Read The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman for Free Online Page A

tried to interest them in working with him after they were discharged. But his friends were ready to collaborate only if somebody serious supervised his fantasies—in short, they demanded a senior partner who would see to the proper management of the production. Trigano invited his teacher to join his young group. It’ll bore you to repeat yourself year after year, Trigano said. You can have a real connection to young people only by working with them, not from a teacher’s podium. But Moses imposed a condition: If he was a partner, he would not be just a bookkeeper and production manager, he would also participate in the creative process. Trigano would dream up the plot, make up scenes, and write the dialogue, and Moses as director would bring Trigano’s vision to life. Why not? The screenwriter overflowed with ideas, and his friends took care of camera work and lighting, but they needed a leader, a man whose authority people were glad to respect.
    Pilar translates, and the mayor and the priest regard the old man fondly—but Moses is suddenly sick of talking about himself.
    â€œAnd so, ladies and gentlemen, to be brief, I took leaves of absence from teaching and joined these young people, whose enthusiasm swept me onto the path that has become the center of my life. During my first leave we were able to complete our earliest project, a short and unusual film that to my surprise was well received, and so we began right away to plan another. And after my confidence as director grew—and as I read the memoirs of famous directors who started making movies without special training—I gradually reduced my teaching hours, then finally quit, with no regrets. And though he had become my close collaborator, my former student made sure to maintain polite boundaries and treat me as if I were still his teacher, perhaps a surrogate of sorts for the father he didn’t have growing up. He decided that he and his friends wouldn’t call me by my first name, only by my family name, and I also addressed them by their family names, as in the classroom, and it was more or less agreed that everyone in the group would call the others by their last names, including the lady who sits here before you, who in those days was the writer’s very close friend.”
    â€œYou also called him Moses?” de Viola asks Ruth, who sits next to him with her legs crossed, her colorful woolen scarf brushing the hem of his robe, her eyes twinkling as she tries not to miss a word.
    â€œYes.” She laughs. “Even now, Moses is like a teacher to me.”
    â€œBut how did you come to belong to the group back then?” asks Pilar. “According to your biography, you were still a child.”
    â€œWhoever wrote my bio was generous about my date of birth,” says Ruth, “but by now, believe me, I’m tired of hiding my real age. Besides, my connection with Trigano began when I was still a child. I grew up with only a father—my mother died in childbirth, and my father got help from the neighbors, including Trigano’s family. I am in fact younger than Trigano, and when I was in elementary school, he would create roles for me in little skits that he wrote, and it sometimes seemed that he was inventing these stories just for me. And so when he put together the group, I was naturally a part of it. I wanted so much to be an actress that I dropped out of high school. Now I’m over fifty, and I still don’t have a diploma.” Suddenly, she falls silent.
    â€œWhat was that first short film about?” the head of the archive asks Moses. “We know nothing of it.”
    The director begins to answer, but Ruth beats him to it.
    â€œIt was a film about a jealous dog.”
    â€œA dog?”
    â€œA dog.”
    â€œJust a dog?”
    â€œNo,” Moses quickly explains, “it’s about a jealous man who disguised himself as a dog to secretly follow his cheating