“The Mango Tree” by Dalia Rosenfeld / Salmagundi Magazine

Short Story Shoutout

Oct 7

6 min read

Give voice to what evades understanding. That’s what language can do. And love. Rearrange themselves to soften the blows.

When I’m writing a short story, I try to keep the telling as clear and simple as possible. I’m always mindful that if I tax my audience too much, they might shut down and stop reading.

I want to create enough space for individual story beats, lines of dialogue, specific details to stand out when they need to.

That said, I don’t know that I ask myself enough how complexity might serve me.

If the goal is nuance, a writer needs to embrace more complexity to get there. But beyond that, an argument can be made for deliberately overwhelming a reader. If a character is overwhelmed, it’s probably in your interest to mirror that feeling in your audience.

It’s a real gambit, though. This week’s story takes that risk.

Dalia Rosenfeld is an accomplished short story writer. Her work has appeared in top tier literary publications like The Atlantic, AGNI, The Threepenny Review, and Colorado Review, among many others. Her story collection, The Worlds We Think We know, was a finalist for the 2019 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature.

Her story “The Mango Tree” (4,350 words) currently in Salmagundi Magazine is a complex work and it’s worth studying. It takes place in Israel, where Rosenfeld has taught creative writing and translation. I think that she’s successfully managed, through her main character’s first-person narration, to frame the complexity of that setting well by way of a personal story.

In reading it, I was reminded of the way elementary school students are compelled to experience solar eclipses through pinhole viewers to protect their eyes. “The Mango Tree’s” central theme considers writing (and language itself) as a similar tool, and the main character uses them to protect herself. At the same time, Rosenfeld allows us to indirectly reconsider what’s happening in Israel through the scrim of her character’s experiences.

Let’s get into how she does that.

The main character (an MC whose name we don’t get) is an American editor who works for Act for Access, a fictional NGO that funds the legal fees of plaintiffs in class action lawsuits. As the MC puts it:

“To be good at what I do, I have to compartmentalize, to not think for a moment about what it must feel like to soften your baby’s bottom with talcum powder only to learn, years later, that you were poisoning her.”

She’s able to support herself and stay at an emotional remove by “[living] in the language of a text, trying on the words like an outfit, then arranging and rearranging them until they look like a million bucks.”

But when we first meet her, she doesn’t have the benefit of a text to stand behind. She’s out with a group of Act for Access coworkers celebrating a recent verdict over a dinner out, only to find they’ve inadvertently traveled into a settlement in the West Bank—to a kosher restaurant chosen to accommodate a religious colleague. The optics involved don’t align with a different coworker’s politics, and our conflict-avoidant main character struggles mightily to have the group escape the scene.

So the drama that’s framed for us is personal, even as the larger story of the setting looms over it.

Each step we take from there sets up a similar dynamic, and they compound. They flesh out the MC’s life, loves and state of mind, while also quietly painting a portrait of place.

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The drama at the kosher restaurant compels our MC to volunteer time at a different NGO named Combatants for Peace. She brings along a date, an Israeli man (named Aviad) who she’s attracted to. When Aviad asks “So what’s the deal with this group?” her response is this:

“I guess we’ll soon find out,” I said, not because I didn’t know what the deal was, but because trying to convey it to Aviad would have required me to use words such as “dialogue,” “coexistence,” “non-violence” and “occupation.”

While she’s busy texting a colleague, Aviad has an exchange with another volunteer in a hijab whom, he later tells the MC, had “raised her son to be a suicide bomber” before changing her mind and joining Combatants for Peace.

This leads to a very uncomfortable conversation for our conflict-avoidant MC. She embraces the idea that the woman had a “change of heart,” which she feels is a positive development, relatively:

“What heart? [Aviad says.] She changed her mind. And could change it again.”

“It’s an expression,” [says the MC]

“You Americans, with all your words.” Aviad turned one of our first conversations on its head. He had professed to love the English language only a few weeks ago. “How many did you say it was?”

“Two hundred thousand [words], if you count the 50,000 obsolete ones.”

“Well, Hebrew is less than half of this, but we don’t hide the thorns from the roses. We present the whole flower up front, you understand? What you say is what you get. Sometimes it’s pretty and sometimes it’s sharp.”

And, for good measure (and some levity):

“Come, [Aviad said] with all these combatants here, there will be today no peace. We go back now to my place for a shtup.”

A separate story line involves another coworker from the opening restaurant scene, a translator who recruits the MC’s editorial help with a book he’s working on. The coworker has done a poor job, and our MC has to render a translation of the translation to get to what she ultimately finds: a very moving personal remembrance about a dead pet cat name Zachariah. From the text itself:

“When I describe Zachariah as neither foe nor friend, I mean something else entirely: that his dignity upheld mine, and helped me master myself, helped me like myself just the little that I could allow. […] There were days we didn’t speak to each other, days when we spoke only to each other, the world outside too loud to let in. […] Why not give voice to what evades understanding. To the forces that fill you with self-doubt. That’s what language can do. And love. Rearrange themselves to soften the blows.”

Language and love as pinhole viewers of the first order.

I’m not giving this story’s complexity its due for wanting to present an as-simple-as-possible appreciation of it. There are nine separate scenes and ten characters to track—a lot for a story that’s just north of four-thousand words. And they’re all necessary and well placed.

Rather than clip these story elements to keep them clean and concise, Rosenfeld allows the main river of “The Mango Tree” to drift off into narrow tributaries that crowd the telling. It’s an intentional overload, I’d argue, that also reinforces our understanding of place. She creates the world mentioned above, one that’s “too loud to let in.”

The whole of the story comes to a head at the end, in the powerful metaphor of a mango tree that sits in the yard of the MC’s apartment building. The tree produces wonderful mangos, “the best around,” according to an old man who harvests all of the fallen fruit daily in his bucket, before any of the tenants can get to them.

“I’m not stealing anything,” [the old man] said with conviction, wiping bat droppings from his hands onto his pants. “I’ve been coming here for years […] And I wasn’t stealing then either.”

Consider that admission in the context of setting.

Our conflict-avoidant MC steels herself and confronts him, “loosen[ing] the old man’s grip on the bucket and start[ing] to fill it.”

She becomes, contrary to her nature, a Combatant for Peace.

Founded in 1965, Salmagundi Magazine is an international quarterly magazine of politics, culture, literature and the arts published at Skidmore College.

As described on its website “Salmagundi is not a tame or genteel quarterly. It invites argument, and it makes a place for literature that is demanding, including novella-length fiction and essays that go well beyond the fare served up by the better weeklies and monthlies.”

They are not currently reading submissions of unsolicited manuscripts until further notice. When they do post a new reading period, you can submit fiction of generally up to 12,000 words with no particular style preference. They only accept snail mail submissions, and their address is posted at the submission link above.

“Science fiction and potboiler fiction [submissions] are unlikely bets. Experimental work that employs conventions from such genres in formal ways might, on the other hand, be attractive to the editors. The best way to get to know the magazine is to subscribe.”

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You can read more about Dalia Rosenfeld and her work at her website. You can order a copy of her short story collection The Worlds We Think We Know here. She recently completed her second story collection, Love and Other Ailments, and we’ll be sure to Shoutout that release when it happens.