Say It in Hebrew

“Jidelni listek.”
“Menu.”

Last Tuesday, after the Dvorak Museum, I was determined to find Café Imperial, which wasn’t listed in my guidebook, but which I’d passed once or twice on Tram #26, going home. Last Monday night, I asked my husband how to find the café, and, instead of “Na Porici,” I mistakenly thought I heard him say it was on “Na Hrobci.” This proved to be one of those occasions when liking words that rhyme (you say “Porici,” I say “Hrobci”) is really a drawback.

While I study my guidebook map, standing outside of the Dvorak Museum (wondering if the tiny building marked “Office”–in English–is really a code word for “Gift Shop”), I locate the street that I wrongly believe to contain the café. The map indicates you can get there by going from Ke Karlova and the Museum to Albertov Street, a pedestrian street that turns out to be a series of staircases leading south toward the river.

At the end of Albertov, I head for the river, but register a bit of surprise when I pass by an old train station with a plaque that says “Praha – Vysehrad.” Tram #26 doesn’t go anywhere near Vysehrad. A massive rusting train trestle stretching across the river confirms my suspicions that I’m way off the correct path. Café Imperial is nowhere to be found on the short street, which runs east-west off a busy quayside street. From the corner of the quay and Na Hrobci, I can barely make out the castle, to the north, in the cold haze. It looks distant and not quite real, from here. Charles Bridge is so far away that it doesn’t seem to have anyone on it.

Getting lost in Prague is sort of like reading a mystery too quickly: you can always go back and look for the clues. You don’t even have to retrace your steps, to a large degree: if you can spot tram lines overhead, it’s easy to catch a tram and trace your way to your origin. Like most cities’ metro lines, even an obscure route will stop at a few major stations. And so I stuff my guidebook in my bag, wait for the tram, and head home.

Wednesday, we cook lunch—the main meal of the day, here—for my mother-in-law. Preparations involve a trip to the closest supermarket, two tram stops away. Inexplicably, the market chain’s logo is a black head in profile, wearing a tall red fez. This, plus the red-yellow-black color scheme, makes the Julius Meinl market chain look like the Moroccan Krogers. But, inside, it’s your average supermarket, with a few local twists: 1) On one table near the roll aisle, vanocka, the frosting-drizzled, almond-topped Czech version of panettone, peeks through snowflake-stamped bags. 2) There’s an entire aisle devoted to different kinds of dumpling mixes. 3) There’s a vast selection of rohlicky (which look like straight, slender crescent rolls) poking out of woven baskets. Here are more rolls in one place, at one time, than I have ever seen. Furthermore, the two wall lengths of dairy products would make a French chef weak in the knees. Cream? Cheese? Spread? Cream cheese spread? Meltable cream cheese spread, in forty-seven varieties? This is a culture that apparently has yet to meet a cow it doesn’t like.

I gaze around for a few minutes, looking for rosemary in any form, but realize that my Hebrew vocabulary exceeds my Czech vocabulary, and my far cultural ego exceeds both of those, combined. No fresh herbs? I sniff pretentiously, and then realize that they do have fresh herbs—sold in terracotta pots, with dirt. Oops. That’s fresh, all right.

One tram ride back through lightly falling snow, a half-dozen used pots and pans, two fogged-up kitchen windows, and two hours later, lunch is chicken with thyme and orange-cream sauce, honey-glazed carrots, and rolls—but not rohlicky: San-Francisco-style sourdough rolls, with their familiar inflated-hockey-puck shape.

Later, I contemplate going to the Mozart Museum, but decide that the freezing weather rules out a trek to the outskirts of town, where the museum is located. Instead, I return to my vision of finding Café Imperial—this time with proper directions. I’ve studied the guidebook map, now, and have a strategy: approach from Namesti Republicky, and pick up Na Porici where it branches off. If that doesn’t work, my plan is to just ride Tram #26 back and forth until I find the café.

Café Imperial is not just any café. The photos (in the sidebar) illustrate only one aspect of the cafe’s character.

“Vesele vanoce.”
“Merry Christmas.”

Thursday, December 17, dawns foggy, white, and freezing, again. We take separate trams; my husband goes to school, and I go downtown, gripped by the need to buy things to prevent my banoonies from freezing off for the next ten days. I’m convinced that even the women wearing teeny woolen skirts and thin boots are warmer in this weather than I am, swaddled, as they are, in tights as deliciously thick as a layer of expensive raspberry preserves. My need for dense, dark underthings drives me into the halls of the new Marks and Spencer on Vaclavske Namesti, and, once I’m versed in the language of “100 denier” tights (for which I am prepared to pay dearly), I emerge much a warmer tourist. “Those are boutique prices,” my husband warned me. Alas, to women, the adjective “boutique” is synonymous with “charming and original;” for men, it means “stash wallet and pray.”

Behind Wenceslas Square, there’s a small exhibition of photos taken during the Revolution, in November 1989. Two dozen photos show crowds packed into Wenceslas Square, students sitting on the ground holding banners with writing in thin block letters, Czech police in riot gear, Russian soldiers standing with their legs far apart. There is more than one photograph of a vast column of water aiming at well-dressed men and women who face shop windows with their heads down.

Later, while I’m around the corner, in a second-floor bookstore café off Wenceslas Square, the sun comes out, and buildings begin to emerge from their ghostly grayness. Suddenly, ribbons on straw ornaments shine, edges of gold-sprayed mistletoe shine, etched crystal goblets in storefront windows shine, and the gold scrolls above the hooded figures on the top of the Palac Koruna glow in the light. I vowed to venture past the Charles Bridge, once there was sun, so after lunch near Narodni Trida (across from Café Louvre), I walk over the bridge, cross north a couple of streets to avoid the crowds, and start up the hill.

But deep in the streets west of the bridge, there’s not much sunlight. It’s late afternoon, and the steep angle of Nerudova Street turns the buildings into a staircase; the tallest buildings leave the narrow street in the dusk. The tearoom U Zlateho Cajovna turns out to be the end of the road, for me. Inside, people are sitting demurely at small tables, sipping tea and reading. The room looks cool, in blue and green, and dark wood, but feels warm. Handmade blue-and-green pottery tea sets dot the tables. Around the edge of the small room runs a ledge displaying children’s books; I choose a corner table under a book illustrated by Peter Sis and have jasmine tea with honey. Then a bald, elderly man with a booming Southern accent that belies his years arrives and plops down at a table with his translator, a Czech girl in her twenties who shoots a desperate look of apology at the rest of us and hunches into her white parka. “Y’ALL OUGHTA ‘RANGE A TRIP TO PLZEN NEXT S’MESTAR!” he shouts to the girl. The man rubs his head with a gloved hand and his eyes bulge. His translator mumbles a response and hides behind her menu. He takes out his wallet, which also bulges, slaps it on the table, and orders yogi tea. The tea-drinkers stare for a moment, then we slide our eyes back to our books and hunch away from the voice, too. It’s as though Tennessee Williams fell off a wall and squashed Jane Austen. The proprietors of the tearoom, two women wearing brightly-colored woven sweaters, give each other a look that seems to mean, “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Tram No. 9 goes back across the river, south of Charles Bridge, and begins to head northeast, past the national theater, Narodni Trida, Jindrisska, and Hlavni Nadrazi, up to where my husband’s family lives. After the voice of Senior Donor, U. of Alabama-Birmingham, the steel brrring of the tram bell is positively melodious.

# #

Friday: I accidentally get into Zlata Ulicka (the Golden Lane) next to the Castle, for 50 Kc instead of the usual tourist price of 350 Kc. “Jsem studenka,” I say to the cashier in the ticket booth, without realizing that I am no longer a studentka. Never mind! I am about to be trampled by hordes of Italian students, so I gather my change and head for the gate. Zlata Ulicka is less than a block long, and can fit no more than five people across its street; Kafka’s house lies partway down the row of connected houses.

After Zlata Ulicka, I assuage my guilt over cheating Czech tourism of 300 Kc by having coffee and babovka cake at Café Slavia, and writing Christmas postcards.

Monday, with the aim of visiting Strahov Monastery, I consult my guidebook’s transportation map, and take a tram across the river to Ujezd, at the bottom of Petrin Hill. The tram stop is a few hundred feet in front of the Revolution Memorial, a series of thin sculptures of human figures descending massive steps. Not far from the steps, the Hunger Wall runs up the hill. The funicular ascending to Strahov and the radio tower on top of Petrin Hill lies about a block north of the memorial, and of the tram stop. One forty-five-second trip up the hill costs 12 Kc, or as much as a ninety-minute tram ride. Welcome, tourists! I’m not bitter, but 1USD was worth 40 Kc a couple of years ago.

The funicular trundles up the hill, offering a spectacular view of the city, with its pink rooftops, and green-oxidized spires catching the southern light from a break in the clouds. About a third of the way up Petrin Hill, before ducking into the trees, the funicular brakes and sways back and forth very slightly for a minute, giving the six or seven tourists a photo op. The funicular continues on, stopping at Nebozizek, which seems to be little more than a practical joke on tourists, half of whom put one foot out of the funicular at this point, realize that the stop is basically in the middle of the forest, and quickly draw their foot back in. (Once he’s stopped laughing, my husband later tells me that the Nebozizek stop provides access to a restaurant. But I remain convinced that “nebozizek” is Czech for “nitwit.”) Finally, the funicular stops at the top of the mountain. Except that Strahov is now down the mountain—a steep, switchbacking, knee-twisting cobblestoned path partway across and down the mountain.

A terraced field, gray-green and dark under frost—an old vineyard, perhaps—gently bumps down the northeast side of Petrin Hill, just below the monastery, forming a small valley. On a patio outside the monastery, overlooking the valley, a Russian guide is shouting at her group. The library is the only part of Strahov open on Monday, and a docent directs me to its doors a few steps away. Inside, I slide my money through a small glass window to another docent. She primly slides her little door closed again to keep out the cold, and points to a flight of stairs without looking up, from inside her warm booth.

The monastery’s library is divided into two rooms: Philosophy and Theology. Both rooms are roped off, but you can gaze into them. The narrow Philosophy Room has two golden floors of books, with gilt-edged bookcases. It is the kind of room that exists in the minds of people who deeply love books. Somewhere on the shelves is tucked a copy of Diderot’s Encyclopedie.

Outside the Philosophy Room, in a series of display cases, is a catalogue of another sort: the neatly organized shelves contain rows of seashells and bugs. Each bug is carefully propped on a pin and labeled. The shells are not labeled. Along the hallway leading to the Theology Room, framed collections of polished, oval stones that look as if they once belonged in brooches, decorate the walls and continue the theme of order. Where the Philosophy Room was warm, the Theology Room is austere; its white walls seem to suck up any other hint of color in the room, and the ceiling fresco is nibbled on all sides by Baroque plaster curls. One floor of books extends down both sides of the long room, though it looks as though no one has come in and enjoyed a book here for years.

After Strahov, I find a tram that goes to Palac Flora, a shopping center on the east side of town. This is my effort to Christmas shop outside of the tourist boundaries (or at least outside of tourist prices), but every few feet, I hear American accents, which doesn’t bode well for my budget. The strange thing about the Palac Flora is that its four floors are arranged with dazzling logic: “Services” on the first floor, for example, while “Fashion” occupies the second floor. In the Czech equivalent of Pier 1, I join other shoppers trying to choose from among thirty styles of coffee mugs.

And that is Monday.

Tuesday, I manage to find the Dvorak Museum near Charles Square precisely at 1:00 in the afternoon, which is midway through the Museum’s two-hour lunch break. So I go wander around the square until 2:00. It’s quite large, vaguely British, and lacking in cafes around the edges. Happily, the Dvorak Museum is everything one might hope it would be: the first floor is filled with a detailed chronology of the composer’s life, along with artifacts and photographs. One case houses two crowns of golden leaves, given to Dvorak by Americans of Czech descent. On the second floor, in the middle of the room, a white piano stands in front of thirty wooden chairs; the museum offers concerts here, in the summer. During winter, though, you can sit for as long as you want, listening to Dvorak’s music fill the room from hidden speakers. While I’m listening, two older women in matching long brown coats and fur-covered babushka hats come in. Their white curls, under their hats, waft a bit and catch the late light through the windows, as they sit and listen, smiling.

Last: Christmas, here, means carp. On dozens of streetcorners, packed live into giant blue plastic tubs that are continuously hose-fed with fresh water, they oop oop oop anxiously until a man wearing plastic gloves, a thick plastic apron, and a dapper forest-green deerslayer cap with a hunting feather scoops one up in a net and drops it on the scale. If the customer is satisfied (and most are, nodding and freezing), the fisherman plops the carp on a board, whonks it on the head with a two-by-four, and then goes at it with the knife. At home, my father-in-law fillets the fish himself to make the traditional soup and breaded and fried fillets for Christmas. As I tell my dad, it makes preparing a turkey look like a cakewalk–or, at least, not nearly as exhausting. One needs a much stiffer drink after wrestling with carp than one might after trussing a bird. My husband and I agree that we’ll leave both culinary productions to the pros on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Veselé Vánoce.”
“Merry Christmas.”

Hannukah Party, Part II

The representative to the Hanukiyot from our class was an American Jewish grad student who read her part fluently. After her came another postdoc, from the advanced class, who absentmindedly gestured with her candle while reading. Since she was wearing a skirt no bigger than a bandana, however, no one was paying any attention to the flying wax. The Serbian and Hungarian postdocs stood up and read their parts, next, to loyal applause from the “Kitta Aleph” class members. Then there was a song. This pattern repeated about six or seven times; as each class sent its readers up, the applause grew increasingly more boisterous, as though we were watching some kind of Hannukah sports event, with everyone rooting for his team. The Twin Miss Ukraines, in this analogy, amounted to the half-time show.

Kira’s son and daughter, dressed in identical gray Snoopy sweatsuits, sat with a member of our class and his girlfriend and stared at it all while downing as much Sprite as their indulgent seatmates could provide. By the time things were over, all four of them ended up liberally sprinkled with Sprite and jelly-doughnut-filling. Kira, meanwhile, relaxed in the row behind us, grateful for the free babysitting.

Finally, when the supply of readers had been exhausted, and every candle lighted, the organizers nodded meaningfully to each other and opened a door behind the musicians. They vanished momentarily into what looked like a gym, returning with a stack of giant flat boxes of sufganiyot. This had the same effect on the crowd as the opening of the giant rear theater doors does in the last scene of “White Christmas,” when everyone assembled in the inn gasps at the snow beginning to fall, outside, right behind the stage where Bing Crosby’s character and his Christmas-tree tableau are singing. (Of course, this analogy was probably fueled by the serious Christmas withdrawal I was going through.) Here, the decidedly non-Christmassy crowd gasped at the hundreds of doughnuts that emerged from the gym and which the organizers happily took around to everyone, along with a pile of paper napkins. The napkins were no match for a hundred mouths, and even more delightfully squishy and oily doughnuts.

The appearance of the doughnuts signaled the end of the festivities. We beat a path with some friends to the Saturday Night café, and ate as though the doughnuts had made only a small dent in some holiday-sized appetites.

##

Unlike flying to Israel, flying out of the country involves a fairly minimal security rigamarole. However, house slippers made entirely of plastic are still best left at home, where the fact that they are plastic constitutes an advantage, rather than a mistaken threat to national security. Moreover, the phrase, “These shoes are the bomb!” will not really ameliorate the situation, and is best left in America, on the streets.

Nevertheless, we arrived at the highly-touted new international terminal at Ben-Gurion with plenty of time to leap through the security hoops. And to shop. Once you emerge from passport control, however, you’re greeted with a less-than-spectacular, forlorn little row of shops…but that’s before the real shopping, past the last security checkpoint.

The shopping extravaganza really lies near the end of the long journey to the departure gates. Gates A through D all extend in spokes from a giant rotunda. The tiled floor traces a Star of David, pointing, variously, to points where the diaspora (and gentile visitors) can deposit its dough: the jewelry store, the electronics store, the souvenir store (Biblical scents and soap) Arcaffe (Israel’s answer to Starbucks), and—of course—the Duty-Free store.

The core of the rotunda is a giant pool that catches the halo of manmade-rain falling from above, from the sides of a circular skylight. Presumably, the sound of the gentle rainfall it produces is designed to lull you into parting with your last few shekels; it also successfully hushes the annoying zing of credit cards through the cashier’s machine. (Zing! is widely recognized as the unhappy sound of your interest rates skyrocketing.)

This is the only place in Israel where precipitation occurs on a regular basis. I may rent a chair, here.

# # #

Prague has been freezing and foggy for the last two days. The blast of icy air that hit us as we emerged from the airport froze my nose-hairs, and my senses, as I stood there, smiling for a moment, thinking of Denver at Christmastime. What a strange kind of sentimentalism, to miss your nose-hairs turning to ice. Meanwhile, accustomed to the mild Israeli winter, where we turn on the heat if it dips below 50 degrees outside, we gasped and flexed our fingers, which were gloveless and rapidly turning white.

My husband pushed the luggage cart to the end of the arrivals row, and bravely sprinted off to look for the taxi we’d called for. “We can’t just take one of the ones sitting outside?” I had asked naively.

“No,” he replied patiently, zipping up his down vest. “They’re owned by the Prague airport-taxi mafia. One company controls the arrivals row, and they determine the prices. They’ll not only rip off tourists, but locals, too.”

Fortunately, affordable transportation in the form of AAA Taxi Car #407 arrived just as most of our outer extremities were beginning to freeze off. At one-thirty in the morning, the ride from Ruzyne Airport to Zizkov takes approximately fifteen minutes; the streets were empty, but glowing with Christmas lights. As we swung around neighborhood squares, I could see Christmas market stands with their wooden doors shut for the evening. In the long rows of apartment buildings, electric candles and lights dotted a few windows.

The next morning, my husband headed to school, and I headed for Old Town, buying mittens along the way, and trying to remember to say “Prosim” and “Dekuje moc,” instead of “Bevakasha” and “Toda raba” (“Please” and “Thanks very much” in Czech and Hebrew, respectively). In Italy, once, my brother and I nearly drove a waiter (and probably Mom, as well) nuts, when we tried communicating in French and Italian; “Where are you from?” he finally burst out, exasperated. We meekly handed him the menus and said, “Pizza, please.” On my first day back here, I mostly succeeded in convincing a couple of shopkeepers that I really had no idea where I was from.

It’s a short walk from my husband’s family’s home to the Powder Tower, the start of the coronation route, and then to the Charles Bridge. In the narrow Old Town streets, the tourist stands are doing a much better business in scarves than they were this summer. From each stand dangle different Christmas items: gingerbread ornaments with elaborate white scrolls of frosting; and woven, gleaming straw ornaments with red ribbon. Christmas is everywhere. When I arrive in Old Town Square, it’s taken up on all sides, in the middle, with the Christmas market: stalls selling everything from ornaments, cards, candles, and games to mulled wine and “roasted baby pig.” The only stall that isn’t selling something is the live crèche, which resembles a petting zoo. The donkey in the nativity scene, though, seems dissatisfied with his non-speaking role, and belts out a braying yelp that ring through the square.

Incidentally, if you dial up the Old Town webcam on the Internet, and squint a lot, you can make out the Christmas stalls and the enormous lighted Christmas tree, though it is a little smaller this year—no doubt as a result of the lawsuit an angry British tourist filed against the city last year when the high winds at Christmas blew the tree down, and smack onto his head.

I trek across Charles Bridge, where a jazz trio of old men is playing a jaunty version of the Beatles’ “Michelle, Ma Belle.” A group of blond-haired schoolkids from a tour group feeds a descending vortex of seagulls, on one side of the bridge. Even though those seagulls look like they would take a kid’s arm off, the middle-schoolers are screaming with delight. I turn around before reaching the end of the bridge, and decide to save the walk up to the castle for a day with sun.

People who have lived here all their lives know the shortcuts through building passageways, and can get from one side of town to the other by ducking in and out of them. I don’t, but I don’t mind walking; as long as I stick to the main streets, I can easily get from Old Town to Wenceslas Square. “I only had to take the map out once, near Tynska,” I proudly tell my husband, who appears to still be thinking fondly of lunch, which, he noted, was something you really couldn’t discuss with your rabbi: in other words, a paean to pork.

In any case, I do know how to get into one passageway, where the Lucerna Café and Cinema are located, off of Narodni Trida, near the National Theater. Under the passageway skylights hangs Czech artist David Cerny’s satire of national myth, in the form of a rider seated not-so-heroically on top of his upside-down horse. The giant hanging sculpture is swaying a bit, as usual. Up a staircase near the horse, the Lucerna’s black curtains, designed to keep the heat in the café, billow out rather theatrically, when anyone walks in. Inside, I sip tea and wonder where they hide the boxed Christmas cards in this town.

“EH-rev tov.”
“Good evening.”

Hannukah, Part I

Sahar had given directions in class a couple of weeks ago, all in Hebrew, for the Ulpan Hannukah party on Wednesday; unfortunately, she did it as more of an afterthought than anything else, hastily drawing a map to the Rehovot mall, and, for good measure, some snaky side streets. The main Rehovot Ulpan building was located on one of these streets. She must have thought it was pretty straightforward, because she then erased the map, and proceeded with class, before any of us really knew what happened.

I noticed the maps in my row were mostly incomplete; for some reason, they looked like primitive sketches of Paris, with Herzl Street as some sort of straightened River Seine. It seemed like a pointless exercise. I despaired of actually locating the party.

But on Monday, she issued more lenient instructions. “Go to the mall,” she told us. “I will wait inside until five minutes to six. Whoever meets me there, by then, we will walk together to the main Ulpan building.” She added, “And don’t forget to bring your music.”

My husband and I showed up Wednesday evening at the mall, running late. From the security line outside the mall, we could see Sahar and a handful of “Kitta Aleph” (Beginners’ Level) class members; they were scrubbed, polished, and wearing their student best. Spotting us, Sahar practically threw open the mall’s giant glass doors to us. She was wearing her customary spotless tennis shoes and a raspberry sweatsuit with brocade. She looked festive, as though she were ready to shepherd a group of third-graders through the Holiday Concert.

I handed her a package of biscotti, wrapped in parchment paper and tied with red thread. Commandment Number Eleven: Thou Shalt Give the Teacher a Holiday Gift. (Even Though Ye Are Twenty-Eight and Not Taking the Class for Credit. Duh.) “For me?” she beamed, pulled me into a hug, and pecked me on both cheeks. My husband, who did not quite understand why I had gone into a frenzied biscotti-making mode the day before, looked on, as Sahar peered over my shoulder and spotted him.

“Who’s this?” she asked. I introduced him, and she looked at me, astonished. “I did not know you were married!” Then she turned back to my husband. “So you are at the Weizmann, too?”Apparently, she had mistakenly assumed I was the postdoc in the family.

Fortunately, an older man who was accompanying the group waved frantically at Sahar from a few feet away, and called to her in English, “We must go now or we will be late!” She dashed away to lead the group, preventing my husband from informing her that he was really the only one of us technically at the Weizmann.

The tiny group hurried after Sahar and Mr. Now, heading for the far end of the mall. Crowds of families bearing Hannukah gifts knocked their bags and boxes against each other; the kids, suffering from a five-minute sugar withdrawal, circled the parents like whirling dervishes. Somehow, the boys’ saucer-sized yarmulkes managed to stay attached to their heads.

Sahar dropped back to where we were, unwrapping the biscotti, and remarking on the crowds. “It’s always like this, this time of year,” she said, and took a bite of biscotti.

“They’re not kosher,” I said to a group of balloons that passed between us, as a toddler plodded past, underneath and attached to them. My husband sidestepped the toddler.

“These are homemade?” Sahar munched a biscotti, and quickened her pace, to keep up with Mr. Now, who was already slipping out of sight, heading down the escalator. “Very good! You must teach me how to make them!” She nudged one of the postdocs who would be reading a poem in Hebrew at the festivities, and who was nervously studying her lines as she walked. “Here, try one of these.”

We made it downstairs, and outside. (“Why did we have to go through the mall?” my husband asked.) Mr. Now somehow caught three green crosswalk lights, and, within seconds, was ahead of us by a block.

Sahar was dusting biscotti crumbs from her fingers as she hustled us down the sidewalk after Mr. Now and his dotted line of Kitta Aleph students (one Serbian, one Hungarian, one Russian, and one German). “There will be over one hundred people here,” she explained to my husband. “Students from all the Ulpan classes, and olim—new immigrants. And those who are learning as part of conversion.”

The Rehovot Ulpan building was tucked down a side street, about two blocks away from the mall. Its neon sign lit up the street, still wet from the day’s rain. We saw three members of the other, advanced, class walking in, but they didn’t say anything to our group.

The building looked like an average high school (only far more clean). As we walked inside, shouts, applause, and accordion and klezmer music rang out overhead, at the top of the stairwell. On one landing, three ladies were gathered, holding colored paper folders with menorahs and dreidels on them; when they saw Sahar, they smiled, and waved the folders at her. The Serbian and Hungarian postdocs joined Sahar for some last-minute coaching, as the rest of us drifted up the stairs.

Sahar had been right: about one hundred people were crammed into the second-floor foyer, at the top of the staircase, packed into fifteen rows of chairs. As more stragglers like us arrived, the organizers pulled more rows of chairs from God knows where, and beckoned at us to sit down. At the front of the room stood a giant menorah, and a table with three smaller menorah (Hanukiyot); between the giant menorah and the table, the accordion player and the klezmer player charged on.

Dozens of Ulpan students—adults, families, and a handful of elderly students—sat in the rows, waiting for the ceremony to start, talking and applauding when the musicians played a flourish. Distracted, I sat down on a bench of chairs on the same side of the room as our group, and our teacher, and looked around for a better vantage point–one that wouldn’t put us behind a post. Two girls holding cards with phonetically-written Hebrew were sitting next to us, their heads bent together, conferring on their texts. When I finally took a closer look at them, I felt like a dried pea.

I was sitting next to the Twin Miss Ukraines, dressed identically in black pants, black boots, and tan, tight sweaters. They both had blond-brown hair down to their waists and faces shaped like softened inverted triangles. You could have staged a play on their cheekbones. Of course, they had flawless skin. Two sets of giant blue eyes turned toward me as we sat down, scanned me and my outfit (“What are those? Shoes? We have cinderblock bookends that are more stylish”) without comment, and then promptly registered more interest in my blue-eyed husband. One of them finally turned her gaze away to a boyfriend who’d been relegated to sitting on the stairs, and who was trying to pay court, from a distance, via his cell phone. She blew him a kiss, and I groaned inwardly.

The organizers (all women) bustled about, merrily officious, rounding up readers and rabbis. Finally, after some help from the accordion player, the room quieted down so the evening could begin. Everything was in Hebrew, and I guessed that my classmates and I understood about one-third of the words we heard—and not the ones that were next to each other, either.

A man wearing glasses, a yarmulke, flannel shirt, and jeans that were too short for him, popped up to recite the first prayer. He rattled off the blessing, lighted a candle on the table Hanukiyot, and sat back down. The whole thing had taken no more than thirty seconds. “He must be the Reform rabbi,” my husband whispered.

Rabbi Number Two was Orthodox: black hat, black coat and pants, and a long beard. He was much more animated than Rabbi Number One, and he gestured with the candle like a practiced storyteller.

Each Ulpan class had apparently selected three readers: the first reader would introduce herself, and, on behalf of the Jewish community in her country, then light a candle on the giant menorah; two others would read from Hebrew poems. Most of the students read slowly, but with confidence. Of one who read particularly quickly, my husband grimaced and said, “That was done in the heaviest Russian accent possible.”

The most surprising readers were two elderly men, both slightly hunched and wearing red yarmulkes. They stood at the front of the room and swayed, reading. “We are new immigrants from Uruguay,” they announced together, in Hebrew. When they finished, there was wild applause and they grinned like little kids.

“KH0-ref.”
“Winter.”

It’s almost mid-December: a fine time to sit on the beach.

Really! The beaches in Tel Aviv, swamped with the oily droves in summer, are now nearly bare. A burly man who appears to be the Original Middle Eastern Beach Bum (sporting a sweater and faded, flowered surf shorts) waddles along the water’s edge, scooping up his rentable plastic beach chairs, but the only real movement is of people bundled up, sipping coffee in one of the beach cafes.

By “beach cafe,” I don’t mean a cafe where you gaze at the beach, which lies about a hundred yards away. I mean, you walk down to the beach, follow the two-foot-wide wooden boardwalk over the sand to a handful of tea-party-sized tables, and plunk down in your plastic chair, which sinks into the sand. You’re close enough to hear the waves, and to see the tide begin to come in, pooling a few feet away. If you’re willing to risk a grain or two of sand in your cappuccino, there’s no better way to watch the sun set in Tel Aviv, in winter.

This is how we spent Monday afternoon, before seeing “Coffee and Cigarettes” in the Opera Tower Rav Chen 5. Well, this, and thinking with a wee bit of schaudenfreude about the weather forecasts for much of the U.S. (cold and snowy) and Prague (very cold, not yet snowy).

If it’s any consolation, it’s cold and rainy here, today.

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Tonight is the ulpan Hannukah party. When I mentioned on the phone to my brother about my misgivings over singing “Sevivon, Sov, Sov, Sov,” he pointed out that now I knew how Josh S. felt for virtually all of December.

Four more days until Prague! Or, as my husband has begun to refer to it, “P minus 4″ — “Pork minus 4.”