My Fair One, Come Away

Last year, I traveled to the United States to visit family and friends. The time was rewarding and well-spent; I returned home filled with many fresh and wonderful memories. I spent about a week in each of three different states: Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maryland. One fond memory, however, was made not on the ground but in the air, on both the flight over and the return flight.

The plane’s audio entertainment system had Buddy Guy’s 1993 album Feels Like Rain on it. I listened to the entire album twice, once on the way to the States and once on the way back, but I listened to the title song dozens of times. Many blues songs, in one way or another, are about love. And that love is not the love of sunshine and roses. It’s about stormy weather, rain, tough times, broken hearts, and battening down the hatches. 

When I got home, the song was still playing in my head. It prompted me to sit down and write a story, a love story, about love and rain. I titled it “The Prince of Rain.”

I am grateful to Jordan Blum and his staff at The Bookends Review for publishing it. Like many of my stories, this one takes place partly in America and partly in Israel, Mississippi, and the Negev, Hattiesburg, and Beersheba. My heart and feet are firmly planted in two places.

The story opens with an epigraph from what is, for me, the quintessential love story, The Song of Songs.

—The Song of Songs 2:10-11 (NJPS)

Here’s the story’s opening paragraph. We’re in Beersheba.

Jakob Wasserman’s soul scrutinized the members of the Burial Society as they began to clean under his nails and between his toes and to cut away several pieces of dried skin from his corpse. He asked the mal’akh ha-mavet if it would be all right to stay longer and observe the men working; he was curious. The angel consented and told Jakob they did not need to leave until after the burial.

You can read the complete story here. And if you’d like to hear the song, you’ll find it here.

All the best,
Gershon