Surely, I look suspicious, like I’m not from around here, because of who I am and because I am driving so slowly.

But there was no other car nearby.

And then there it was.  The correct number.  On a driveway to her left.

Alana turned her car into the driveway, her headlights sweeping the gravel, the dirt, the brush and the tree trunks standing in the dark.

She passed a tumbling-down shack, the kind of shack people in the country sometimes build for their children to stand in while they are waiting for the school bus.  Then she passed the shell of an old stone building that looked like it had once been a garage.  Its roof had fallen in.  Its windows were shattered.  The window frames were rotting out.

There was a rusting old car next to the side of the road which had a fallen tree on the roof, collapsing that.

The place looked abandoned.

Alana would not have been surprised to see a tree down, blocking the road, and she thought for an instant, will I be able to back my car all the way out in the darkness?  She wondered if she should stop now and back out before she got deeper in.

But I have just one more box to drop, she thought.  Then I can turn around and head home, my job done.

The dirt drive took her past a swamp, where the now-brown shafts of cattails and reeds swayed in the wind above the water, in the thin light of the setting sun.  The swamp opened into a lake, the other side of the lake she had driven by a few minutes before.  An old dock reached into the water.  There was a red rowboat overturned on the dock, and three kayaks — orange, yellow and red — stacked nearby on the shore, their paddles resting on a tree, with orange and blue lifejackets hung from the branches of the tree.

At least someone lives here, Alana thought.  At least I didn’t come this far for nothing.

The house, a ramshackle two-story colonial with weathered brown siding, sat on a rise above the lake.  There was a yellow porch light lit over the door, which reminded Alana of the Ner Tamid, the eternal light, a strange association if ever there was one.  There was an old Volvo parked next to the house, further up the hill, but it had no license plate and had grass and weeds growing around it and looked like it hadn’t been moved in years.

No other lights in the house were on.

Good, Alana thought, as she pulled her car up near the door.  There’s no one home.  I don’t have to introduce or explain myself.  I don’t have to explain why I’m here.  I can drop the Shalach Mones at the door, turn the car around, and be gone, Alana thought.  Who knows if anyone actually lives here? although the kayaks suggest someone does.  Who knows if these people are even Jewish?  Or if they are, who knows if they’ll hate me anyway, just for disturbing their peace.

She opened the door of her car, lifted the last box of Shalach Mones, and stood, leaving the car door open.  Dogs, she thought.  I bet there will be dogs.  I hope they are inside.  She steeled herself against the vicious barking she sometimes heard when she approached the doors of other houses, when the dogs threw themselves against the door from the inside, hoping to frighten anyone who came near.

But instead of barking, there was only silence.

There was a porch swing and a rusting metal porch slider next to the door.  Alana put the box of Shalach Mones on the slider and knocked.

No answer.  Nothing.

Then she noticed bells on a chain, hanging next to the door.  Oh,bells instead of a doorbell, Alana thought, and pulled the chain, which rang the bells.  They had delicate, musical tones.  Their chimes filled the air.

No reply.  Nothing. No one home.

I can go now, Alana thought.

Then Alana noticed a mezuzah hanging loose on the wall next to the door.

Huh, Alana thought.  A mezuzah way out here.  There must be Jews here.  Or at least must have been Jews here once.  Way out in the middle of no place.

The bottom nail holding the mezuzah had worked loose so the mezuzah didn’t hang at the usual angle – bottom toward the outside, top toward the inside of the house.  The mezuzah hung straight up and down.

Alana reached up without thinking.  She touched the mezuzah.  She brought her hands back to her lips, kissed her fingers, and by extension, kissed the mezuzah itself, something observant people do whenever they come into a house or a room with a mezuzah.

How strange is that, Alana asked herself.  Where did that come from? Who am I?  What am I doing here?  I don’t kiss mezuzot, she thought. I don’t like Purim.  All that fear, the two thousand years of persecution, always having so many enemies, ending with that awful retribution at the end of the story.  I hate the suffering of all people.  And I hate our suffering — all the deaths and exile and time in slavery.  I hate it all.  We abandon God and bad things happen.  Terrible things. And then we never learn from our own history, so we repeat it.  Are repeating it.   Again.  Or God abandons us.

Mezuzot are a kind of idolatry.  People shouldn’t kiss objects.  We should only embrace one another.

The nail that had been hanging from the bottom of the mezuzah fell, and Alana bent to pick it up.

Then the porch lit up and Alana heard the crunching of tires on gravel.

Holy Moley, Alana thought.  Someone lives here after all.

She turned.

A white truck pulled in behind Alana’s car.  Then it backed up, on the hill, toward the old Volvo that was rusting in the weeds.  BIIEEEEEP!  BIIEEEEEP! BIIEEEEEP!   high pitched and piercing, the backup warning signal piercing a beautiful night, the sun having just broken through the clouds as it set orange and purple over the lake, after the wind and the rain subsided.

A thin balding man with brown skin and a short beard, wearing a blue and black Amazon vest, popped out of the truck, opened its side panel, drew out a cardboard box and then trotted over to the door.  He put the box on the rusty porch slider next to the Shalach Monas, pulled out his cell phone, and held it out to Alana.

“Sign?†he said, in a still, small voice that Alana struggled to hear.

“I don’t live here,†Alana said.

“Ok,†the man said.  He turned his cell phone around and took a picture of the box on the porch slider, the flash from his phone brilliant for an instant. Then he turned, trotted back to his truck, hopped into it, started it and drove off, the gravel from the dirt road spitting out from under his tires and into the underbrush, leaving Alana standing in front of the door, a nail between her thumb and her forefinger, looking at the last light, the clouds and sky now a dark pale purple and reflected in the lake, which was itself still and as smooth as glass.

I wonder, Alana said to herself.

She turned back to the mezuzah.  It’s got to be a mitzvah, she told herself, to fix a mezuzah that has come loose.

She nudged the bottom of the mezuzah with one hand while she lifted the nail with the other, pulling the bottom out, closer to the porch.  She inserted the nail into the little hole at the bottom of the mezuzah, looking for the nail hole in the doorpost.  The nail found that hole and Alana pushed it back in.

Then there was more light, and the sound of tires on the dirt driveway again.

An old green Volvo station wagon pulled up next to the porch, and an old man wearing a down jacket and a beret, a man who looked like an artist or an aging hippie, got out of the car.

“Help you?†he said.

“Hag sameach,†Alana said.

“Say what?†the man said.

“Happy Purim,†Alana said.

“Whoa now,†the man said.  “I think you got me mixed up with somebody else.â€

“Don’t you live here?†Alana said.

“I do now.  But only for a couple of months.  Those other people moved out.  Flew away. Lock stock and barrel.  Left me that old Volvo though.  Good for parts.â€

“They left the mezuzah?â€

“The mazuwhat?†the man said.

“This,†Alana said, and pointed.

“I don’t know what that thing is.  You can have it if you want.  Doesn’t do me any good.â€

Alana stepped back.

“You got a delivery from Amazon,†Alana said.

“Excellent,†the man said.  “Chain saw parts.  I don’t get how they can get you stuff in one day.â€

The man stepped to the door, put a key in the lock, raised his eyebrows, and opened the door.

“Do you want to come in?â€

“No thank you.  I better be going,†Alana said.  “I brought a little food package for the people who used to live here.  Do you want it?â€

“Hot stuff.  No contract or obligation?†the man said.

“No, nothing like that.  Just some pastry, candy, and fruit.  And a little wine.â€

“Don’t mind if I do,†the man said, and he smiled, in a sneaky, self-satisfied way, and raised his eyebrows again.  “Tell you what.  Trade you for the mezu-thing.â€

He reached up and wrenched the mezuzah off the wall. Then he handed it to Alana.

Alana froze.  The screech of the nail coming out of the wood tore into her, as if the nail was being pulled from her own flesh.  As if she was being torn in two.  And she herself had been ripped in half.  As if the world had just collapsed in on itself.  As if there was no future and no hope.

She held out her hand and the man dropped the mezuzah into it.

“See-ya,†the man said, and he winked.  That’s the last thing I need, Alana thought.  To be hit on by some old lecher out here in the middle of the woods.

“Thanks, the man said, as Alana backed away.

“My pleasure,†Alana said, and grimaced.

She turned, got into her car, turned it around and drove off.

Why does any of this matter? Alana wondered as she drove off.  A mezuzah is just a thing.  People move.  What does it matter if they take their mezuzah with them or not? and repost it in their new house or not?  What does any of this matter?  We are born alone, die alone and everything else is an illusion.

Chesed, she thought then, one of the voices inside her answering the other.  Lovingkindness.  Our history is the story of a people who have never been at peace, not with others and not with ourselves, Alana thought.  We have a choice: we can live in constant fear and with endless anger.  Or we can decide to take care of each other, and try to create islands of peace and decency in a world that is full of trouble of our own making.  Holiness even.  Those moments of decency are holy.  Nothing else matters.

You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might, she thought, the words that are in the mezuzah.  These commandments which I give you today are to be upon your hearts.  You shall inscribe these words on the doorposts of your homes and on your gates.  Bind them as a signpost on your hands and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes, when you lie down and when you rise up.  You shall teach them to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you rise up to walk upon the road.

Love Adonai? who humans sometimes think of as a war god? and not one another? an angry voice inside her said.

Chesed, she thought.  Lovingkindness. Love one another.  And the world, while we have it, the other voice answered back.  Every moment.  Every part.

We create our own truth by our actions and choices, she thought.  We can sit idle, and let the world fall apart.

Or we can resist, feel, love, and act.

Alana drove home on Route 6.  The sun had set, leaving just a line of pink light on the horizon behind her, which she could barely make out in her rearview mirror.  She passed Cindy’s Diner and one gas station after the next. Gas stations, donut shops, discount stores and tire places.

As she got into Providence, a train ran parallel to her car for a few hundred yards and then slowed is it entered the station.  Alana’s car and the road veered off to the right.  Then she took Route 95 north into Pawtucket.

The garage door of Alana’s house opened automatically as Alana pulled into her driveway and the garage light came on.  We live in a world of miracles, Alana thought, as the motor of the garage door reversed and thrummed and the garage door lowered.  Man plans, God laughs, she thought.  Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.

Why is that?

Alana got out of her car and walked up the wooden steps from the garage into the house.  The garage light turned off, also automatically, as she closed the door behind her.

___

 All of Michael Fine’s stories and books are available on MichaelFineMD.com or by clicking here

The Last Jew In Foster recalls a folk tale called The Crying Talis, told by the Kelmer Maggid (Moses Isaac ben Noah Darshan) and passed down to me when I was a teenager.

Glossary

Mezuzah singular.  Mezozot (pleural) – a small rectangular case, usually made of metal,  which is hung on the right side (as you enter) on the doorpost of the front door and the doorways of most rooms in Jewish homes, just above shoulder height.  Mezuzot each contain a small piece of parchment, the klaf,  made from the skin of embryonic calves on which is hand-written (by a specially trained scribe) verses from Dvorim, the book of Deuteronomy, including the Shema, a six-word expression of faith in the one God of the Jewish people.  Observant people touch the mezuzah as they enter a house or a room and then kiss their fingers, kissing the mezuzah virtually.  The mezuzah is thought to provide spiritual protection to each place, and to some has some mystical associations that border on superstition as though the mezuzah provides some personal protection as well, although rabbinic authorities will tell you that those associations are idolatry, and that any benefit a mezuzah conveys comes from keeping your thoughts centered on God and God’s commandments, in order to avoid temptation.

Mitzvah – The act of fulfilling one of the 613 commandments inscribed in Jewish law.  Also any good deed or an act of kindness.

Ner Tamid — the eternal light.  A light hung over the ark that holds the Torah (the scroll on which is hand-written the Five Books of Moses) in a synagogue and which is never extinguished.  It represents the omnipotence and eternity of God, as well as the value of knowledge and learning.

Many thanks to Carol Levitt for proofreading, and to Lauren Hall for all-around help and support.

Please click here to receive Michael Fine’s monthly short stories and his new series, What’s Crazy in Health Care.  Please invite others to join by sending them the link here.

Information about Michael’s books, stories, posts, talks and performances is available at www.MichaelFineMD.com or by clicking the link here.   Join us!