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  Interview with a Jewish Vampire

  A Novel

  Erica Manfred

  ©Erica Manfred 2011

  All rights reserved. Except by way of fair dealing for review purposes or study, no portion of this publication may be transmitted, entered or stored in a retrieval system, photocopied, or reproduced in any way or by any means whatsoever, without prior written permission of the copyright holder and publisher.

  Published by

  Fredonia Communications

  19 Mosher Place

  West Hurley, NY 12491

  ISBN - 978-0-9710968-2-0

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and incidents are imaginary, and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To my late mom, Freda, and the “goils.”

  Acknowledgments

  I am eternally grateful to my writers’ critique group: Rachel Pollack, Carla Reuben, Cynthia Sinharoy, Linda Gravenson Geuthe, Jillen Lowe, and Sharon Doane, without whose appreciation, laughter and incisive editorial suggestions this book would never have been conceived or written. I also want to acknowledge my editor, Chris Noel, who “got” what I was doing (despite being a goy) and helped me turn this book into a fully realized novel.

  Preface

  I’ve always been a vampire fan. I remember the delicious terror of watching Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee movies on late night TV in the 1950s, when I was babysitting—alone—curled up on a couch in the basement of a suburban ranch after putting the kids to bed. The movies were usually hosted by the wonderfully campy Vampira or Zacherly.

  My favorite vampire novel was Dracula by Bram Stoker, because that’s the only vampire novel there was, until Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire came along. No one before or since has ever imagined such an intricate, brilliant vampire world or written such gorgeous gothic prose. Anne Rice’s fabulous undead creatures with their tortured souls and intense relationships mesmerized me. I fell for vampires and fell hard; a love affair that never ended.

  Then vampires became a craze, and I became a fan of Buffy and Twilight. But as I got older I noticed that vampires kept getting younger. Most were in high school. Why would a vampire want to go to high school, I wondered? Most of us can’t wait until we get out of that hell. Rice’s vampires were adults, some of them even middle-aged when they were turned. I started wondering why vampires had to be young. I know teenagers are a lot prettier than geezers, and if you’re going to live forever you want to look good, but kids don’t fantasize about living forever. They think they’re going to live forever anyway. It’s us old folks who know we’re not immortal, and as death approaches maybe we’d like a second chance.

  It occurred to my twisted brain that turning the genre on its head, with old vampires preying on the young, would be fun. The idea for Interview with a Jewish Vampire came from a fantasy of saving my mother from dying in her eighties, and still having her and her friends around to schmooze with. I wanted to pay homage to Anne Rice in a way that she might appreciate if she had a Jewish sense of humor (which, who knows, she might, even though she’s Catholic). I imagined what would happen if Anne Rice and Mel Brooks had gotten drunk one night at Grossingers and collaborated on a vampire novel. Interview with a Jewish Vampire is the result.

  Chapter One

  “So nu?” asked the vampire thoughtfully, as he sat down next to me at the Mitzvah bar on Orchard Street. “You must be Rhoda?” He’d picked me out of a line-up of twenty-somethings. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.

  We had met through JDate. I was a Jewish divorcee of forty-one who claimed to be thirty-five and might be considered zaftig if you defined that liberally. He had been dead for a long time but I didn’t know that right away. I just thought he was pale. An undead double for Jeff Goldblum, he was tall, slender, with a mischievous smile, flashing green eyes and long black hair. His incisors were kind of pointy when he smiled and his skin was pasty white, but that didn’t put me off. Everyone looked pretty sallow in the dead of winter in New York City. I immediately wondered if I could drag him off to my lair later that night.

  Despite the fact that I had a pretty face, I didn’t get a lot of action on JDate because I had checked “a few extra pounds” in the body-size box. “A few” was an understatement, which is why I always met dates at night in bars. I wore black and got there first so they would see me sitting down. My face was a lot slimmer than the rest of me. Jewish guys were the worst when it came to weight—and everything else. Only a Jewish supermodel who ran a law firm was good enough for the Jewish princes I met on JDate.

  I was perched on a barstool too teeny to accommodate my rear end, which spilled over the edges. I peered at everyone else's barstools and felt worse seeing all those visible edges. I decided that from now on my goal in life would be to sit on a barstool and be able to see the edges. I tugged on my low-cut tunic top trying in vain to hide the bulges between chest and crotch which seemed to have a mind of their own, ballooning out despite my best efforts. At least I was showing some cleavage, my best physical attribute. He rescued me from what was rapidly becoming a severe fat attack.

  “So, you’re a journalist…” he said, putting his elbow on the bar and turning towards me. I had listed that profession on my profile. “Do you have a tape recorder with you?” he asked, not realizing I suppose that tape was so last century and reporters now carried digital recorders.

  “Why do you ask?” Men had asked me a lot of strange opening questions on first dates but whether I had a tape recorder was not one of them.

  “I would like to tell the story of my life.” He leaned forward and gave me such an intense look I had to turn away. “Would you be willing to interview me?”

  No, I wasn’t interested in the story of his life. I was interested in getting to know him in a more biblical sense. I figured he was just another narcissistic celebrity wannabe. As a writer, I was constantly getting hit on--not by attractive men--but by people who thought their lives were so fascinating they would make surefire bestseller material. All they thought they needed was a writer to tell their story which, of course, I would be thrilled to do on spec because they didn’t have any money. None of them realized that writers are not charitable institutions.

  “You will want to write my story,” he said urgently, “You’ve never heard anything like it before. It will make you rich and famous.”

  “Sure, sure. So what’s so special about your story?” I asked wearily, disappointed that he was only interested in my writing skills, not my body.

  “I’m a vampire,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Sure, and I’m the Queen of the Damned.”

  “What will convince you?” he asked.

  “Hmm. Hold on a minute,” I said, playing along. I dragged a cross out of my purse, which I happened to have because I’d visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral with my niece earlier that day and got one for free. I held it up in front of him.

  “I’m a Jewish vampire. Doesn’t do a thing for me.”

  “How about a Jewish star?”

  “Don’t be silly, only Christians are afraid of the devil.”

  I dragged out a mirror and held it in front of his face. No reflection. He said ‘Ah’ and the mirror didn’t fog up. When he opened his mouth, I saw that his long incisors were, in fact, fangs. I shrank back, not thrilled about the notion of becoming dinner. I looked more closely at him, noting that like Anne Rice’s Louis, he was utterly white and smooth, as if he were sculpted from bleached bone, with brilliant green eyes that looked like flames in a skull. Unlike Louis, however, he was not wearing a finely tailored black coat but an overly long shlumpy one that looked like it came from the n
ineteenth century without a stop at the cleaners along the way. His full black hair, with waves combed over the tips of the ears and curls that barely touched the edge of his white collar, made me long to touch it. He was one handsome dude although his wardrobe could use some help.

  “So,” he said, “ask me some questions.”

  He certainly had piqued my curiosity, so I decided to go ahead and interview him. If he really was a vampire, I’d have the scoop of the century, if anyone believed me. If not, at least I’d have the opportunity to flirt with a good-looking guy. Maybe I should have been more frightened, but I’d interviewed many dangerous types, including serial killers, so I was pretty nonchalant about the risk involved. Plus my life had been seriously lacking in drama lately and here was an opportunity for a little excitement.

  I pulled out my pen and started making notes.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, sounding upset. “I thought you were going to record this”

  “I am recording it. This pen is a digital recorder.” I showed him my latest reporter’s gadget. “As I write, it records, so I can play back any part I want.”

  “That would have come in handy in Hebrew class when I was a kid. I was always getting lost during the rabbi’s Talmud commentary. Too bad I had to use a quill pen.”

  He wanted me to give him a pseudonym so I’m calling him “Sheldon” after my ex-husband, who was a bloodsucker if ever there was one.

  “I didn’t know there were any Jewish vampires.” Actually, I didn’t know there were any vampires at all, but I was suspending disbelief for the moment.

  “Vy not a vampire? Vy a duck? Just kidding. I miss Groucho. We used to hang out at Grossingers in the heyday of the Borscht Belt.”

  I laughed. In addition to being a hottie, he was a regular vampire comedian. You never know what will turn up on JDate.

  Then he reached out over the bar towards me. I automatically recoiled. He clamped an icy hand on my shoulder and said, “Believe me, I won’t hurt you.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said, wishing he did want to hurt me—just a little bit, not fatally of course. “I’ve interviewed worse than you. I once interviewed John Gotti. Now he was scary.”

  “I met Meyer Lansky once. He didn’t scare me a bit.”

  I shook my head in bewilderment. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would scare him, but then maybe he was a wussy vampire.

  “How did you become a vampire?” I asked, playing along, while I made notes.

  “I was a rabbi who was killed by the original Count Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. You didn’t know Dracula was an anti-Semite, did you? He thought it would be amusing to turn a Jewish rabbi into a vampire. I mean we Jews have the strictest rules about what’s kosher and forcing a rabbi to drink blood, well, that was his idea of a joke. He didn’t laugh for long. Little did he know that I’d still be around a hundred years later and he’d be staked in his coffin by rampaging villagers. Dracula was just too obvious, what with that cape and that nasty-looking punim.”

  “So how did you get away with living as a vampire? Didn’t people notice?”

  “I had a big advantage as a Jewish vampire. I was a Hasidic Jew at the time I became a vampire and so naturally blended in. The last thing I wanted was anyone knowing the truth about me. Once people start being afraid of you, you’re at the mercy of hordes of villagers wielding wooden stakes and opening coffins. We Hassidim already are very pale; we turn mirrors to the wall, don’t wield crosses and wear black. As for garlic, I was so used to it in Jewish cooking it didn’t bother me at all. Jewish services begin at sunset so that’s convenient. You can be a teenager forever in eighteenth-century black hats and black clothes--you always look old. You can drink blood instead of wine and no one will notice that you don’t eat. You can refuse food on the grounds that it’s not kosher enough. No one will argue. It’s a great cover.”

  “Didn’t you feel guilty about killing people and draining their blood?” I hoped he had some restraint. I might have been sexually starved but I wasn’t suicidal.

  “Did they feel guilty about killing us all these years? I don’t think so. I preyed on the anti-Semites and let me tell you, I never ran out of blood--until recently. It’s not so fashionable to kill Jews these days. Actually I don’t kill people anymore,” he sighed. “I stick to animal blood these days. It doesn’t taste so good but at least I don’t hate myself in the morning. If I were going to suck human blood today I’d stick to the goyim or Republicans. I wanted to hunt some of George W.’s born again buddies, especially the ones waiting for the Rapture. They think they’re going to be transported right up to heaven. Hah! They’ll be in for a big surprise when they find the big guy in the sky is a rabbi, just like me. Why do you think he has a long gray beard? In fact, just wait till Mel Gibson gets there. Actually, he might get there sooner than he thinks if I have anything to do with it. Passion of the Christ, what a shanda. That movie was the work of a man obsessed with blood and he’s not even a vampire, and he never will be or we’d all be in trouble.”

  “I voted for Obama myself,” I told him reassuringly. “Did you vote for him?”

  “No, I’m an illegal alien. I can’t even get a Green Card, much less become a citizen. The immigration office is closed at night.”

  “If you’re a Hasid where is your beard?” He was clean-shaven, without a trace of five o’clock shadow.

  “I shaved it, of course. Do you think I’d show up for a date looking like Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments? Luckily, like anything else I cut off, it will grow back by tomorrow after my night in the coffin. You didn’t think I’d spend a hundred years in a black hat and payess? I wanted to have some fun.”

  “Actually, you are very nice looking, but I suppose you’re aware of that.”

  I was surprised to see his huge grin, fangs flashing. Those green eyes fastened on me with a look of hunger, which I hoped was of the carnal, not carnivore variety.

  “No I’m not aware of it. Thank you.”

  “What have you done to make your life, or rather undeath, easier?” I changed the subject, feeling a bit embarrassed by his intense gaze.

  “I created a golem, a creature of mud that comes to life. Jews have believed in golem for centuries and will accept golem where they will not accept vampires. Golem don’t eat so they don’t have to be kosher. My golem, named Goldie, cleans, guards my coffin and goes out during the daylight to get what I need. She’s good company. I’ve taught her to read Yiddish so she keeps me from being bored when I’m stuck in that coffin during the day. You think we vampires sleep all day. Well I suffer from insomnia and I get really tired of lying in that farshtunken coffin for twelve hours at a time. It’s the rule that we have to stay in the coffin during daylight or who knows what might happen. I don’t want to find out. I can’t watch TV in a coffin so Goldie reads, mostly Isaac Bashevis Singer. He knew from the undead. The only problem is that she’s jealous when I talk to any woman but her. She thinks she knows what’s best for me. She reminds me of my mother. Don’t ask! I used to use Goldie to do all my shopping since stores closed at sunset, but now, with Wal-Mart open twenty-four seven, I can do a lot of my own shopping. I just adore Wal-Mart.”

  “What could a vampire want at Wal-Mart? Especially a kosher vampire?”

  “I like auto parts and hardware. And electronics of course. I once had an all-night electronics store in Times Square but that’s another story. I would be in undead heaven at Home Depot but it’s not open late enough. I get great deals on EBay, though.”

  “You shop on EBay?”

  “I get the best buys there because no one else is up at 4am. I wait till the last second when an auction closes and then go for the jugular. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” He gave me a mischievous grin, which I found charming.

  “Why do you have to shop for bargains? After centuries you should have multiplied your investments?”

  “Ever heard of Bernie Madoff? I got talked into investing my lifetimes of savings with that goniff.
I’ve got nothing on him in the blood-sucking department. I’m thinking of making him my first Jewish victim. If you hear about him dying in jail from unknown causes with mysterious puncture wounds in his neck you’ll know who did it. Now my circumstances are reduced. I work in the diamond district at night since I was trained as a diamond cutter in the nineteenth century. It doesn’t pay great but hey, it’s a living. Luckily I’m very entrepreneurial. I’m thinking of creating a vampire video game since we’re so popular with kids these days, if I can find a computer maven to program it. I like modern technology but I‘m still using a pen and parchment to write my memoirs. IMHO computers are the work of dybbuks. Mine is always giving me the blue screen of death. That thing knows who I am.”

  “If you’re writing your own memoirs why talk to me?”

  “You think I know how to write in English? I only write Yiddish and who’s going to translate? If I try to get one of those Hasids, they’ll probably start davvening over me. Plus who would believe me? You’re a journalist. You’ve got clips.”

  As Sheldon spoke, I became mesmerized by his voice, which was soft, with an adorable Yiddish accent. Or maybe he was doing his vampire hypnotic thing on me. Whatever it was, I found him irresistible. I had no idea if he was attracted to me.

  I hated having to date again in my forties. I thought marriage meant I was through with all that adolescent angst, but ever since I’d been dumped for a younger, thinner, blonder, dumber shiksa, my self-confidence was at an all-time low. I’d prayed that tonight’s date would at least find me attractive. I’d had a long string of JDates who had made it painfully clear that I didn’t pass their hotness test. My standards had plummeted so far that just about any high school graduate taller than five feet two who had all his teeth passed my hotness test these days, no matter how inappropriate he was, which explains why I didn’t run screaming out of the bar when Sheldon introduced himself as a vampire.