Rivka Galchen’s Short Stories Transport Readers Into Magical Worlds

Israeli Writer Tells Surreal Stories of Culture Shock

By Shoshana Olidort for The Jewish Daily Forward

The stories in Rivka Galchen’s “American Innovations,” aren’t all fantastical — although a fair number include elements of magic realism and science fiction — but even the most realistic stories in this collection have a kind of magical quality about them that transports the reader into a world that feels at once real and surreal.

In “Real Estate,” the narrator moves into a haunted building where she meets a man, or imagines she meets a man, Eddy, who she will never see again. Opening her fridge, she finds not the Armenian string cheese she thought she had purchased too much of, but the apples she thought she had “only contemplated buying.” At a nearby gyro place she encounters a man who reminds her of her dead father, and whom she begins to refer to as “my dad.” She wonders: “Had I slipped through a wormhole of time?”

Galchen gives phantom and reality equal space in her stories, as if to underscore the fact that for her characters, the distinction between these two spheres is less important than the recognition that the imaginary and the actual are both a part of the experience of life. In the title story, the protagonist wakes one morning to find herself newly endowed with a third breast on her lower back. She consults a doctor, who asks a series of personal questions about the patient’s family life and emotional well-being, because, as she says, “It’s very common to manifest these things in our body… Your body speaks a language. It’s like a foreign language we all speak but have forgotten how to understand.”


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