Jeff Sharlet: At 7 pm on Monday, May 8, I’ll be reading a part of “You Must Draw a Long Bead to Shoot a Fish,” my contribution Laurel Snyder’s new anthology of “Jew-ish” tales by half-Jews, Half/Life, at Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction, 34 Avenue A, between Second and Third streets. It’s Jew night at Mo’s, but my essay is really about a half-Mennonite. Greater Jewish satisfaction will be had from readings by Renee Kaplan, a novelist and broadcast and print veteran of “60 Minutes II” and the New York Observer; and Jeremy Mullem of Zeek, “a Jewish journal of thought and culture.”

Here’s a sample from the fish-shooting essay I’m assigned to read:

It’s Yom Kippur, a good day for writing, and besides I’ve a letter demanding an answer. It’s from my friend Sue, who has gone home to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to watch her father die. He is or maybe now was a self-made millionaire, a maverick Mennonite, a builder of hard, bony houses, and a shooter of animals on land and in water, which is saying something, since you must draw a long bead to shoot a fish. Her father is or maybe now was, writes Sue, “guns and sweat and beer.”

When the ten-years dying of his cancer began to accelerate last spring, he called Sue and her sister to tell them that when the time came, they would find his body in the hollow in which he lived, his head gone on to Heaven by way of his shotgun. He is, writes Sue (or now was), a man to be feared, not for violence toward others — none of that — but for competence plus disdain plus the dumb beast arrogance of any pretty man who can make women swoon. These virtues made him a twice-abandoned husband and an ignorer of daughters. The daughters have nonetheless returned to the house he built to ease his dying…