Shalom and ahoj

A Prague blog will eventually get started, here: smetanasglasses.wordpress.com

 

Not shalom, but lehitraot…

Three weeks ago, we headed to Jerusalem for our last short trip in Israel.

“So how many times will you have been to Jerusalem?” J’s colleague asked us wistfully, leaning back in his chair, as J. looked up the train schedule in the office. I told him it would be the third time. “Well, you will have seen much more of it than I have,” he replied.

He’s lived here for at least twenty years.

So now I don’t feel so badly about living here for two years, and failing to get to Eilat, Abu Ghosh, Nazareth, or Beer Sheva. Naively, perhaps, I figure I can always come back and visit them.

We ended up in Jerusalem around lunch time, took a taxi to Kikar Zion (or as close to Zion Square as it’s possible to get, at noon in commercial West Jerusalem), and headed to Solomon Street, a pedestrian lane lined with restaurants on one side, and jewelry and ceramics boutiques on the other. Yes, I’m aware that it’s wholly touristy, but (some days) I’m a tourist. And, as J. can attest, ravenously hungry tourists aren’t much fun until after they eat.

And eat we did: hot lunch, as in Europe, is an institution, here. One mixed Jerusalem grill later, we went back to Jaffa Road and had coffee at Café Hillel.

“One shekel for security?” the waitress asked, as she tallied our bill. Ok, we said uneasily. Would two be better? Maybe fifteen? Here, take thirty!

Jaffa Road leads back to Jaffa Gate. We went back to the Old City, and decided to check out our lodgings, nearby. I had visions of staying in the Old City, and absorbing a completely different night atmosphere, full of muezzin calls and choirs, and maybe a candlelight procession. To everyone we knew, I bragged that we would stay in the Old City.

The hostel I chose was reputed to have great views of the Old City, and it did. However, in every other aspect, it was a dump. Next time, it’s the King David or nothing.

“They could have at least changed the sheets since Herod slept here,” J. mumbled, as one of the cheerful owners showed us our tiny windowless room on the rooftop, past other rooms, where the doors were open, and seasoned, gray-haired hostel travelers were writing in their journals, underwear flapping on the line, outside. Downstairs, some guests were gathered on the couch, watching a soap opera in Arabic, as the owner of the hostel translated into English. “Goodbye!” they shouted to us. “See you later!”

To really appreciate a hostel, you must be an extrovert, evidently, and not one with pretensions toward a traveling lifestyle that involves little bottles of complimentary shampoo and lotion, either. We fled with the key.

“Maybe it will look better in the dark,” I suggested.

“When I stayed in the Renaissance Hotel, in West Jerusalem, for the conference, last year,” J. said sadly, “they left little chocolates on the pillow, every night.”

“But look at the view,” I told him, sweeping a hand across the horizon. We could see David’s Tower in the Citadel but, come to think of it, the skyline itself was rather hard to find below the hundreds of black-painted hot-water heaters, and satellite dishes.

“You can’t eat the view,” J. said, and we headed for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

This time, we absently followed some tourists into a side chapel, to the right of the main entrance to the church, and wound up on the rooftop, where the Ethiopian church holds sway. Women swathed in colorful fabrics and draped in white cloths gathered around a priest wearing a cylindrical black hat that bore a distinct resemblance to the rook piece in a chess set.

Downstairs, a hundred people were lined up before the wooden inner chapel, and slowly processing in—but not out.

We went on to the Via Dolorosa; to properly follow it, and observe the stations of the cross, you have to start in the Muslim Quarter and head west to the Christian Quarter, as the path ends inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Across from the Second Station, the Chapels of the Condemnation and Flagellation, there’s a blue ramp leading up to a school. Inside the school courtyard, you can see (through a wire fence) the Dome of the Rock.

At the steps leading down into the courtyard for the Second Station chapels, a guide stopped us and offered his services for ten shekels.

“No, thanks,” J. said.

“I will tell you all the secrets of the place,” the guide, a man with dress pants and a short-sleeve shirt, said. He spread out his hands in welcome. “Only ten shekels.”

“I have a guidebook,” I said, and walked down to the chapels.

“I can tell you all about the games the soldiers played,” he persisted with a smile.

“Do you have ten shekels?” J. asked me.

“No, I have a guidebook,” I said, waving it around for emphasis. That ended our good-cop, bad-cop routine.

Both chapels are small, dim, and silent.

Outside, on the Via Dolorosa, the shopkeepers (all men; the women were nowhere to be seen) practically tugged on J’s sleeves to get him to come inside. In one of the covered market streets, little boys no more than six years old spotted us and instantly started shrilling in English, “Five shekel, mister! Hello! Buy!”

If you’ve grown up with the image of Christ as blue-eyed and golden-haired, walking around the Old City is bound to shatter it.

Following the Via Dolorosa is mystifying. Since the Herodian level of the city actually lies far underground (as we found out, that night, on a tunnel tour of the Western Wall), the Via Dolorosa itself must, as well. Yet pilgrimage tours process down the street, with pilgrims praying aloud, fanning themselves in the heat, and stumbling on the slippery rock streets.

Off the Via Dolorosa, we stopped in St. Anne’s Church and the excavated Bethesda pools, where Christ healed the sick. The church was converted into a school for the study of the Koran, at some point, so it is unadorned outside, with Islamic architectural additions and stark, inside.

Eventually, we made our way back to the Jewish Quarter and walked down to the police station across from the Western Wall, where we had to pick up tickets for the tunnel tour. Comfortably seated in a shaded plastic chair in front of the police station, facing the ticket counter, was an older man in white shorts, sneakers, white polo shirt and a baseball cap. He looked like he was waiting for someone to bring him a martini.

“Are you here for the tour?” he asked me. “The sign says he’ll be back in five minutes, but if those are Israeli five minutes, we’re in for it.” The man had a wry smile. “Where are you from?”

“I’m from the U.S.,” I told him.

“Abe Moskowitz,” the man said, with a marvelous grin. “Pleased to meet you. How long have you been in Israel?”

“Two years,” I said. “And you?”

Mr. Moskowitz one-upped me. “This is our eighteenth time here. We come every year. What are you doing here?”

I explained the saga. Mr. Moskowitz looked duly impressed.

“So you’re from New York?” he asked, and continued, before I could correct him. “Do you know the difference between an Italian actuary and a Jewish actuary in New York?” I shook my head. Mr. Moskowitz gleefully went on: “The Jewish actuary can tell you exactly who died, and where, and how, last year; and the Italian actuary can tell you who will die, and where, and how, in the coming year.” He slapped his leg and I laughed, along with the rest of the English-speakers in line.

The ticket man returned, and the few of us in line paid for our tickets.

“See you on the tour!” Mr. Moskowitz said.

Even though the Jewish Quarter is largely populated by Americans who made aliyah, Mr. Moskowitz was the first and only American ever to strike up a conversation with us, in the Jewish Quarter. In Jerusalem, for residents, religion trumps everything else.

We returned to the Western Wall plaza at six-thirty, and joined the group standing near the entrance to the passageways. A girl with blond hair pulled back in a barrette and wearing a plain, longsleeve blue shirt and long black skirt rushed in ahead of us to stand behind a waist-high model of the landscape of the Old City. She waited while everyone bunched in around the model, under the close, cave-like rock ceilings, which dripped, in places. When everyone had grown quiet, the girl began to describe the history of the Old City, focusing on the events surrounding the Temple. The model was an effective demonstration of how many times the Temple landscape was cleared: the tour guide dug around beneath the model to find the scale-sized copy of the Second Temple, hoisted it up to the table model, and efficiently knocked it into place.

The tour winds through tunnels created during excavation of the ground near the Western Wall plaza; massive, five-hundred-ton Herodian stones are stacked along the length of the Wall. Visitors see only the sixty meters of the wall above ground, but the length of the real foundations of the wall, underground, are staggering. The passageways follow the length of the wall closely; there’s barely room enough for one person, in some points. People passing along the wall, here, sense that they’re in a sacred space, as every crevice is tucked with notes. One point in the wall faces the point where the Holy of Holies (the foundation rock of the Temple) is thought to be concealed, and it serves as the only place to stop and pray, along the wall.

Here’s a sample of who was on the six-thirty tour in English: Mr. and Mrs. Moskowitz, Catholic me and my atheist husband, a trio of curly-haired Canadian sisters in their sixties (one of whom balked at the plexiglass walkways and gripped the walls on either side, saying, “Oooooh, these things make me nervous”); and a girl wearing a clingy, longsleeve white shirt with the Zara logo spelled out in gold-sequinned script, long white skirt, a white headscarf with gold threads, a white purse, and matching white-and-gold slippers. I was often behind her, on the tunnel pathways, and was mesmerized as she walked. She was clearly Jewish, but she clashed wildly with the usual dress of the Old City, as a tourist: she was covered according to the Orthodox rules, but every inch was carefully styled. Her English was Eastern-European or Russian –accented; she didn’t say much, but gazed at the wall, and stopped to pray, often. She seemed very serious, until the end of the tour, when our tour guide earnestly suggested that the Temple would only be rebuilt when Jewish people of all nations displayed more love for each other. The girl in white then said dryly, “Group hug!” and laughed.

After the tour, we waited for the Moskowitzes, but they had stayed behind; we climbed back to Jaffa Gate and steeled ourselves for the hostel.

J was consoled about the lack of amenities in our room when he discovered the six-hundred-channel satellite offerings, including Al-Jazeera, a handful of stations in English, two-hundred-and-fifty channels in Arabic, and two hundred and forty-nine channels in Italian.

There was no telling what the Herodian-era dust under the bed was capable of; we tested the bed gingerly and spread out a giant swath of a quilt remainder I had stashed in my backpack. This was enough for J, but I wrapped myself in a sarong and tried to sleep like a mummy.

Guess what? Mummies don’t sleep. They lie awake until two-thirty in the morning, convinced that bugs of all centuries are biting them. In any case, this was my experience, minus the dying part. I finally fell asleep, but not after hearing tiny mosquito squeals in my ears, for hours.

At seven-thirty, I opened one eye and shrieked, “It’s light! Let’s go!”

J. was not amused.

We rapidly decamped from the hostel and stumbled out into the traffic zooming around Jaffa Gate, into a café, and had breakfast.

We climbed up to the top of Jaffa Gate, and bought tickets for the ramparts. This is an underrated way to see the Old City; or, at least, part of it, anyway. When my family roamed around Europe about fifteen years ago, this was the first thing we did, in nearly any city that had ramparts remaining.

The ramparts walk from Jaffa Gate passes along the Christian Quarter, where children at the Greek Patriarchate elementary school looked up from the basketball-court-playground and yelled to us, in English, “Wake up, New Mexico!”

I figured they probably knew every state’s motto better than I did, but we didn’t stop to check.

The Christian Quarter turns into the Muslim Quarter, and the view away from the Old City, into East Jerusalem, at this point, became more interesting: all the women in view were covered from head to toe, but sparkled and fluttered. Inside the Old City walls, we could see down into a courtyard bazaar, where women were snatching undergarments and robes in hot pinks, purples, turquoise blues off the racks. This was where one exit from the ramparts-walk was supposed to be, but, instead, we were stuck above the bazaar, since the exit gate was rusted away. Ribars for reconstruction sat on the stones above the precarious narrow stairs leading down into the Muslim Quarter. We had to turn around and retrace our steps for half an hour…without water.

This sort of walk really tests one’s character. And one’s marriage.

After banning the word “ramparts” from the family lexicon, we headed for West Jerusalem, and lunch at another place on Solomon Street (Luigi’s, with its nearly infinite permutations of sauce and pasta combinations). It occurs to me that perhaps Solomon Street’s restaurants have taken on mythic proportions of taste, in part because we collapsed at their tables after long, hot, dusty treks…but I still maintain that Luigi’s Italian food would hold its own, anywhere.

We wandered around Ben Yehuda for a while, stopping in the ubiquitous J-Crew-wannabe shop, “Golf,” where a woman emerged from a dressing room and promptly asked me (first in Hebrew and then in French, when I offered languages I actually speak), “Do I look fat in this?”

I’m convinced that it’s because of the divine presence in Jerusalem alone that I had the presence of mind to respond only, “Do you like it?” Too bad I didn’t know the French for what I would have really said, if a friend had asked me this: “Honey, that skirt would make Kate Moss look like Pavarotti.”

For some reason, we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave West Jerusalem; we went to the 70s Bar, with its funkified décor, and sat down for iced coffee. A couple in their twenties, a few tables away, sat with legs and arms entwined and came up for air only when the waitress (a tall teenage girl with long, straight brown hair; a serious expression; and wiry arms) came over to tell them that one menu item they’d asked about would cost three shekels. The couple wanted to know if they could pay cash for lunch. The waitress turned away and went back to the kitchen. Then she returned and told them they could. They then ordered something complicated and sat back to make out some more. The waitress clenched her fists at her sides and glared at them. She spun around and steamed back to the kitchen, where we heard something crash in fury.

A minute later, the same waitress appeared at our table and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Can I help you?” she asked sweetly.

“Two iced coffees, please,” I said.

“That’s it?” she blinked. “Nothing else?” We shook our heads. She beamed with relief.

The iced coffees that arrived at our table were far more decorated than any others we’ve had in Israel, with chocolate syrup drizzled liberally around the inside. As we were finishing them, about twenty minutes later, the waitress returned with the make-out couple’s order and practically slung it at them, from across the room. Some salad bumped off the plate and fell on the table, which caused the couple to look up and yelp in surprise. The waitress dusted off her hands and sauntered away.

Some days, you’re the windshield; some days, you’re the bug.

We left her a big sympathy tip.

And then it was back to Rehovot. Most of the next two weeks or so passed in a blur of packing and doing “last things”, and then trying not to think about how they would be the last things: the last falafel at Falafel Yerushalemi, the last view of the sunset from the top of A.G. Gordon Street; the last iced coffee with K and Son at Café Mada; a last visit from Ben H. (I promise I’ll come back to visit Abu Ghosh!).

Ironically, as we were preparing to leave, the brother of a friend arrived at the Weizmann to start a summer program and a Master’s Degree. Taking him around town was like seeing things, from the perspective of two years ago, when everything was foreign, dusty, noisy, and complicated.

Pale Ivan trailed along, as we hit the Atrakcia store, the shouk, and the Karl Berg market, where he seized a bottle of brown soda with Cyrillic writing on it and exclaimed happily, “We have this in Russia!” J. and I smiled benevolently.

“How old is he?!” I asked J.

“Twenty-two, I think,” J. replied, watching Ivan, and then revised his guess. “Twenty?”

Ivan looked so baby-faced and wide-eyed that it was hard not to feel parental.

“Oh, jeans! I will try them on, ok?” Ivan looked at J. hopefully, in the Energia clothing store.

“No, you really don’t need them; it’s the middle of summer,” J. replied, with his arms crossed. “Did you say you needed pens?” Ivan looked crestfallen.

“Would you two excuse me?” I went outside and sat down. It felt like we’d fast-forwarded to a son’s orientation week at college, twenty years from now, and we would soon be heading to the local equivalent of Target, to equip his dorm room. Where was my martini?

We invited Ivan to dinner, along with Czech friends who, unlike J., were willing to speak Russian. I wondered briefly if pasta salad would strike someone from St. Petersburg as a completely weird dinner.

“I came here a few years ago,” Ivan told me, at dinner, and then said something I couldn’t understand.
“Sorry?” I asked, and handed him a plate with cheesecake. (The last cake from Eyal’s cake shop!)

“Taglit,” Ivan said. “I came here with the Taglit Birthright program.” This is the program that allows Jewish teens from anywhere to travel to Israel for free, once they’re eighteen, and participate in a program of Jewish heritage.

“Oh, that’s a terrific program,” I replied, but I was awfully confused. I thought, first, “Taglit? But only Americans go on Taglit.” (Wrong.) My second thought was, “I didn’t realize Ivan were Jewish; I thought most Russians weren’t Jewish…” (Wrong.) My third thought was “Wow, two years here were not enough…” (Right.) # # #

Leaving Israel

By the shores of the El Al counter, I sat down and wept.

No, really. I did. It wasn’t pretty.

We had twenty kilos of excess baggage…not all of it, emotional, as I kept emphasizing. When J. leaned the heaviest bag on the scale, it only weighed sixteen kilos, and the counter agent accepted it. Oh, happy day!

Not so fast. When we added my bags to the scale, it tilted. “Now you have too much,” the counter agent said. She looked like Heidi. “It’s one hundred and eighty dollars to send it, extra.” J. and I reeled back in shock. He rebounded quickly. I didn’t.

“In two years, you don’t expect me to contribute to the economy and acquire THINGS?!” I sputtered, and burst into tears. (My conscience replied, “Look, you didn’t exactly contribute to the economy in the sense that Warren Buffet contributed to the Israeli economy; you just spent a lot at The Third Eye boutique. Now buck up.”)

My conscience lost to a buzz of emotions. Next was: “Everything I own in the world is right here! You expect me to either leave it or pay two hundred dollars to get it to Prague?!” (My conscience persisted, “Everything you own is here and on a ship from Haifa, and in Colorado. Pilot to tailgunner! Get a grip!”)

J looked at me like I was sprouting horns. His face was the only shocked male face in the row of perky, young counter agents (girls) which stared back at me, not a sympathetic one among them. I could hear J thinking, “Houston, we have a problem.” Or whatever the Czech equivalent would be.
In retrospect, I realize that it’s alarming to see your wife lose it in the El Al terminal, in front of hundreds of tourists. In my defense, I wish to note that this was the only time this happened.
However, I was not done yet. From economic to emotional musings, I turned to religious hypotheses: “If I were coming back to make aliyah, would I have to pay?” I hazarded, before J steered me quickly away from the counter. “You can mail it by post,” Heidi called.

Saved by the milkmaid? Don’t do me any favors.

I sensed that, at any moment, a neon sign would drop down over our counter, announcing the 100,000th Ugly American to pass through, that year. We have a winner!

Heidi came out from behind the counter and approached me as one would a schnauzer with an attitude problem.
“All you need to do is remove ten pounds,” she suggested.

“Let’s start with my hips,” I thought, and sighed.

Thirty minutes later, we had tweaked the bags to the point where the El Al scale gave in, and J. had shipped the last overweight bag by post. We sat in the departure lounge, near the rain-circle, and drank coffee.

“Well, that was educational,” J. said, out loud.

Indeed.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #873

"ישׁ לכּם אספּירין?"

"Yesh la-khem as-pee-REEN?"

"Do you have aspirin?"

Like ice dancing and bonsai gardening, packing is best left to the professionals. 

I packed (with a lot of parental help) to move to and from college four times, to and from grad school four times, and to and from my teaching job twice.

I am a professional.

I am also the daughter of an engineer. And I come from a long line of independent-minded women.
For the uninitiated, this is a potent combination that ultimately produces a feminist with quiltmaking scraps tied around her head, ripping packing tape with her teeth and issuing threats to anyone who packs or tapes or, indeed, moves in a non-approved fashion. I scared myself.
Scientists are not used to such raw unravelling; they prefer to do things in their own cohesive, perfection-seeking ways. But two perfectionists can bring any process to a halt.

J packed everything, a week ago, just "to see" what we had to work with and whether we would need more boxes. The shipping guy, Georges, in a moment of prescience, left us three new boxes after we signed the contract, despite J's protests that we wouldn't need them.
I repacked, the day before Georges arrived, according to My Way, which, it turns out, is actually My Dad's Way, and woe to him who questions it. 

"I'm not being arrogant," I told J. "This is just what works. How many boxes have you packed, in your life?"

His look told me to forget the tape and remember a little humility.

This time, we went out for falafel and hummus (shakshouka). 

Forget about two years in the Middle East, as a test; any marriage that can survive the upheaval of packing is on firm ground.

Any husband that can survive feminism and independence is rare. 

 

Say It in Hebrew! #1129

“הלב”

“Ha-LEYV.”

“The heart.”

In the last two weeks in Rehovot, I found a great hidden cafe, Cafe shel Sarit, shaded with bougainvilla vines; a French bakery I’ve never been to, right around the corner from the Russian market where I go all the time; and ads for yoga classes near where we live.

Would I like another month, here, to sample the new finds and to visit places I haven’t been to, yet (like Latrun and Abu Ghosh)? Well, yes. And no. Some days, more yes than no.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. I had planned to remain wholly unattached to Rehovot.

But I really like having a handful of great cafes nearby, where the waitresses know me and J., and know exactly what we’ll have. I like taking the train to Tel Aviv, but not living smack-dab in it. I like the Institute campus, and its four million acres of lawn. I like subsidized lunch (and the view) from New Charlie’s. I like 88 FM. I like wandering around the shouk. I like the clatter of palm tree leaves, all over town. I like Eyal’s pastry shop. I really like the Book Club.

Argh! I’m a local! How did that happen?

Well, I’m not that local, I suppose. I don’t really speak the language, and there are large sections of town that I’ve never seen; namely, the neighborhood east of the Karl Berg Russian market, where I wandered around on Tuesday night, trying desperately to find the apartment where the Book Club meeting was to take place. The Institute-issued map (like everything else they issue) was well-intentioned but in bad need of an update: streets that looked normal on the map were closed off or nonexistent.

Eventually, I found the address and rode up to the apartment with a tired businessman who leaned against the wall of the elevator and practically fell out when it arrived at his floor.

Nearly all of the Book Club’s regular members were there, and I realized how much I’ll miss the group. Before Christmas, I’d dropped off some books at a member’s apartment and talked with her, for a while. I think I must have complained that the social portion of the club, in which people graze on snacks and catch up with each other, was too short.

“Well, I didn’t join the Book Club to socialize,” she said, perched on an armchair. “I only joined it for the books. I don’t need it for the friends.”

I stared at her, stung. “Well, I DO!” I thought.

The Book Club is made up of native English speakers, most of whom made aliyah from the U.S. or Canada; there are also two South African members.

There’s Ramona, the no-nonsense organizer, with a background in editing engineering journals and an M.A. in French literature, who commutes to Tel Aviv to take courses from the Institut Francais.

There’s Amira, Tuesday night’s hostess, who dresses classically, and who was not afraid to tell the club that she liked The Da Vinci Code.

There’s Jody, the former professor of biology, who writes her reviews on index cards and who invited us over for coffee, when she and her husband were planning a trip Prague, last fall.

There’s Norma, the only Orthodox member in the Club, who winters in Florida and has the best tan of us all.

There’s Sid, the former chemistry professor, who writes his reviews in fine, tiny script, in a spiral notebook.

There’s Lily, with whom I went to the Book Festival in Jerusalem, last year, and who invited me over for coffee and to view her family’s quilts; if we had been in school together, I’m convinced we would have been best friends.

There’s Rose, from South Africa, who has a beautiful, lilting accent, and wears delicate clothing with small embroidered flowers.

There’s Sam, also from South Africa, the most laconic member of all, who speaks in a gentle, measured way, and who never takes more than one book–if that. If Moses wore Birkenstocks, he’d be the very image of him. The last meeting was at his house, and when someone brought out a book titled The River of Angry Dogs, Sam’s giant dog rose his head from under the coffee table and gave a soulful bark.

There’s redheaded Mindy, outspoken and with precise, quick reviews; she mothers the group in an efficient way.

There’s Mariah, who lived on a kibbutz and whose cousin in Canada is an Honest-to-God Famous Author who dedicated a book to her, which she brought to the club and over which we all swooned; her reviews would be at home in any graduate-level literature class, but they are often so thorough that they make the rest of the club squirm for a commercial break.

I love them. I hope they’ll forgive me when I write a book about them.

At this last meeting on Tuesday night, I gave my ad-lib reviews (writing them out makes me feel too much like I’m in grad school, again) and finished, but forgot to say thanks for the memories and good times, even though it was foremost in my thoughts. After everyone else had finished giving their reviews, Ramona produced a book on Israel that the club had bought for me, with their best wishes and a list of everyone’s addresses. “Don’t forget us,” the card urged.

It’s rather bad form to cry on a book, but I’m sure they understood.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #811

"לאן"

"Le-AN."

"To go."

A few photos from this morning, before it became too hot to anything outside but sit and drink limonana or iced coffee, in the shade:

Below, the dodgy side of the shouk. (The covered market is to the left, outside of the picture.) The shop with the plastic buckets hanging outside is run by a man who looks like Falstaff's grumpy, more-slovenly brother. The only reason he gets any business is because he sells these things far more cheaply than hardware stores…

A mosaic on an apartment building near Steimatzky's. Left side: happy Rehovot family; right side: The Last Supper??

The little art cinema, down the pedestrian street from where the mosaic is; I've never before realized it, but the sign proclaims it as the Colonia Cinema…

Lantern outside the Alkali Cafe…

A street near where we live…

View of our front yard…

 

Say It in Hebrew! #823

".גן"

"Garden."

In the early 1900s, Rehovot's vineyards were uprooted and converted to citrus production; the ruins of the wine market on Hanasi Harishon is probably a remnant of early vinoculture. There's a garden above it, past the far walls, and the wine market is surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings, so the ruins of the market echo with all sorts of domestic life: someone taking piano lessons, someone else (much more advanced) practicing on a flute, people washing dishes and singing, a dog barking…

The first picture shows the small garden outside the walls of the wine market; this garden is ringed with orange trees; the second picture shows the vats, inside, and the vast courtyard, which is all that remains of what must have been a vibrant corner of Rehovot, at one point.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #736

נל ך למשׁחק כּדןר גל."

"Neh-LEKH luh-mees-KHAK ka-doo-REH-gel."

"Let's go to the soccer game."

Last night, we gave up on packing and went to the River Cafe for sushi. It was only seven o'clock, and the World Cup game wasn't scheduled to start until later in the evening, but four Japanese chefs, in black caps, t-shirts and black-and-white striped aprons, had been recruited to set up the restaurant's projection screen on the patio. The screen itself, which was anchored by a box labelled "White Ginger", wasn't being very cooperative. One of the chefs kept trying to pull the screen up from its cylinder and attach it to the top of the frame, but this, of course, is impossible, and the screen just kept zinging back down. 

Next door, the Burger Bar restaurant was an illustration of well-organized and well-planned smoothness. A giant projection screen hung from the windows over the restaurant, above the patio, and no one buzzed nervously around the cable box, which sat on a tall stand. Waiters glided around the tables. The restaurant was packed.

Meanwhile, the River Cafe was empty, except for us, and the hostess was wrestling with the cable box, while someone on the other end of her cell phone yelled instructions. A passel of waitresses appeared and clustered around the hostess. Once the dust cleared, the cable box was hooked up and the projection screen, open. The waitresses looked extremely pleased with their work, and the chefs backed away in admiration.

Only then were we able to order.

We've vowed to go back on Monday, for the U.S.-Czech Republic match, which is bound to end badly, for at least one of us. But fantastic tempura is consolation enough, for me.

This packing business is exhausting. And if you've never packed with someone else, before, let alone packed an apartment, it can prove to be a baffling experience. My packing philosophy is, much to my father's chagrin, "We can always get more boxes," while J's seems to be, "The fewer boxes, the worthier the challenge." Suddenly, Our Stuff becomes My Stuff and Your Stuff.

Your Stuff inevitably takes up more space, and is of inestimable sentimental value; thus, suggesting that Your Stuff could be significantly reduced, with a little work, is never a good idea…that shelf full of chocolate Kinder-Egg toys notwithstanding. 
The real test of the marriage will be if we can consolidate and pack Our Stuff with minimum emotional and physical injury.

And without spending a fortune on sushi as therapy.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #1243

"התּבה."

"Ha-teh-VAH."

"The box."

Here's what our living room looks like, currently.

It's enough to make Martha Stewart commit seppuku with a macrame needle.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #5

?םליחה

"Slee-KHAH?"

"Excuse me?"

Strange Conversations I've Had in the Past Week

#1

El Al Agent: Ken, hello?

Me: Shalom, can you tell me about early check-in, please? We don't hold Israeli passports. I'm American and my husband is Czech. Can we still participate?

El Al: Hmm, rak shnia.

[Folk music plays mercilessly, while I'm on hold.]

El Al: Are you a terrorist?

Me: Beg pardon?

El Al: Are you a tourist?

Me, recovering: No, we live here. In Rehovot. Ok, not permanently. My husband has a student visa and mine is an accompanying visa.

El Al: Rak shnia.

[Five minutes of my life pass, which I will never get back.]

El Al: Aalo. Ok, the American passport is fine. Thank you.

Me: One Czech passport and one American passport.

El Al: Rak shnia. [Pause.] Ok, you can come with the American passport.

Me: ONE American passport. Ve gam ONE Czech passport. We are married. Lots of bags. Can we check in early, please?

El Al: Czech?

Me: Check-in! Czech-in!?
El Al: Rak shnia.

Me, hanging up: No, YOU rak shnia!

This, plus #5, is possibly the most useful phrase of all, here.

#2

Me: Hello?

Shipping Guy: Shalom, Erin?

Me: Who is this? If you're Ha'aretz, I don't want to subscribe. But you need my services as a copyeditor.

Shipping Guy: This is Whozit from Whatzit Shipping Company.

Me: Oh? Oh, right, the estimate.
Shipping Guy: Port-to-port, or door-to-door?

Me: There's no port in Prague!

Shipping Guy: [stunned silence]

Me: Oh, wait… Inland port. Never mind.

Shipping Guy: [briskly] Door to door?

Me: Yes, but we only have about fifteen medium-sized boxes. No furniture. Nothing else. Just boxes.

Shipping Guy: [grandly] I will come give you an estimate.

Me: For fifteen boxes?

Shipping Guy: How about Sunday morning?

Me: How do you like your coffee?

 

Say It in Hebrew! #117

?לאן אנחנו הולכּיס

"Luh-AN a-NAKH-noo hol-KHEEM?"

"Where are we going?"

Things I Won't Miss

Our kitchen, designed by misogynistic dwarves

Summer burning of toxic-smelling stuff in fields, somewhere nearby, which requires sleeping with the AC on, or with tea bags up one's nose

Our bed, which could easily be carved up and sold to desperate fourth-graders for California-mission model construction

Paying the equivalent of $1 to do a load of laundry

Schlepping to the Housing Office to buy laundry tokens

The opening hours of the Housing Office

The Housing Office

The Visiting Scientists Liason's Office

Being regarded as non-existent, in the eyes of the Institute

Ants

Walking five blocks to buy milk

Roaring fighter jets and regional politics

Clalit health clinic / HMO
April through mid-November

Things I'll Miss

Friends

The shouk

The Book Club

Free utilities

The beach

Beach cafes

Tel Aviv-Yafo (and Sheinkin Street, Ibn Gvirol, and Gan Ha'ir–and the latter's Snooty But Beautiful shops)

Jerusalem

Rehovot's little cinema

Alkali and Netanela cafes

mid-November through March

 

Say It in Hebrew! #370

"יציאה"

"Yuh-tsee-AH."

"Exit."

Sometimes, the only way to get from Point A to Point B is by taking an avocado.

After I overslept on Wednesday and missed the train to Ben-Gurion–there was one later, but I was also feeling adventurous–I went to where all the sherut congregate on Herzl Street.

"Le ne'mal teufa?" I asked into a dim sherut. "Le Ben-Gurion?"

"Tel Aviv first, then Ben-Gurion," the driver said, so I got in.

Ten shekels, one sweaty guy's elbow in my face, and an hour later, the sherut driver dropped me off at the Central Avocado Station in Tel Aviv, with a friendly smile. He yelled out the window to his buddies, "Where's the bus to Ben-Gurion?"

"Inside," they yelled back. "Number something-something-something."

Thanks a lot, I thought. This was not really how I had planned things; rather, I had planned in order to avoid taking an avocado. Nevertheless, the new Central Avocado Station in Tel Aviv is an interesting place to spend about half an hour. It's really a mall in disguise, but the shops are small, apparently in case an inspector comes along and says, "No, we can't have a mall in a bus station; now, move on," and the shop has to fold up in twenty minutes. Bakery and fruit-juice kiosks abound, as well as delightfully tacky stores that would be at home in any U.S. strip mall. I'm sure there's treasure in there, too, but I didn't hang around long enough to find out where.

I got on the avocado to Ben-Gurion via Lod, and then ran up to the driver, when the bus spun past the airport turnoff, on the roundabout.

"I don't understand," I told him in Hebrew. "I need to go to the airport."

"Avocado Number 5!" he yelled back at me, and then motioned for me to go sit down.

Oh. Fine. So that's what "via" means.

The bus stopped at the terminal, and I went down to the arrivals hall, only to discover that J's plane wasn't due for another two hours, which contradicted what I'd read on the flight tracker.

Don't embarrass me again, flight tracker!

The arrivals hall of any major airport is a haphazard study in its country's society. On Wednesday, the B-G arrivals hall featured Israeli Filmmaking, complete with antsy director, who furiously motioned actual arriving travellers away from the entryways and away from the actor-travellers, who were charging the real travellers with their luggage carts.

J finally showed up, and we headed for an exit. "When does the next train leave?" he asked. No! No more public transport!

I pretended not to hear, and ran off with his luggage cart, in the direction of the taxi stand.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #41

“אני ממהרת”
“Ani muh-mah-HEH-ret.”
“I’m in a hurry.”

To Do in the Next 22 Days:

1. Thursday-morning market, Be’er Sheva.
2. Abu Ghosh.
3. Israel Museum (and the Murano glass exhibit).
4. Old Tel Aviv Port (near Reading) restaurant row, one more time!
5. Giraffe Noodle Bar, one more time!
6. Nazareth.
7. Jerusalem, one more time!
8. Matzkeret Batya, a town built by Baron de Rothschild in honor of his mother.
…

 

Say It in Hebrew! #1201

“Kham me-OD.”
“Very hot.”

The Dead Sea, Part 2

After Charlie and the Spanish-speakers went off to Masada, I stared into my locker at the Spa and tried to formulate an approach.

What first? Sea or mud? I had never considered this kind of dilemma before.

I changed, crammed everything into the locker, and flip-flopped out from the women’s side of the lockers. The first floor of the spa is one giant, brown-tiled room, partitioned off into women’s and men’s locker sections, with separate baths behind the lockers, and one mixed bath at the end of both sections. The other half of the first floor was spread with lounge chairs, and the wall of windows looked out over the outdoor pool, with a wider view of the Dead Sea, facing the northeast. The din from the first floor was incredible: there was hardly any splashing from the baths, but the pensioners who were forcibly occupying the lounge section–that is, those who weren’t splayed out, snoring–were chattering in high-pitched voices to each other.

There appeared to be no one under the age of seventy in the lounge section. But, darn, they looked good.

I headed around the pool, past a grassy area below the pool with palm trees (where I staked out a spot for later), past the shaded areas near the giant mud box and a six-sided turning mirror right next to it, past the mineral-water showers next to the mud station, to the tractor stop.

Tractor stop, you say?

The level of the Dead Sea receded at a shocking rate during the twentieth century, when the flow from the Jordan River ceased, in the 1960s, leaving a good kilometer between the Ein Gedi Spa and the actual waterline of the Sea. (Originally, the Spa was built on the shore, but the shore is much farther out, now.) So that tourists or pensioners from Be’er Sheva don’t have to do the embarrassing “Ooh! Owee! Ouch! Hot!” walk down to the beach, the Spa offers a tractor-pulled cart with benches.

My theory is that the massage industry at the Spa is generated in large part by the spine-crushing effect of being jerked down the road by a sputtering tractor engine.

To get into the Sea, you have to walk down a gangplank, into the water. Fellow tourists may point and say something in Russian to you, which turns out to be “Step!”, too late, at the bottom. Thanks, anyway.

The Sea feels like silky water; when I lifted my hand out of the water, it didn’t feel wet, or wet as you normally think of it. When I rubbed my fingers together, it was as though there was hardly any water on them at all. The Sea is an opaque teal color, and there’s absolutely nothing growing or living in it; its salinity is about 300 parts per thousand, which is about nine times as much as the salt concentration of ocean water.

I walked out past the raft, which was tethered to the gangplank with a long cord. Most of the pensioners went hand-over-hand to the raft and clung to it, even though the water there was waist-deep. I kept walking out, and then hopped a bit, to see how buoyant I was.

Very. I popped up onto the water and sat there; I felt like I was on top of the water, and constantly rolling off it. Your center of gravity is much higher, because of the buoyancy caused by the water’s high density.

The few people who were scattered out beyond the raft, like me, were all wearing silly grins.

As I lay back and looked at the reddish mountains on the western side of the Sea, right behind Ein Gedi and the road, I was so relaxed that all I could think was, “Gee, it looks a lot like Arizona.”

On the eastern side of the Sea, the hills of Jordan loomed behind the dust, but that was all I could see.

I floated around for a while, and then headed back for the mud, gingerly sitting on the tractor for the jolting ride back. For about half an hour, I had lazed in the Dead Sea, but the reduced ultraviolet levels meant that I didn’t get (too) sunburned…

Next to the mud box were the same hard-core mud folk I had seen on my way down to the Sea; these people were draped in the patio chairs provided by the Spa, sitting in the sun and shade, baking. They were covered, every inch, in the dark slate-green goop, and no one sitting there spoke to each other, as though to move or speak would break the spell.

I would venture that, for most people over the age of four, the experience of digging into a giant wooden box of clay-like mud and gleefully slapping it on oneself, is not an everyday thing. All health benefits aside, there’s something exhilarating about slathering yourself in mud–for a moment, you’re a kid again.

The mud hardened and caked on about a minute after I covered myself in it. It was hot. And itchy. I was no competition for the mud folk, and I’m convinced that some of them snickered at me as I ran for the open showers, a few minutes after walking around like a giant ball of dried goo.

Very relaxing, though! And everyone standing at the open showers, tugging on the cords for fresh water, exclaimed in his or her language, “My skin feels GREAT!”

I ambled back to the building, and headed for the thermal mineral-water baths, which smelled slightly sulfurous and powerfully healthy, even though the water was an odd greenish-tan color. I’m not sure what explains the smell, since the sulfur content is pretty low; the mineral composition of the Dead Sea (which feeds the baths, I think) consists principally of magnesium chloride, potassium chloride and sodium chloride.

Whatever it was, it was stinky. I bobbed around in the warm bath for a while, on the women’s side, until two German-speaking women came in, stripped, and got in, next to me.

Americans don’t do nudity so well. Or maybe we don’t do clothing so well, when others are nude. Either way, I felt silly (but thin) and clambered out.

In fact, going to the Dead Sea is a marvelous way to improve your body image. After five hours of watching pensioners amble to and from the sea, the baths, lockers, showers, etc., I thought, “Good God, why don’t I have a bikini on, then?!” They looked like they had not only eaten Heidi Klum for lunch, but stolen and put on her swimsuit-issue outfit.

I decamped to the grass-and-palm-tree area with my books, lugged over a lounge chair (in a sarong, so bonus points for difficulty), and spent a blissful few hours under a palm tree, reading and napping. Napping is a difficult activity for paranoid tourists like me, who, even in a remote spot within a remote spot, feel like they must have all their stuff within sight and reach at all times. I draped my limbs over my gear and slept.

When I woke up and staggered to the “snake bar” an hour or two later with my gear, it was swarmed with people, including a small group of tourists from Japan who were clothed from head to toe. The Israeli contingent looked at them with interest and some degree of pity.

I took lunch back to my beach chair, read some more, watched a lot of nothing going on in the Sea itself, relaxed, and drove the man under the next tree generally crazy by munching on coated peanuts.

Did I mention it was hot? During the last hour before the appointed group-meeting time Back at the Bus, I began to wonder if things were really all that healthy. Something–the high atmospheric pressure at the Dead Sea?–was giving me a powerful headache, and I was running out of water. I sadly left my idyllic spot and went inside to change; true, it was cooler inside, but the “lounge area” was still filled with pensioners, all of whom were cackling like Macbeth’s witches about God knows what. They sat in little groups and tried to wage verbal war on the other groups; whatever it was, it was loud. Well, if they were waiting loudly for Godot, they were just going to have to shove over and make room for me. Their crankiness was infectious.

Charlie appeared at 4:30. I wanted to ask him if my pores looked smaller, but I thought he might take it the wrong way.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #1197

“Kham.”
“Hot.”

The Dead Sea, Part 1

I left the apartment at 5:45 am, yesterday morning, and by 11:30 am, I was bobbing in the Dead Sea at the Ein Gedi Spa.

“Don’t you want to go to Masada, too?” asked the tour-guide reservations guy, when I called mid-week to book a place on Thursday’s tour. “We stop at Ein Gedi on the way back, for a couple of hours.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he pressed. “Masada is a very important site!” (The fortress at Masada, high on a mountain, was the site of Jewish resistance to the Romans in 73 A.D.; the Zealot tribe committed suicide, rather than fall to the Romans. Every year, Israeli soldiers vow that Masada will not fall again.)

“Yes, I know, but I only want the spa–for the whole day,” I said peevishly, like some third-rate celebrity. I had a vision of one entire day filled with mineral water, salts, baths, fluffy towels, and palm trees, and no amount of history or religion was going to interfere with it.

Finally, the reservationist relented and grudgingly booked me as “SPA ONLY”. I worried that they would make me wear a nametag with “HEDONIST HEATHEN” on it.

At 6:45 am, I walked out of the Tel Aviv-Merkaz train station. To say that it took me almost two years to discover that “Merkaz,” “Arlozoroff,” and “Savidor” are synonyms referring to the Merkaz station, doesn’t bode well for any sort of future career as a tour guide… (In my defense, the last two are hardly ever used, although “Savidor” does pop up on destination boards in a maddening, mysterious way.)

It was cool and foggy, Thursday morning, and I didn’t mind waiting by the bus “terminal” (two designated parking spaces) for the bus to show up. After about ten minutes, a short woman with curly brown hair, who was wearing fascinating plaid golf pants, sidled up to me. I stepped away. She followed me. As I was about to glare at her, she said, “You are here for the tour?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Dead Sea tour?”

I nodded, and she beamed, relaxing and hoisting her bag up onto the trunk of a car parked nearby.

“Geveret, GEVERET!” the guard near the entrance to the bus parking lot shouted, like Jerry Lewis. “HEY, LADY!” The guard dashed over, and she yanked her bag off the car. The guard dusted the back of the car with his shirtsleeve. “It’s new,” he said in a hurt voice. The woman looked away airily.

A few minutes later, the tour guide showed up. Charlie, whose nametag listed Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Romanian, and Polish as his languages, was a tall man who looked like a little like Qaddafi, if Qaddafi had a pleasant smile and expressive eyebrows.

“Colorado means red,” he told me, after he found out where I was from. “In Israel, we have adom.”

“Oh, like Magen David Adom,” I said. (This is the name of the Israeli Red Cross / Red Star of David.)

I think he was searching for the word, “Duh”, in any language, but he continued.

“America is full of fascinating place names, like Philadelphia,” he said.

“The city of brotherly love,” I added, determined to get one right.

Charlie nodded, satisfied, and excused himself to make a bunch of phone calls, which produced a giant bus for the drive to the Dead Sea via Jerusalem.

A handful of people got on the bus in Tel Aviv, and, except for me and two German girls, they all spoke Spanish. So Charlie announced everything in English and Spanish, with some Hebrew thrown in, for good measure.

“Señoras y señores, hoy es Yom Yerushalayim, y tenemos mucha gente en los calles, oy!” Charlie recounted in two languages how difficult it would be to get around Jerusalem, since the city would be crowded with people and parades. He then discussed it in Hebrew with the driver…who also spoke French.

In Jerusalem, Charlie’s “jolly good morning” attitude cracked, a little. The tour was scheduled to pick up fifty guests from Jerusalem hotels, and the driver, Sammy, incurred Charlie’s wrath by continually choosing the wrong streets. It was difficult to tell exactly where we were in Jerusalem: girls wearing school tunics, jeans, and headscarves walked past the bus, up the hill; Orthodox couples pushing strollers walked down, a few minutes later. The old city has this kind of quiet coexistence, but I don’t know how far outside the old city walls it extends.

We left Jerusalem via a tunnel under Mt. Scopus, passing by the Ma’ale Adumim settlement; here’s a map. Charlie pointed out that the landscape on the western side of the tunnel is covered in evergreen forests, while the eastern side is arid, rocky desert.

“On your right, you will see a camel,” boomed Charlie, from the microphone. Sure enough, a camel whizzed by, and, a few meters later, what looked like yurts slid into view; these were the tents of Bedouin tribes, nestled in among the rock valleys, far from the road. Not all of the tents were round, and from a distance, they looked as though they were covered in big squares of chamois cloth. Occasionally, as we passed, wind would catch a tent flap and reveal brighter cloth, inside.

At some point, the road winds up just at the northern edge of the Dead Sea, and a road sign says, between the Hebrew and Arabic characters, “JERICHO” (to the left) and “DEAD SEA” (to the right). We went right; to the left, the skyline of Jericho, the oldest inhabited spot on earth, shimmered through the morning dust, eight to ten miles to the north.

On the way to the Dead Sea, horizontal lines of blue tile mark sea level, and then below sea level, on mountainsides abutting the road.

“Slow down! Slow down!” Charlie yelled to Sammy in Hebrew. “It’s here!”

“This is a bus, a bus, not a donkey cart!” I imagined Sammy replying, as he shouted back to Charlie, and didn’t slow down. “I’m on a public road, here; what am I supposed to do?”

“This is my job!” Charlie shot back, and slumped in his seat, with the hand holding the microphone dangling off the seat railing in front of him. The sound system emitted alarmed screeches. He picked it up, and glared at Sammy. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I was trying to show you a very important line, a water mark that shows how much the Dead Sea fell between 1913 and 1917.” Charlie sighed. “We will attempt it again on the return.”

Sadly, there was not enough Dramamine in the world to make me budge from the second row of seats. The road to the Dead Sea may go mainly down, but once you get to the shore of the sea, the trip south is surprisingly curvy.

Charlie recovered enough to announce our arrival at the Ahava factory. I pressed my nose to the glass suspiciously. This wasn’t in any description of the tour, on the website. I had a moment of flashback, to when my aunt and I walked into Hilo Hattie’s, with what seemed like hundreds of other Tourists, who had all arrived by bus.

I smelled a kickback.

Charlie shepherded us in, and turned the group over to an Ahava rep, who crammed us into a room at the back of the showroom, where she began to ask what language the group spoke.

“Español! ES-PAÑOL!” cheered a good chunk of the tour group. “La mayoria!” one member noted proudly.

“English,” replied two pale people feebly.

“Ok, English,” said the guide, and popped a video cassette into a vcr beneath a giant tv. I got up and left.

My problem with this aspect of the tour was not necessarily that it was an unnanounced stop, and obviously one motivated by the kickback, but that Charlie had, only moments before we arrived, just finished describing how companies like Ahava contribute to the erosion of the Dead Sea, by harvesting it for cosmetic products. To suddenly be wheedled into purchasing 160-shekel mud didn’t sit well, for anyone who has vaguely socially-conscious tendencies.

(And it’s cheaper at the duty-free place, at Ben-Gurion, anyway. So much for my liberal leanings.)

After waiting out the Ahava trip outside–the “factory tour” is a view of the production line’s boxing-and-shipping station–we lumbered off to Ein Gedi.

The bus slowed at the Ein Gedi public beach, surrounded by palm trees and a restaurant. “Ahhhh,” went the tour group.

“We are not stopping here,” Charlie intoned over the PA system, and Sammy hit the gas, evilly. “Awww!” went the group.

We went past Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. We were not stopping there, either, which dismayed my seatmate, a French-speaking woman from Algeria with red hair, clad in pink linen. She fingered a turquoise pendant on a red thread around her neck in a nervous way.

“But the man who sold me the tour told me we would go to Qumran,” she told Charlie in French.

I felt compelled to mention to her that the Dead Sea Scrolls were in Jerusalem, at the Israel Museum, at the Shrine of the Book. Actually, I think I said “temple du livre”, but I figured it was close. She rewarded me with a cold stare.

Finally, the Ein Gedi Spa rose up on the shore of the Dead Sea, and Charlie called to those of us who were getting off, “Get ready!”, as though Sammy were going to open the door, swing the bus by, and hurl us off.

He stopped, and three of us got off. We looked at each other sheepishly, for a second. Then Charlie got out and led us through the check-in counter, where we were rewarded with a locker key, but none of the cool and impossibly-fluffy teal-blue towels that everyone else at the Spa got. I blinked past the smell of sulfur at the check-in desk (but by the end of the day, didn’t notice it).

“Here are the lockers, baths, the mud is outside, and downstairs there is a snake bar,” Charlie rattled off.

Pardon?

“Snake bar!” He mimed eating.

Oh…

Never mind. I had come prepared, including basic spa essentials such as a towel, two kinds of nuts, a biography of Shakespeare, and Great Expectations.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #32

“A-NEE ha-ver-AH shel…”
“I am a friend of…”

Beginning sometime in February, K. and I started talking about how to find the other spouses of postdocs and visiting scientists, in order to establish some sense of community.

It’s strange to live somewhere where you have never met your neighbors. To me, it’s unnatural. Most of last year felt like a Samuel Beckett version of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”:

“Won’t you be mine? Won’t you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”

NO, came the resounding silence.

Is the desire to go knocking on nearby doors with coffee cake in hand solely an American trait?

Perhaps the need to meet neighbors is explained more by living patterns: people in apartment buildings are physically closer to their neighbors, to begin with, than are those in suburbia. In an apartment block, you hear your neighbors sing, argue, and do dishes–along with a host of other activities. When I lived in London, my host family’s house shared a wall with the man living next door–a very thin wall. I heard the man sneeze, clink silverware, and sigh, on the other side of my bedroom wall.

I most certainly did not want to meet him. In fact, I wanted him to leave me alone and to sigh more quietly, please. I would have preferred it greatly if I lived on a farm and he lived on the next farm, because then I wouldn’t have to hear him incessantly.

But there’s something about apartment living, Bauhaus-style, that made me want to force people out of their concrete stupor, here, on our block, and get to know each other. With people from all over the world, it had the potential to be a really vibrant community. I used the word “community” so often, this winter, that I should have been shipped off to a kibbutz.

I naively forgot that at least half of these people were working feverishly, every day, to come up with Results. Scientists seem to speak about Results in the same way people used to talk about opium in the nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t really with these people that K. and I were concerned; they were already taken care of by the Institute. It was the others–the ones whose visas are stamped “NO WORK PERMIT” and “ACCOMPANYING”, in a vaguely offensive way–with whom we wanted to meet, talk art, literature, and philosophy, and, occasionally, go shopping. (The revolution would come later.)

So after months of talking about it, and after gentle prodding from the Visiting Scientist liason, K. showed up at the apartment, last Wednesday morning, about half an hour before the meet-’n-greet affair was to begin.

She added a bag of pretzels and a package of cookies to the table, and plopped in a chair in a Cleopatra-esque way that expectant mothers seem to do well. I surveyed our living room, and tried to determine how kid-proof it was. With a bamboo stalk in a tiny glass, and my prized Riverside Shakespeare perilously close to a bowl of cookies, I determined that it wasn’t. And probably I wasn’t. I hoped anyone with kids would keep them on a short leash. Literally. But I was feeling a little bitter.

“You realize this could be you, me, and Liza sitting around, don’t you?” I asked K. Last year, Liza asked me to host the same kind of thing, and two other spouses of postdocs showed up…and then turned out to be postdocs, themselves. Cheaters.

K. sighed. “Everyone’s moving in June, anyway,” she said woefully.

“Sorry,” I said. “Have a cookie.”

Our buzzer rang, and K. paused with a cookie halfway in her mouth, her eyebrows raised. “Someone’s early,” she said, through crumbs.

“An American,” I guessed correctly.

First to arrive was a woman from Michigan (originally from South America), who was leaving next week to do volunteer work in Jerusalem, as a dentist. She had a bright smile and black hair that swung just beneath her ears. When she offered to drive K. to the hospital, K’s eyes welled up. When she realized that she would be in Jerusalem and couldn’t do it, K’s eyes welled up for a second time.

Neighbors from across the street arrived, next, before we could recover from the shock of anyone actually turning up, at all: a woman from Hungary, with a long braid and her quiet, three-year-old son, who was at wide-eyed level with the fruit and cookies arrayed on the kitchen table. As his mother and I talked, he sat on the edge of the sofa and calmly emptied a bowl of dried pineapple slices, politely piling them on a napkin on his knees. His mother, after restoring the pineapple to the bowl, steered her son over to the bookshelves, where he appraised our collection of Kinder-Egg toys with a practiced eye, and glanced up with a shy smile after I took down three for him to play with.

A woman from Germany arrived with a year-old baby; a woman from New York arrived and took to the babies instantly, as a practiced grandmother; two women from South Korea arrived, bearing homemade cookies and cherries, and a tiny, chirpy toddler–a girl who followed the Hungarian boy around in an adoring way, slapping the floor in glee when he did something particularly enchanting. Mae, visiting with her husband from Ann Arbor, arrived and we started talking about A.B. Yehoshua and his How-Not-to-Give-a-Thank-You-Speech controversy.

Liza stepped inside the apartment, registered shock at how many people were there, and instantly left, saying, “I’ll go get the nametags.” (She came back, a few minutes later, but I was darned if anyone was going to wear nametags. Too AA.)

K. and I were shocked. We really hadn’t expected so many people to show up. “Where have you all BEEN?” I wanted to shout. But it’s best not to terrify your guests in this fashion, so I just poured them more lemonade.

The apartment buzzed with voices and kids chirping for two hours; then, people exchanged email addresses and phone numbers with all the excitement of a highschool-yearbook-signing session.

And that’s how we kicked Beckett out of the neighborhood, for a day.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #80

“Neh-heh-NAY-tee muh-OD.”
“I have enjoyed myself very much.”

The best thing to come out of this blog has been meeting Ben H. and his family, who have a far greater claim to the name “Rehovot” than I do; Ben, brave soul, took an interest in the blog and went so far as to go through the archives, where God knows what sort of writing lurks… The blog reveals how few Israelis I’ve actually met; Ben kindly proposed to remedy that, on a recent trip down from Haifa to his hometown.

So last Friday afternoon, we set out for the Alkalai Cafe, at the corner of Herzl and Weizmann streets, where I suggested the three of us meet for coffee.

Initially, on the Alkalai patio, there were four of us: me, J., Ben, and an Orthodox man, who was trying to persuade Ben to wear tefillin–the box containing portions of the Torah. As Ben politely waved away the black tefillin strands, the last guest packed up and disappeared.

Ben demystified military life and mandatory service, and shed light on other aspects of society, his family’s history in Rehovot, and where to get great falafel outside of Tel Aviv.

It was a little strange to meet someone who knows exactly how much I’ve complained, over the last two years. In my defense, I would like to say that I haven’t felt the need to track down tortillas in six months. Really! That’s quite an improvement!

Midway through coffee, Ben took a phone call, and then turned to us. “Would you like to come for dinner?”

This is the first such invitation in two years.

We were delighted to be asked, and happily made our way to Ben’s family’s home, a couple of hours later. (That is, after we got lost on the way.)

Ben’s mother, Michal, welcomed us in warmly, and we met Tamar and Tal, and sat down to a marvelous dinner. (If I made meatballs only half as well as Tamar does, I’d open a meatball shop and retire happily!) With great conversation, compelling stories, and laughter, we felt right at home.

At one point, Michal began, “You know, when Ben was younger…”

“Mom, don’t!” Ben protested. Tamar, Ben’s sister, laughed.

Michal continued with a smile. “In Rehovot, for a long time, the freight trains used to run, long before the passenger trains started to. After seeing these freight trains go by, day after day, Ben finally wrote a letter to the stationmaster, and asked to ride one of them. The letter reached the freight train company, and they agreed.”

Michal cited this as evidence of Ben’s curiosity and his willingness to find a means of connecting with people; it’s a great story, about someone with imagination, who would grow up to travel way beyond Rehovot.

All in all, we had a marvelous evening with a remarkable and generous family.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #343

“Sah luh-AT.”
“Slow down.”

Last night, J.’s advisor and his wife invited us to see the fireworks for the Lag B’omer holiday, which is traditionally celebrated with bonfires.

Some people decided to have a bonfire of sound outside our apartment, on the street, and cranked their car stereo sub-woofers up until 6 am. When I called Security at 3 am, the guard responded sweetly, “Well, we can’t really do anything; it’s a holiday!”

“Can’t you move them further down the street?” I growled. “We’re trying to sleep, here!” I really did feel thirty.

At six o’clock, unable to compete with the birds, who had been warming up for two hours, the partiers gave up and went home.

By six in the evening, we were yawning, but we headed off to the advisor’s house, where everyone elected to depart for Tel Aviv ASAP. We piled in the car, along with a Lithuanian scientist visiting from Canada, and rolled merrily off…into a two-and-a-half-hour long traffic jam.

Normally, by train, you can get from Rehovot to Tel Aviv in about thirty minutes; by car, in about twenty minutes.

Creeping toward Tel Aviv, I remembered why my first impression of Israel was that it looked a lot like Los Angeles.

The sun set, trains passed unimpeded, the moon rose, and we were still not even in Tel Aviv. All of us stared glumly at the taillights and prayed for a parting of the traffic, Red-Sea style.

When we reached Tel Aviv, we circled the city like dust around a comet; which is to say, incredibly slowly. We could hear the fireworks begin and end. Someone in the car claimed to see them in a reflection from an office building, but this was met by the group with great skepticism. J’s advisor, a man of infinite patience behind the steering wheel, tried to find parking at two restaurants, before getting back on the highway and heading north to the port.

Even in the northern part of Tel Aviv, streets were packed, and at a standstill, but the sidewalks were full of people coming back from the fireworks. “How were they? Nice, I hope?” J’s advisor called wistfully to a mother and her daughter, out the car window.

The mother and daughter looked surprised, but stopped to talk, since we were clearly not going anywhere.

“Lovely! They were great!”

“We’ve been in the car for two and a half hours!” J’s advisor’s wife called to them in a tone of desperation. They shook their heads in commiseration.

A block later, the advisor put the car in park and motioned for all of us to get out, while he joined a very long line for a parking lot.

We were just south of the Reading power station, at the old Tel Aviv harbor. A bike path runs from the power station south to the old harbor (and continues all the way down to Jafo), past a cluster of cafes and restaurants, some of which overlook the beach from a wide boardwalk. We walked to the cafe at Comme il Faut, and sat outside, to soak up the wind and the sea salt. Frankly, it felt more like being in Normandy than in Israel; people sitting at tables closer to the beach were swaddled in fleece throws, and were trying to spear bits of their salads from between pieces of fringe.

But we were comfortable, and dined very happily at ten o’clock, with the waves breaking a few yards away. J’s advisor’s wife told us stories of the first Gulf War, when a postdoc and his wife called and asked to come stay with them, when the first sirens went off (signalling incoming missiles from Iraq).

“Actually,” Dr. E. said, “the sirens went off, and A. and his wife dove into their closet and sat there for four hours. Then they crawled out, called us, and came to stay for two weeks.” (“They were in your apartment,” she added, to us.)

“Every morning,” she went on, “A. and I would go out and do the grocery shopping. We would buy two loaves of bread every day, and go home and cook up a storm.” She laughed. “We all gained a lot, during those first two weeks of the war.”

“Some took it well,” she said. “But the postdoc’s wife, who was from Bogotá, stayed in the house for twelve days, shaking.” She shook her head, remembering. “Bogotá! Where the crime rate is through the roof! And she was worried that we’d get hit…”

“But how close did the missiles land?” I asked.

“Oh, Americans always think they landed very close,” she teased me. “But the closest one to land was about five kilometers from us, at Kibbutz Netzer Sireni. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” I exclaimed, “it’s really close!” The advisor’s wife just laughed.

When you’ve had to put on a gas mask for real, then everything else must seem trivial and liveable, in comparison…

 

Say It in Hebrew! #325

“Ha-OR ha-a-kho-REE.”
“The tail light.”

We finished in Haifa, last Saturday, by first lazing around until we figured at least something might be open for lunch, so we went back to the Carmel Center, and had lunch at the Greg Cafe, branches of which also dot the Technion campus. Lunch must have lulled us into geographical ignorance, because we then decided to walk to Stella Maris.

It’s not so bad, really; from the Carmel Center, you take the Promenade until you fall into the sea. That’s about a kilometer and a half, by foot. In the sun. At midday.

The Carmelite Monastery site was chosen in the twelfth century by Crusaders who chose to focus on asceticism, solitude, and prayer…much like I was, as we plodded down to Stella Maris.

The chapel of Stella Maris, as far as I know, contains the only altar to be built over a holy cave. The altar seems to float over the rough-sculpted overhang of Elijah’s cave. It’s a startling contrast: the order and symmetry of the eighteenth-century altar; and the cave, with its small altar jutting out at an angle and smoke-stained rocky ceiling.

The dome in the photo illustrates legends surrounding the prophet Elijah and his disciple Elisha.

From Stella Maris, we went around the corner, past the fenced-off lighthouse, and down to the entrance to the Haifa cable cars, which drop you down to the Bat Galim beach (and the Yotvata restaurant) in about three minutes. As we stepped inside the orange-striped globe to descend from Carmel, all those trips up and down Keystone Mountain made me realize why the term “cable car” doesn’t really make sense. It’s a gondola!

Like Tijuana, Haifa’s poorest neighborhoods are at the very bottom. In this case, the Bat Galim neighborhood has million-dollar views and weather-beaten beachfront apartment blocks, some of which are boarded up. Families scattered on the grass between the apartments and the beach seemed to enjoy Saturday-afternoon picnicking in a stoic way, facing the wind, but here and there were people selling games, cotton candy, and shishkebab sticks from their plastic beach chairs.

We walked around Bat Galim and the beaches on the point of Haifa, and continued on to the port. This was roughly another two kilometers. J. claimed we were always approaching town, so we would soon find a taxi to spirit us back up to the Technion, in no time whatsoever.

Finding a taxi on Saturday afternoon is no small feat.

We limped on toward the port, past the National Maritime Museum, the Museum of Clandestine Immigration, and the Railroad Museum (all closed; sorry, Dad). The few minutes we spent relaxing on a bench at Bat Galim in the sea-spray faded and I began to adjust the straps of my sandals, every three feet. Finally, we came to some giant intersection, past the wholly-deserted main bus station, and saw a few taxis, waiting to turn, on the opposite side of the intersection.

I’m no Claudette Colbert, but I was very close to employing drastic measures a la “It Happened One Night”, in order to flag down a taxi, or a police car; in any case, whoever picked us up and/or arrested me would have to drive us up the hill, which I wasn’t doing.

Happily, there was no need to show a little leg, since J. waved wildly and caused a flurry of taxis to swarm over toward us, violating all sorts of traffic laws.

“Le ha Technion, bevakasha,” I said to the driver.

He peered at us in the mirror and licked his ice-cream bar. Then he said something excitedly in Hebrew.

My Hebrew had expired about as quickly as my feet. “Binyan Amado, bevakasha!”, I said, trying to give more specific directions to the Math Department building.

“Lo, lo!” The driver waved his ice-cream bar at us. “I picked you up yesterday! I remember you!” He turned around and grinned.

Lo and behold, it was the taxi driver from Friday afternoon, when we’d expired only a few blocks away from the port, near the German Colony neighborhood, after the Bahai Garden bonanza. My hero!

I’m sure he thought we were wimps.

Indeed, when we got back to the guesthouse, it was all we could do to watch three hours of “Absolutely Fabulous” reruns on the BBC.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #701

“O-TAH-noo la-ma-LON, bu-va-ka-SHAH.”
“Take us back to the hotel, please.”

Haifa, Part II

On Friday night, after we went back to the hotel and collapsed for a while, watching hilarious infomercials for hula hoops on Russian-Israeli tv, J.’s host for the week arrived and took us back to his and his wife’s home for pre-dinner drinks and snacks. They invited us to take in the view of the Mediterranean from their back porch, which was staggering.

The professor’s wife, as we left for dinner, cooed, “Shalom, Shalosh ve Rezi!” (“Hello, Three and a Half!”) to a cat curled up on the stairway.

“Three and a Half?” I inquired, as the cat sat and stared up at me suspiciously.

“Three and a half legs,” she replied. “He’s survived dog fights and a municipal poisoning that took care of every other stray cat in the neighborhood.”

Yikes.

The professor eased the family car out of its parking space in the garage, next to a dusty automotive specimen that looked like it hadn’t moved since the establishment of the state. “We can’t bear to part with it,” his wife sighed. “And no one will take it off our hands.”

We drove to a busy street in town and then walked down the street.

The professor, a tall man with a gentle ambling gait, looked at us. “Do you eat meat?” he asked.

“Yes,” we responded politely, like tyrannosaurs being put on a waiting list at a shishkebab restaurant. “Absolutely.”

“There’s a very good meat restaurant that I would like to take us to,” said the professor, and he led the way down the street.

He stopped at the bottom of a short flight of stairs up to a two-story house, where a sign bearing the name “EL GAUCHO” in red neon suggested waiters in big pants, bearing giant Brazilian steaks.

However, “EL GAUCHO” was dark. The restaurant on the first floor had its lights on and loud clanging sounds were coming from inside. Suddenly, four men in puffy white and gold suits–the kind you might imagine Ghengis Khan’s head honchos wearing, or at least the kind they would certainly wear, invited to appear on Lawrence Welk–backed out of the first-floor restaurant with long brass trumpets and lined up on the stairs. The professor blithely peered inside, as more of Ghengis Khan’s band exited for their dramatic entry.

Since we are not really all that far from Jericho, relatively speaking, I was a little alarmed to hear the band (clad in white linen, gold lame sashes, and white fez-ish things with a feather) start trumpeting.

In vain, we called to the professor, as the din from inside and the trumpeting outside increased.

Finally, his wife yelled, “IT’S CLOSED!”, over the madness, as the band (with token Ghengis-Khan-chorus-line dancer) stormed in, and the professor receded, blinking.

“How very odd,” he pronounced, on reaching us at the bottom, as the Ghengis-Khan disco ball swirled inside, over the heads of the band. “They didn’t look Brazilian.”

After that, the HaBank restaurant was positively conservative, as its name might suggest.

As a rule of thumb, if you order a salad in Israel as an entree, upon finishing your dinner, the World Bank should present you with a bill for the entire cash crop production of a small third-world country. And yet I never learn.

On the way back from dinner, which lasted three hours, I asked the professor’s wife about the cable cars of Haifa, which we were hoping to take on Saturday, from near the Stella Maris chapel to the beach. “I think our guidebook calls them the eggs of Haifa; “beitsim shel Haifa,” I added in what I thought was a helpful, educated way. Wrong!

I could see the professor’s wife blush, even in the dark. “Oh, hell,” I thought.

It was even worse than I feared. She cleared her throat. “Actually, this is a rather vulgar joke in Haifa; people call them “the mayor’s balls,” because the project was funded by him…in a somewhat corrupt way.”

Lovely.

The professor’s wife gave me a sideways glance. “Where did you hear the joke?”

“I read it!” I yelped. “In a guidebook! It wasn’t even my guidebook!”

Yes, I could hear her thinking, that excellent postdoc from Prague and his…eccentric wife.

Worse still, we hadn’t brought a hostess gift (the wine I lugged from Rehovot), because J. figured we would be going straight to the restaurant. In my family’s book, this is wrong, wrong, WRONG, and the only way to atone is by doing a thousand rites of penance at the altar of Mom, who raised me Much Better Than That.

“Write them a thank-you note,” my mother suggested, with infinite wisdom.

But I fear that this would only immortalize me on paper as the postdoc’s wife who not only told rude jokes, but who also did not bring a hostess gift, AND who declined to see the world-famous View of Haifa at Night. (In my defense, I was wearing sandals and freezing.)

So it came as a surprise when they invited us for coffee on Sunday, on campus.

And I forgot to bring the wine, again.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #936

“KO-va.”
“Hat.”

You can keep your hat on!

 

Say It in Hebrew! #248

“Ay-FOH kron ha-shay-NAH be ha-ZEH ra-KEV-et?”
“Where is the sleeper car on this train?”

Last Friday morning, I hauled two days’ worth of clothing, a bottle of wine, and a corkscrew through campus to the train station. There, I bought a ticket for Haifa (Hof Ha-Carmel) and waited on platform 1 for twenty minutes while I tried not to fall asleep or be tipped over by my backpack. If I missed the train or wound up in Be’er Sheva, at least I would have clean clothes in which to enjoy my drunken stupor.

Fortunately, the train showed up and was bound for Tel Aviv – Merkaz, where I got off and stood around with everyone else, waiting for the train north to Haifa. This train was full of sleepy soldiers, caffeine-jazzed teenagers, and humble long-weekenders like me, contemplating why they packed half the closet for a few days. As I was wrapping my scarf around me (the AC is now on in trains, even though it’s still cold outside), I had a twinge of worry, as the recorded voice announced, first in Hebrew and then in English, “Dear passengers! Welcome aboard. This is an express train to Nahariya. It will make only a few stops. Have a nice journey.”

Nahariya is about 15 kilometers south of Lebanon.

I was so tired that I figured, even in Nahariya, I could wear the contents of my closet and drink the wine, so I went to sleep.

So did all the soldiers around me, including one who snoozed sitting up, his head bent forward, and drooled onto his AK-47 as he slept.

I thought about telling him that that would rust it, but, really, who wants to jolt awake someone whose machine gun is pointed at your toes?

The last few kilometers of the way to Haifa, the train runs parallel to the coastline, following stretches of clean, empty beach and dunes that look a little like the Outer Banks.

At the Hof Ha-Carmel stop, I got off the train and went outside, trying to remember if J. had told me not to cross under the tracks and meet him on the opposite side, or if he had said to absolutely cross under the tracks and meet him on the opposite side. At least I remembered he had said something about the tracks…

I elected to not cross under the tracks, and waited outside. A soldier and her parents were standing together, evidently discussing, in Russian, the best way to get to the center of Haifa. The soldier frowned, shook her head and blond ponytail at something her mother said, and went to sit down on a bench. Her mother, a tall woman with perfect posture, headed out to the taxi stand and started negotiating. The soldier’s father, wearing a baseball cap and a sea-green t-shirt, was left in the middle, tugging thoughtfully on his beard. He rested his hand on the grocery cart the family had brought as though he had seen this standoff before, and, uniform or no uniform, it was very clear who the family’s commander and front line was. The soldier sat in the shade and hunched over her cigarette.

When I left, they were still spread out like a stubbornly independent battalion.

I met J. as I headed down into the passageway under the tracks.

“Hi, I love you, I have a blister already,” I greeted him.

“My little trooper,” J. replied.

N.B.: any reader who would prefer not to know how we made it to the Technion should skip this part. In fact, to preserve your emotional and mental well-being, instead of “bus”, I’ll just write “AVOCADO”.

We took an AVOCADO.

Haifa is a little bit like Laguna, but bigger, more hilly, and with drivers who would probably treat PCH as a learner’s road.

“Just so you know, I could never live here,” I told J. as we emerged at the Technion stop. Is it possible to get seasick on an AVOCADO, even if you’re sitting in the first row and the ride only takes ten minutes? Yes.

We dropped our stuff off at the Plaza Athenee Technion, also known as the Forcheimer Guest House, generously built and furnished, with no expense spared, by the Jewish community of Palm Beach and other donors, whose funds produced a gleaming two-story hotel with marble, 400-count sheets, and satellite tv.

No minibar, though, but I had schlepped up one-third of our minibar from Rehovot, in case of emergencies.

We took another AVOCADO to the Carmel Centre, which is a busy intersection flanked by a somewhat-small mall.

“From here, I think it’s only a short walk to this great restaurant I went to yesterday,” J. said. (He had been in Haifa all week.)

“Ok,” I said naively.

Ten minutes later, J. mused, “It should be right around the corner.”

Twenty minutes later, he announced, “I think we’re getting close! I recognize this street from the car, when Zvi took me to lunch.” Then he looked back at me apologetically. “You know, distances in a car seem a lot shorter than on foot.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “How profound these simple truths can be, sometimes.”

After that comment, I had to pick up the pace to avoid being swatted with the guidebook.

An undisclosed-while later, we ended up at a restaurant near the Gan Ha’em Carmelit stop, and finally sat down to lunch. For something like NIS 30 (about USD 7), we ate what my people call “dinner” and what the rest of the world calls “Sunday lunch”. Then we tottered out to the panorama walk, which looks out over the Bahai Gardens and the bay.

At 2:55 pm, as ordered, we showed up at the entrance to the Bahai Gardens, clutching the reservation number for the afternoon tour.

Securing this number was no small feat. First, I had to track down the number. Then, I called on Memorial Day, which a recording informed me was a Jewish holy day, so no one was answering the phones. The next day, Independence Day, turned out to be a Bahai holy day…so no one was answering the phones. Finally, the day before I left for Haifa, I called to make a reservation. A woman on the other end said, “The tour is only in Hebrew.”

“Ze beseder,” I replied. “We’ll enjoy the view, anyway.”

So, number in hand, we piled up at the gate with forty other people, as the guard went through bags and checked names and numbers against a list on his clipboard.

“Who’s next?” he asked in Hebrew, and we elbowed our way forward. I smugly announced the number in Hebrew, but after listening to my painful-to-hear pronunciation for the first three digits, the guard hurriedly waved us in.

The gardens were pristinely cultivated and terraced, with streams running alongside the steps. It appeared to be an entire religion devoted to gardening.

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s shrubbery,” I suggested, as we walked down one stone staircase.

“Thou shalt set aside a day devoted to shrubbery,” J. added. “Thou shalt not commit shrubicide.”

It put most English gardens to shame.

It had seven hundred stairs.

My dad had warned me that hiking downhill was almost as bad as uphill, and now I know why.

Instead of toting the wine from Rehovot, I should have toted Diana, an Austrian sports-balm that J. uses to recover from postdoc-soccer.

That night, my calves hurt so much that I dreamed they were being attacked by carnivorous gnomes.

Garden gnomes, of course.

 

Say It in Hebrew! #1238

“Ha rad-i-YO.”
“The radio.”

In a country that uses air-raid sirens to signal the start of a national holiday, is it ever really possible to know what’s going on?

Just ask Shaul Mofaz. One day, he’s Defense Minister; the next day, Amir Peretz is in his office, measuring for curtains.

Cheer up, Minister Mofaz; after all, it’s not every Transportation Minister who is also in charge of “strategic dialogue with foreign governments.” Dialogue from where? The Ayalon Highway? In any case, Minister, it is best to avoid a Grey-Poupon-style confrontation…

“Pardon me, but do you have any nukes?”

“But of course!”

Today is Yom HaZikron, Memorial Day; tomorrow is Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Independence Day. The Visiting Scientist coordinator sent out a message detailing how life in Rehovot, and at the Machon would be affected, and included this interesting tidbit:

“On Tuesday evening, May 2, from about 21:00, festivities start in every town with dancing in the streets, open air pop concerts, and fireworks around 22:00…”

Well, I do love a festival! And we missed this one, last year, because we were headed to Prague at midnight, on the 2nd. But the message continued with a cautionary note for the unsuspecting:

“Please note that it is customary on that night for youth to roam about the streets and merrily hit people on the head with plastic hammers or spray them with streamers, so beware.”

Bands of youth with hammers and Silly String? Ha! I ate them for breakfast, as a high school teacher.

As on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, radio stations have played nothing but melancholy and wistful music, beginning last night. Memorial Day additionally seems to involve a stipulation that radio stations must play only Israeli music; so, for example, Radio Galgalatz and 100 FM, which play roughly 80% American pop music, now sound like they’ve aged forty years, overnight. It’s hard to crank your stereo up, your windows down, and low-ride down Herzl, to the oldies station.

Not that I’m complaining.

Even our much-beloved Shmoneh u Shmoneh FM, 88 FM, has gone over to an all-memorial format, which is fascinating for the first four hours, and then a little tiresome. Normally, however, they play an eclectic mix of (mostly American) jazz and folk music that would be the envy of any self-respecting public-radio station in Berkeley.

You would really have to be some kind of heel to complain about the kind of music played on Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day, wouldn’t you?

 

Say It in Hebrew! #30

“Shlo-SHEEM.”
“Thirty.”

Ok, thirty, minus an afternoon party!

(But I still feel only sixteen–and that’s beseder gamu with me!)

Thanks for all the goodies; you people are spoiling me!

 

Say It in Hebrew! #560

“Ha-EEM zeh ko-LEL et duh-MAY ha-shay-ROOT?”
“Is the service charge included?”

A couple of weeks ago, our kitchen saw the first version (and probably the only version it will ever see) of Iron Chef: Kosher Battle.

Guests we’d invited requested that we not mix meat and milk. We wanted to make them as comfortable as possible, so I pondered this request for days, until I began to lose my mind.

Not mix them in the same dish? In the same meal? Within two hours? Is butter milk? Is chicken meat? Does pasta include butter?

It quickly became an existential problem, which squawking madly did not alleviate. The logic of kashrut, for a Catholic, became rather knotty and dogmatic: if one does not use meat, then one can use milk; however, any use of meat means that no dairy must be present in the entire meal.

It was Iron Chef, in reverse: the Battle of No Dairy. Or cooking algebra; for the uninitiated, the various factors were daunting.

DAY 1
Commentator Hattori: Fukui-san, it looks like our contestant is stymied by the restrictions. What’s going on, down there?

Kitchen Reporter Fukui: Hattori-san, our contestant is presently flipping through cookbooks and wailing like an impaled eel.

Hattori: I see. Well, can you get any idea of what’s on the menu?

Fukui: From what I can gather, Chicken Cacciatore is the main option, at the moment.

Hattori: Ok, clearly appealing to the old standards.

Fukui: Excuse me, Hattori-san, but our contestant begs your pardon, and says she’s only made it twice before, for guests, so don’t get too technical.

Hattori: Duly noted. But surely Chicken Cacciatore involves butter, so that’s out.

Fukui: Hattori-san, if looks could kill…

DAY 2
Hattori: It’s Thursday, here, and our contestant really needs to settle on a menu. Let’s find out if there’s been any progress.

Fukui: Hattori-san! A very interesting development, here. Our contestant has taken meat off the menu, entirely.

Hattori: Oh, my. Isn’t that throwing the baby–or the cow–out with the bathwater?

Fukui: The contestant is really playing it safe, here, and going with fish, instead, which will let her use dairy in any aspect of the dinner.

Hattori: Ok, a practical choice. What else is on the menu?

Fukui: Well, there’s a big baguette and a tub of torta cheese, in one bag–

Hattori: No doubt, for appetizers…

Fukui: Little potatoes and frozen green beans–

Hattori: Classic, but boring.

Fukui: Excuse me, Hattori-san, but watch out for the flying–

Hattori: Lemons. Thank you.

Fukui: There’s fish wrapped in newspaper in a black plastic bag.

Hattori (sotto voce): An ominous sign.

Fukui: And last on the counter is a long strip of cheesecake, which will go with strawberries, balsamic vinegar, and sugar.

Hattori: Ok, store-bought. Well, you can’t do everything.

Fukui: Excuse me, Hattori-san, I forgot to report that there’s a big slab of butternut squash going into the oven to roast.

Hattori: For soup, probably.

Fukui: Our contestant says to tell you that it’s sure not for decorating.

DAY 3
Hattori: Well, here we are, the afternoon of the Kosher Battle. Fukui, can you give us an idea of how the battlefield looks?

Fukui: It’s a mess. I can’t see the sink. Any other questions?

Hattori: Can you elaborate?

Fukui: Everything’s set to go. The fish are marinating in lemon juice and lemon zest. Our contestant is marinating in white wine.

Hattori: It’s only two o’clock!

Fukui: L’chaim!

Hattori: Can you tell us what’s happening with the butternut squash?

Fukui: Yes, our contestant has chopped it into little cubes and is sauteeing onions in butter. Looks like the cubes will go in there for soup. Oh–this is odd… Our contestant has taken out the chicken bouillon container.

Hattori: She’s going to sautee the squash and onions in butter and chicken broth? This is disastrous. That’s not kosher!

Fukui: Yes, the contestant’s husband has just appeared in the kitchen and pointed that out. I’m sorry I can’t give you more details, but I’ve had to move to avoid the flying utensils.

Hattori: Oh, black-flagged on the last lap. Well, that’s the end of it, then. Kosher Battle Over due to non-Kosherness!

Fukui: Excuse me, Hattori-san! Our contestant fiercely insists that it isn’t over, and that no one saw the chicken broth.

Hattori: Is that a fifty-shekel bill she’s waving at us, or a hundred-shekel one?

KOSHER BATTLE OVER

No one told the guests about the soup. Guests didn’t notice. Or were far too well-mannered and forgiving to mention it. Or we stuffed them so much that they would have nodded and smiled at anything, to escape.

All right, I admit, it was kind of a fun challenge!

 

Say It in Hebrew! #84

“Lo po.”
“Not here.”

And now for something completely different!

From Tierra Wools, Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico.

Thanks, Dad! Lovely photos!

(All copyrights reserved.)