I hate fishing. Not because I feel sorry for the fish. I don’t have anything in common with them.
My father was a fisherman. He sat without stirring for hours, wrapped in a wide, knitted cardigan. The fish didn’t like him. Not one of them, no matter how he tried to entice them, answered his call. I think that no one derived pleasure from that—neither the fish nor him.
Father was a hopeless fisherman. It would have been better had he never taken it up. It would have been better had he been a postman. He would have delivered letters. And people would have been grateful to him.
Yet he sat and sat on the shore of the lake, gazing off into the distance. As if he were the sentinel of an unknown state. What enemies was he attempting to discern way out there? What thoughts roamed in his disheveled head… Perhaps he imagined that he was the sentinel of this lake.
Nothing presaged his desertion. Nobody knows what he thought about for hours on end. Was he thinking at all, or was he contemplating space, emptying his mind like a Tibetan monk? A monk standing guard over Being. But what happened then? Why did he abandon his post? What was the last drop that made the burden of his doubts overflow? Had Being actually appeared as merely the Possible? Merely one possibility among others.
Nothing foretold his death, apart from his own private musings. He drowned, quietly dissolving into the utter silence of the lake. As if he had never existed at all. As if it wasn’t him who, sitting in the hush of evening not too long ago, had hopelessly attempted to catch a fish that had strayed by chance.
It would have been better had he been a postman…
But no. I think he could not have been one. Then who would have sat for hours on end, staring off into nowhere? For someone had to be on watch at the lake.
Jonathan Vidgop is an Israeli director, author, and screenwriter. Vidgop is the founder of the Am haZikaron Institute for Science, Culture and Heritage of the Jewish People. He is the recipient of the Zeiti Yerushalaim Prize and the medal “For contribution to the development of the national spiritual heritage of the Jewish People”. Jonathan was born in Leningrad in 1955. In 1974, he was expelled from what is now called the Saint-Petersburg State University of Culture and Arts “for behaviour unworthy of the title of Soviet student”. Having worked as a locksmith, loader, and White Sea sailor, he was drafted into the army and sent to serve in the Arctic Circle. Graduating from the Russian State Academy of Performing Arts in 1982, he was involved in 23 productions across the USSR, 12 of which were shut down. In 1989, he emigrated to Israel, where he has worked as a director, editor, and researcher. Jonathan was awarded a special grant from the Israeli president for writing. Leading Russian publisher NLO published Vidgop’s latest book, Testimony. Jonathan’s stories were published by the Los Angeles Review and the Pembroke Magazine. Nomads won the 2022 Meridian’s Editors’ Prize in Prose. In 2025, Jonathan won a poetry competition conducted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Vidgop’s works were published in more than 30 countries, and he is the author of several books.
