David Stern
WRITER NAME: Josh Brown
WRITER AGE: 31
EMAIL: baradrae@hotmail.com
CHARACTER NAME: David Stern
CHARACTER NATURE: Human
DESCRIPTION/APPEARANCE: David is of average height, and is average weight, although on the slender side of average, rather than the fat side. He has brown hair, cut conservatively, and brown eyes. He wears glasses, as he is short sided, but can manage with out, as long as he doesn't have to do any very detailed work. As this is not yet the late twentieth century, he dresses according to the mores of society, with the addition of a kippah and tzitzit (more on that later). He has a slight beard.
PERSONALITY: David is a bit of a bookworm, but can manage well enough in mixed society. He is well behaved.
WEAKNESSES/STRENGTHS: David is an Orthodox Jew. That means that he wears a kippah (a skullcap, in his case, a leather one) and tzitzit (a four cornered woolen garment, worn under the shirt with four woolen strings tied on each corner, tied in a special religious way). He also prays three times a day, preferably in a synagogue with a quorum of ten Jewish men, but if he is busy, or cannot find one, will pray alone. These prayers take about 45 minutes in the morning (he will say these prayers first thing after getting up, with special phylacteries worn on his left arm and head), fifteen minutes in the afternoon and another fifteen minutes after dark (these last prayers can be said any time until just before daybreak, so if he is busy with other things, he will wait and pray later). He also keeps the Sabbath - from Friday late afternoon until Saturday after dark, he will not light a fire (or anything related to this new electricity thing), will not cook (having prepared his food beforehand), and will not carry anything in or out of a building (unless there is a special thing called an eiruv prepared, but while they had the knowledge to make one at the time, they didn't have the city permits to put one up, so it's a moot point). He is also very conservative about sexual relationships, not that they were exactly as promiscuous back then as we are today, but still, he will not even kiss a woman he is not related to. He also keeps kosher, something expensive but possible in London. It means he eats a lot of milk products and vegetables, but little meat. What meat he will eat he must purchase from a Jewish butcher, one who has been approved of by the local Jewish community.
He suffers from terrible headaches from time to time, but they last for no longer than a minute.
HISTORY: David is the son of a Rabbi in New York. During the day, he went to school with all the other children, but in the afternoons, he spent in a Cheder (the CH is gutteral, like in Hebrew or German) learning Bible or Talmud (Jewish Law). His father expected him to go on to study in RIETS (Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary), the only place of higher education that combined a secular university education with a Jewish learning program, and to follow him into the Rabbinate. However, towards the end of eleventh grade, David began to have "spells". He would suddenly have terrible headaches, headaches that would leave him incapacitated, but the headaches would vanish almost as quickly as they would appear. Doctors checked and rechecked him, but came up with nothing. Then the headaches began to last a little longer, and each time left David with a vision. It would be a split second vision, and David would not understand what he was seeing. He'd see a room, or a street corner, or a stretch of beach, places he'd never been or seen. David's father has no idea what to do, as none of the doctors can help.
Finally, Rabbi Stern felt he found someone who might help David. He sent David to London, in order to continue from there to Pressburg, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Rabbi Moshe Sofer, an important Rabbi and powerful Kabbalist. He hoped that Rabbi Sofer could somehow help David. However, as David headed for the ship that would take him from London to Pressburg, he was hit with another headache. This left a strong image of his mind - the image of his ship sinking. Unable to get the image out of his mind, he didn't board the ship. And, in fact, the ship sank in the North Sea, all hands aboard.
So, for the last week, David has walked the streets of London unsure of what to do. He has enough money to allow him to survive for a few more weeks. He waits to hear from his father to see if he should continue on to Pressburg, or return to New York (or stay in London, which he seriously doubts his father will consider a possibility). He is currently staying with the Feinman family, Mrs. Feinman being his mother's cousin. He is a little uncomfortable at their house, as he suspects (correctly) that Mrs. Feinman is interested in arranging a marriage between him and her eldest daughter Feigie. While Feigie is a very nice girl, she is not very pretty and David does not find her attractive in the least. He also doesn't feel he is ready for a wedding yet, anyway.
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RIETS was actually founded in 1897, and still exists today as the center of Yeshiva University, an accredited Orthodox Jewish university in New York. Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Spector, for whom it was named, was one of the major Jewish figures in the 1800s.
Pressburg is currently known as Bratislava and is the capitol of the Slovak Republic. Rabbi Moshe Sofer, also known as the MaHaRaM (Maran HaRav Moshe, which means Master the Rabbi Moshe) Sofer, and wrote some of the important Jewish literature of the time. He was also very outspoken against the Reform movement, which was slowly becoming more and more popular in Europe.
