The Woman Who Collected Solved Crossword PuzzlesAuthor(s): Alex EpsteinSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Fall, 2008), p. 83Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20537010 .

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ALEX EPSTEIN

The Woman Who Collected Solved Crossword Puzzles

There is little market value for these two collections: I collect the names of stories that I will never write; Anna collects solved cross

word puzzles. That said, you have to admit that there are things to learn from this kind of puzzle. Such as, the galaxy nearest to

the Milky Way, nine letters? Andromeda. And the planet closest

to earth, four letters? Mars. The capital of Norway, nine letters?

Jerusalem. Crossword puzzles that have fallen victim to typos she

keeps in a separate file. As she does with puzzles that were, for

whatever reason, not completely solved: clues too difficult, time ran

out. She already has more than seven hundred items in her collec

tion, in various languages: Russian, French, Arabic, Italian, English, and more. One of the puzzles, so Anna says, is from a language whose origins are unknown?Basque. One puzzle especially dear

to her is a puzzle that was solved by her grandmother in 1931; it

was cut out of a Yiddish newspaper, Da Spiel, published in Riga, the

capital of Latvia.

And more: One of Columbus's ships, five letters? Pinta. Half of

half, seven letters? Quarter. The reason for the death of Romeo and

Juliet, four letters? Love. Abroad, Anna's friends are always search

ing for crossword puzzles for her in newspapers and magazines left on trains. One day I must try to write a story about Anna; I will

begin in St. Petersburg, the city of her birth, where at the end of

the seventies, she studied chemistry. These days she sells cosmetics

for a large chain. In her childhood, she stuttered. In 1991, after she

learned Hebrew, this flaw disappeared.

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