Say It in Hebrew

“Muh-khee-RAH.”
“SALE.”

Scenes from the Rehovot Mall, where everything “summer” is now on sale, despite the fact that autumn is not for another three weeks, and autumnal temperatures still require sleeveless shirts.

–Outside, in front of the main doors: two security guards. One waves an electronic wand over prospective shoppers, while the other one examines the contents of your purse or any other bag.

–Inside: in a sports apparel store, an olive-khaki-wearing soldier happily inspects soccer shorts, his machine gun slung casually across his back. Across the way, outside a women’s shoe store, more soldiers, girls, cluster in front of the strappy- sandal window.

–Downstairs, in the food court: orthodox girls with long skirts, long, dark socks, longsleeve shirts, and stylish round caps nibble pastry.

–On the upper level, near Hip Mall Cafe #1, a group of mothers shares salads the size of hubcaps, restlessly tap their feet in improbable tiny-heeled shoes, and bounce their infants in strollers with more manufacturer-installed goodies than most luxury cars.

–In an electronics store: blond-haired girl and her boyfriend chattering in Russian over a stack of cd’s.

–Sign in the window of a children’s clothing store: “BAG TO SCHOOL! BAG TO SCHOOL!”

“Buh-SAHR kha-ZEER!”
“Pork!”

The walk to the mall leads south, down Herzl Street, which is lined with shops, cafes, and bakeries displaying sesame-seed-dotted bagels the size of a toddler’s head. Many of the small all-purpose stores (think 7-11 in its earliest inception) also have at least two or three slushie machines, the paddles cranking away at some drink whose neon color does not occur in nature. Most of these stores also have a modest freezer-on-wheels that holds ice cream bars, and, often, cartons of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. Ben and Jerry’s has a surprising presence here, and a serious grip on the Israeli ice cream market. The Rehovot mall even boasts a Ben and Jerry’s outpost, second only in size, probably, to the flagship store in Vermont.

To get to the mall, you have to pass through Market Street—probably the most entertaining hundred yards of the whole walk. Market Street leads west off of Herzl Street; a small triangle-shaped area (where an impromptu craft fair sets up shop on Friday mornings) funnels into the market’s main alley, which is blocked at all times with trucks and cars engaged in the national sport of stationary road rage—furious honking.

It’s complete chaos, though the north side is noticeably calmer, or maybe just static: the first few stores on the north side are monuments to the global availability, it would seem, of plastic—you can buy trash bins, laundry baskets, plastic bags, plastic stools, plastic cups, ice cube trays, and all shapes and sizes of imitation Tupperware. If you know how to negotiate in Hebrew, it’s probably the best deal on plasticware in town; if you don’t, at least you provide a few minutes of hilarity for the shopkeeper.

Past Plastic Row is one of two fish markets on Market Street. Laid out on rapidly-melting ice, twelve different kinds of fish glare up at you as you pass by. (Drippy fish is highly unappetizing.) A few doors down, the Russian deli has an entire case—bathed in heavenly light—devoted to chilled pork, ham, and (we hope) bacon, not to mention fascinating clear containers of cream-and-fish concoctions. Ham! Pork! Shellfish! Do the Russians have the monopoly on non-kosher foodstuffs? But I digress.

The south side of Market Street, however, is much more compelling than the north side. Plus, it offers another block of shade. It houses a few falafel stands, and a bakery where the fresh pita bread falls off the conveyor belt in hot little pillows and onto a long tray, where waiting customers eagerly scoop it into their opened sacks. (Or, like me, scorch their fingers and yelp in pain.) Between the bakery and the fruit stand lies the narrow alleyway into the indoor market, but I wouldn’t have known where the entrance was if my husband hadn’t pointed it out one day.

The indoor market is a labyrinth of dried-fruit stands, pasta and grain sacks, and mounds of herbs and produce. There are at least three exits onto Market Street, although I have only glimpsed one, outside, from Market Street itself, which leads me to believe that there’s some sort of gap between reality inside the market, and reality outside.

“Ha-oo-KHAL luh-ka-BAYL oo-GAH?”
“May I have some cake?”

The Friendship Club (aka The Ladies’ Social) met in the living room, for the first time this summer, around 10:15 on Monday morning.

At exactly ten o’clock, I was cursing in a very un-Jane-Austen-worthy way. In an effort to decorate within a budget, I remembered a clip of Martha Stewart intoning, Floral arrangements need not be lavish affairs—simplicity, really, is elegant. Then she gave her Cheshire-cat smile, and dropped five orchid stems into a Bacarat vase.

My decorating vision was more Girl-Scout-needs-a-color-wheel. I had taken my Swiss Army knife to the hibiscus bushes outside, lopped off a few red and orange flowers (plus some leaves for good measure), stuffed them in a bowl and placed the arrangement on the coffee table. Instant (not to mention free) décor! And–instant infestation, as the arrangement began to move like something out of “The Godfather,” with hundreds of miniscule ants swarming out of the buds and onto the petals. That’s nature for you—try to bring it inside, and you’ll end up wishing you spent twenty shekels on flowers in the first place.

After dousing the whole thing with water, and vengefully drowning the whole herd of bugs, I replaced the bowl on the table as the buzzer sounded. One neighbor, impressive in a silver-and-black business suit, vanished after saying hello, though she assured me that she’d be right back. In her wake, at a slightly-awed distance, stood a girl my age, who adjusted her purse on her shoulder and asked if this was where the meeting was taking place. What a remarkable phrase, I thought, used throughout history to convene such momentous, clandestine groups as the American Revolutionaries and the Free French.

Yes, I replied, please come in! One lump or two?

Apparently, we would have to effect Significant Social Change in our own, coffee-cake eating and floral-napkin-using way.

“A-va-KAYSH leek-RO luh-TAK-see a-voo-REE.”
“Please call a taxi for me.”

This month, it seems like every kid in Rehovot between the ages of five and eight is attempting to learn how to ride a bicycle. The sad fact is, mastering this skill requires the temporary indignity of training wheels. Rehovot’s desert geography makes this even more unbearable.

In the last week, I’ve counted four kids who, just as it seems that they’re mastering the art of pedaling, hit a mound of the locally ubiquitous red dust and are left, literally, high and dry, pedaling furiously but not getting anywhere, while their main wheel coughs up the dust in spurts. Their parents, meanwhile, stroll obliviously ahead with Kid Number Two in the stroller, while the young cyclist gradually pedals more and more slowly, with a growing understanding of his situation, looking up at passers-by with plaintive eyes as if to say, So this is the real world—your parents leave you, and you spin in a pile of dirt. Great.

“Et zeh loh heez-MAN-tee.”
“I did not order this.”

Operation Pastry Evaluation commenced a couple of days after we arrived. It involved a great deal of strategy and planning: I walked to the end of our street, saw two bakeries, and rejoiced. The first bakery I spotted sits on a corner lot, so, in the morning, the sun shines through the front corner windows, where rows of small croissants and powdered-sugar dusted things practically glow.

I didn’t know if one was supposed to pluck whatever one wanted with one’s grubby mitts, so I asked the man behind the counter, who came out and identified what I was interested in with a slender pair of tongs. He seemed unhurried, but it was a slow process, and a man who was in serious need of a pastry fix behind me was clearly annoyed by my methodical, assisted selection. He rushed around me, dropped his two turnovers in a box onto the scale, threw some coins at the cashier, and fled. Meanwhile, I was debating between what looked like apple-filled croissants or rugelach the size of a wrestler’s arm. The croissants won, and I exited happily, pleased to have found someone willing to proudly and patiently name a dozen kinds of croissants.

There’s another bakery, a scaled-down operation, around the corner from the end of our street; it’s not really a full shop, but a storefront: the counters face the sidewalk/street, and the bakery extends back into the building. There’s no place to sit, and they only offer pastry—no drinks, no coffee, no candy. A serious place, I assumed. Alas, I was biased toward it because the bakery had an entire shelf of the counter devoted to lunettes, the French sugar cookie with raspberry jam spread on the inside and topped with a sugar-cookie ring, then dusted with powdered sugar.

The glass cases always display a tempting array of cookies and other items. During one of the first days here, drawn in to temptation, I gazed at the ring-shaped, sesame-dotted twists that reminded me of flaky pretzels the size of key rings.

“Shalom,” I offered to the baker, whose upper frame was sprawled at the opposite end of the counter from his oven, where a foot-long gas flame roared into the interior. “How much for…?” I pointed at the pretzels.

He rose and came over to where I was pointing. “Twelve shekels a kilo,” he shouted, raising a warning finger. “But salty—very salty!”

I was up for the challenge, but my metric skills were lagging. “Half a kilo,” I returned. Ha! A little salt never killed anyone! But when he began piling a bag full of the snacks, I knew I had overestimated my snacking desires and forgotten exactly how large half a kilo of these light pretzel-things would be. He squeezed about eighteen of them into a plastic bag, took my six shekels, and said, “Bye!” before I could protest.

Salty and very, very stale. The first one I bit into, once home and armed with cold water, was completely dry and tasted as though it had been sitting on the shelf for weeks, waiting for unsuspecting tourists to stumble in and order them. I imagined the baker sitting in front of his forge, sweating grossly and laughing with a terrible glint in his eye as he salted the row of pretzels for the twelfth time that day in Bakery #2.

Bakery #1 became the sole success of Day 1 of my operation. I crossed Bakery #2 and off my mental list. And Bakery #3?

Further down Herzl Street, past the café that seems to be solely frequented, in the mornings, by old men,
there was another small bakery/café, with a side glass-panel-window filled from ceiling to floor with rows and rows of clear-boxed varieties of cookies. Behind the two or three outdoor café tables that are standard sidewalk accessories even for tobacconists, one tiny glass case held what looked like four different variations of tiramisu. Inside the bakery, tilted shelves offered rows of rolls, croissants, and rugelach. Confident in bakery etiquette now, I dropped two filled rolls into a paper bag, brought it to the scale, paid, and left. Exactly what the rolls were filled with, I didn’t know, but I figured it must be under the general heading of “sweet and/or fruity.”

At home, I shelved the pastry for two days. On Saturday morning, I opened the cupboard, anticipating the fruit-filled rolls, but I reeled from a strange smell, the source of which was unmistakably the paper bag from Bakery #3. Passing by, my husband remarked, Oh, these things are great; they’re spring rolls. He cut one open and happily popped a third of it in his mouth. Sure enough, the filled rolls turned out to be phyllo-dough eggrolls.

Am reading:
Camus’ The Plauge. We may have five-inch long Insects Whose Name Must Not Be Mentioned, but, hey, we don’t have rats.