"The Last Waltz in Zurich" by Amir Tomer

Some years (decades) back, I discovered the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, and his stories had a collective purpose: to keep alive and commemorate the Yiddish culture of Europe, especially Poland, that had been destroyed by the Nazis in World War II. I was fascinated. I knew nothing of the world he was describing. It was full of folklore, magic, quirks, twists, the expected and unexpected, dreams, nightmares, and humor.  

I’d not read anything like these stories until The Last Waltz to Zurich and Other Stories by Amir Tomer. Tomer’s stories are not about Yiddish culture in Poland. Instead, they are about contemporary culture in Israel. And yet there is same sense of magic and twists, dreams and nightmares, and a very wry sense of humor that I found in the Singer stories. 

 

A man wakes up in the hospital after an automobile accident; he’s missing an eye, but the eye is still watching at the accident scene. An oil painting becomes real life. A man runs into an old rival for his wife, is invited to meet the man’s wife, and discovers it’s his own. A milkman leads children astray. A Holocaust survivor remembers huddling with her friends. 

 

In the title story, a man is dancing with the woman he considers the most beautiful in the world, his wife, when she suddenly dies in his arms. Later, not wanting to live, he decides to go to Switzerland for a legal suicide. In another story, a soldier contemplates a proposal. In another, a convention hotel provides the opportunity for a professor to pursue a student, but life changes. And there’s a man who abandons his work promotion to take the time to wreak vengeance, and the man pursued by a lighthouse becoming a woman becoming something else. And a story of man preparing to die on the gallows, and his life flashes before him. 

 

Dr. Amir Tomer

The collection contains 20 stories in all, a few containing graphic scenes. Together, the stories describe people searching for what they think is happiness, or the ordinary suddenly becoming extraordinary – and threatening, or relationships that never quite work out the way they were expected. And each story contains a twist, an unexpected development, a narrative surprise that suddenly changes our understanding of what’s been happening. 

 

Tomer, a professor of software engineering, received three degrees in computer science and has worked in the defense industry in Israel. He established a software engineering department at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee and headed the department for more than a decade. The Last Waltz in Zurich is his second book. His first, a poetry collection titled Love Designer, was published in Hebrew in 2021.

 

The Last Waltz in Zurich and Other Stories is unsettling, surprising, full of twists and turns, and a highly entertaining read.

Note: The book will be released in the United States on Nov. 23.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

What Makes Good Historical Fiction? – George Garnett at History Today.

 

Meet the American who conjured up ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow’: Washington Irving, first US celebrity author – Kerry Byrne at Fox News.

 

What The Invisible Man Made Visible to Me – Renee Hale at Miller’s Book Review.

 

‘There was eye-watering fear’: Jon le Carre’s son on writing a new George Smiley novel – Alex Clark at The Guardian.

 

Horatio Nelson: The Darling Hero of England – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.