Say It in Hebrew

“Babka ve kotlei ha-ZIR.”
“Babka and bacon.”

It may be spring, but, for some reason, I’m not yet willing to leave behind wintry comfort foods. Now that the birds start chirping at four o’clock in the morning, I have a lot of time to think, albeit incoherently, before the day really starts. I guess this explains why I was seized with the urge to make babke today, a chocolate rolled cake that apparently every Central and Eastern European culture, as well as Jewish cooking, claims as one of its own native comfort foods. Nevertheless, the Israeli recipe renders something completely different from what’s served under the same name in Prague’s Cafe Slavia; or, at least, what thudded out of my oven bears no resemblance to that light, swirly chocolate cake.

To make babke, you take risen dough (from yeast); sacrifice a kitchen towel and dust it with flour; pat out the dough on the towel; and spread over it a mixture of melted dark chocolate, espresso, and raisins. Then you roll the thing by tugging upward on the towel and somehow slingshot it into a loaf pan. The babke then rises for forty minutes, unless you have so abused it that the dough deflates sadly, and lies in the pan, doing a very good impression of a brick. Nevertheless, after forty minutes, you pretend that it has, indeed, “doubled in volume”, as the recipe requests, and, crank the oven up, cross your fingers and go off to read.

Forty minutes later, removing the loaf from the oven requires serious exertion. Your babke is baked, all right, but it resembles a building compound instead of dessert. It is a baking abomination: the chocolate mixture is hiding in the middle of the loaf, and, as you whack off three inches from each end, it scurries further into hiding. The parts without the chocolate-raisin-coffee mixture taste like boiled pizza dough.

The solution, here, is to think globally: as long as it tastes good, does form really matter?

Thus the babke migrated southward, and has become biscotti.

# # #

Thursday night, we decided to test Rehovot’s “Dublin Irish Pub”, north of the train station, next door to Caffe Milano, in the Science and Industry Park (which has what has to be the largest English sign in town, with two-foot high letters).

Festooned with pale-green and maroon stencils of figures from the Book of Kells on one wall (“Strength,” “Respect,” “Loyalty,” and “Beauty”), “Irish” band instruments, whole forests of dark wood paneling, and music from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, the “Dublin Irish Pub” was a textbook Irish Pub, complete with nook-and-cranny private seating behind small stained-glass windows advertising Harp Lager. We opted for the main table, though, a long, high table in the middle of the pub that could seat about ten people; we were the only two people at it, initially, and I was worried that sitting there obligated one to sing. A waitress who looked more Irish than I do came over and recited menu offerings to us in Hebrew. When my husband told her we spoke English, she switched over effortlessly, and placed a tiny bowl of Israeli snack nuts in front of us, the only concession to local tastes.

“The menus are bilingual,” she smiled, and handed us two menus. Hebrew listings occupied the right side of the page, while the left was in English. The four panels of world liquors fascinated us, but we were surprised to see that the pub had a wider offering of Czech beer than it did of Irish beer.

“Could I have a hot toddy?” I asked the waitress. Her perfectly-plucked eyebrows went up.

“What is a ‘hot toddy’?” she said.

“You mix rum, honey, and boiling water.” I replied. “And then you garnish it with lemon.”

My husband hid behind his menu. The waitress looked at me sceptically. “We only have one hot drink, Irish Coffee.” Listen, make my life easy and just order a Guinness, like everyone else, I could hear her thinking.

“It’s really easy to make a hot toddy…” I started to say. Then I gave up. “Irish Coffee, bevakasha.”

The waitress went away. My husband lowered the menu with a beatific smile.

“They serve food here,” he said. “Do you want to know what kind of food?”

“Colcannon? Corned beef and cabbage?” I guessed.

“‘Bacon Sandwich’!” he glowed.

“Close enough,” I said. “Where?”

He pointed to the menu; sure enough, there was the Sandwich of Forbidden Meat, the Anti-Kosher, in the form of a BLT. Since we’d already eaten, we restrained ourselves and simply gazed at the menu. Then we made reservations for Monday night, which we have noted on the calendar with a small curly tail and the word “Oink!”

“A-VEEV.”
“Spring.”

Sometime last Wednesday night, spring rolled in, and, ever since, it’s been sunny and about seventy degrees, here. Cafes have stowed their heaters and tied up the winter awnings; families have started to picnic, out on the lawn, again; and there’s the cheerful delirium, wherever you go, of Israelis running away from winter.

“Don’t stow your blankets and scarves just yet,” the Visiting Scientists liason warned me when I visited the office, yesterday. “It will be ridiculously hot and cold until the end of March.” I nodded politely, left the office, and then spent two hours lying outside in the sun, watching two clouds move gradually from north to south, like giant steamboats.

Others are less pessimistic. The corner grocer greeted me in an ebullient mood, and showed me cell-phone pictures of his children. Two tiny faces, pale and blue-tinged from the digital screen, looked out: a one-year old little girl with a shock of white-blond hair, and a twelve-year-old boy, wearing glasses. “She looks Scandinavian,” the grocer said, pointing at his daughter.

“Is her mother Scandinavian?” I asked (logically, I thought).

“No, no, no.” He laughed uproariously. “We’re both Israeli. Born and raised here. But we’re white.” Here he poked at his skin, which was really more pinkish than white. “My parents came here in the Seventies, from the old….Russia. The Soviet Union.” He shrugged. “But we are from Israel; the children are from Israel.”

“Spasiba!” he called to an elderly woman, who was leaving the store. (It means “thanks” in Russian.)

“Do you speak Russian?” he asked, when I returned to the checkout stand with my things.

“No, but a little bit of Czech,” I replied.

“Oh. Really?” The grocer adjusted his yarmulke and blinked. “Tell me something in Czech.” He paused to shout out greetings in Hebrew to the Tibon Veal man, idling in the street in his truck, then called back something in Russian to the woman who runs the deli at the back of the store.

This is an average day of shopping. My grocer speaks at least three languages fluently; probably more, for all I know. He makes an effort to greet shoppers in their own language; since the grocery is a block from the Institute, he’s an international one-man band of “Hello, how are you, strawberries are on sale!”

# # #

About two weeks ago, when it was still blustery, and spring was an illusion, I began seeing triangle-shaped cookies called hamentaschen stacked in the front cases of bakeries, alongside the usual rows of burekas and other feats of phyllo dough. The cookies herald the coming of Purim, and their name means “Haman’s pockets”. (The triangular shape of the cookies echoes Haman’s tri-corner hat.) In the supermarket on Herzl, the bakery had three trays of these perched on the counter, but I couldn’t read the flavors listed in Hebrew.

(“Do you speak English?” I politely asked the Russian bakery worker in Hebrew, and gestured to the cookies.
“Lo,” she said, frowning, and crossed her arms.
So no hamentaschen for me.
“Well, the Cold War is over!” I said, and huffed off.)

Who is Haman, and what is Purim? I didn’t know, either.

The Judaism 101 site notes that Purim involves some serious celebrating: “According to the Talmud, a person is required to drink until he cannot tell the difference between ‘cursed be Haman’ and ‘blessed be Mordecai,’ though opinions differ as to exactly how drunk that is.” Someone ought to tell the supermarket bakery workers that it’s supposed to be a festive occasion.

“Ha sefer mi zahav.”
“The Golden Book.”

22nd Annual Jerusalem International Book Fair: Part II

At a book stall at the bottom of the black steps and to the left, two representatives were explaining the Bar/Bat Mitzvah Book, the Golden Book registry of Jewish children. I inched closer, and one of the representatives, a girl about eighteen years old with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a starched white shirt and slacks, asked me something in Hebrew. I explained that I didn’t speak Hebrew, but asked her, in Hebrew, if she spoke English, and could she explain what the book was?

“Do you know what a bar mitzvah is?” she asked me, smiling.
“Yes, sort of,” I stammered. “But I’m not Jewish.”
“That’s ok,” she said, and launched into a description of the book. “A bar mitzvah is when children become adults, or take responsibility for themselves, in the eyes of the religion.” She paused here, to make sure I understood, and I nodded. “So parents paid a fee, and had their children’s name and birth dates, or bar mitzvah dates, recorded in this book. This volume is from 1936.” She brushed her long bangs out of her eyes and opened the cover carefully. Below the lights of the hall, the copper glowed white.

Down the page was pasted a line of black-and-white photographs of children; next to each photo was the child’s name, date of birth, and birth place. If the Book Fair was a U.N. of books, the Golden Book itself was a silent children’s U.N., with entries from around the globe: Claudio Morpourgo, Asher Abraham Lazar; Toronto, Bratislava, Sydney.

“One of the significant aspects of this registry is that many of the children were lost in the Shoah, the Holocaust,” the girl went on, “but this book preserves them and their memories.” I wasn’t sure if she meant “memory” or “memories”, but I spent the rest of the day thinking about both.

A flat-screen panel hung on the side of the stall, showing a film of images from the Golden Book, highlighting certain children’s entries, such as that of Amnon, born in 1937, in Kovna, Poland. A foundation now oversees the entries, and families worldwide can still record important events in the life of a child, the film noted, with a donation of 160 shekels (about $32). Children who were recorded in the book received a colorful certificate imprinted with their name, with pictures of children dancing happily in the margins.

Proceeds from the book now fund national forest preservation, and boxes of dozens of tiny pine seedlings, no more than a foot high, decorated the Golden Book stall. Next to the simple black-and-white images and hand-printed text from 1936, the colors of the modern certificate, and the live greens leaning toward the onlookers, were startling.

“Sfar-EEM.”
“Books.”

22nd Biannual Jerusalem International Book Fair: Part I

On the side of the road to Jerusalem lie dozens of small, hollow, rust-red tanks, scattered like toys someone forgot to pick up. Left over from the battle of 1948, the vehicles date to an era when military manpower was more vulnerable; these little tanks look like they would be squashed to tinfoil if they ran into a Jeep.

June, an American-born friend from the Book Club who had mentioned her interest in going to the Fair at the last Book Club meeting, pointed them out, as we wound our way up the mountain pass (through the Judean Hills) to Jerusalem, on Tuesday morning, in her car.

One of the first things indicating that you are about to enter the city is a Jewish cemetery, a looming wall of pale stone, cut into the mountainside. The graves are stacked and terrace up the hill; it is all stone, without any grass.

We circled the conference center for a few minutes and finally found a space right outside the main entrance.

“I want you to know,” June said, negociating her car into a tiny space, “that I put all the dents and scratches on this car. Really!” She cramped the wheel and waved nonchalantly at the row of cars behind us, honking in impatience. “The roads and driveways here are much more narrow than the U.S. But none of these dings has come from an accident. There!” She straightened the car out, put it in park, and locked the gearshift with a giant padlock. I looked at it in astonishment. “Oh, yes,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “This thing paid for itself when thieves broke into our car and couldn’t put it in drive. Of course, they were so angry that they ripped out the stereo and smashed all the windows, but we still have the car.” She grinned.

The car safely locked in place, we headed inside, where everyone was waiting expectantly at the top of a huge black stone flight of stairs that led down into a giant hall and a maze of publishers’ stalls. At the stroke of eleven, the crowd of patient, well-dressed men and women stampeded down the stairs in bibliophile frenzy.

Three vast halls of books awaited, although June and I initially thought the Fair was confined to the first hall, which would have been a giant Fair on its own. Green – shaded signs from the country’s largest bookstore chain, Steimatzky’s, hung from the ceiling over the English-language publishers’ stalls, which took up most of the first hall. (Steimatzky’s oversaw all sales of English-language books.) A publisher of architectural texts was set up next to Random House; near one publisher was a dual-language display of copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, complete with handmade folded-paper boats. I felt like pointing out that the main vessel in Huck Finn is a rickety raft, but gave them points for creativity, anyway.

For some reason, the Hebrew-language publishers seemed relegated to a draftier part of the hall. These book stalls carried none of the flashy, mainstream paperbacks stacked around the English-language area of the hall; instead, decorated haggadahs (a book read during Passover), calendars, maps of the Holy Land, and botanical prints of plants mentioned in the Bible gathered their own crowds. The Israel Museum was selling red boxes containing rolled-up replicas of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

June and I agreed to meet every hour at the bottom of the black steps; at noon, we met, gushed about the feast of books, traded tips (a special offer on a month’s subscription to Ha’aretz; cookies in the Henry Holt / Norton pavilion), and agreed to meet in another hour. Moments later, we bumped into each other in the Literary Cafe, where a crowd was sitting at small French-cafe tables, listening to Eli Jacobs discuss his latest book for young adults. June opted to stay, and I looked longingly at the burekas (small pastries filled with eggplant, potato, or corn; the Middle Eastern cousin of the Cornish pasty), but couldn’t find a place to sit, so I wandered on, into the next hall.

Between the Literary Cafe and the entrance to the next hall was a closed-off room with a sign that read, “Authors, Editors, and Agents”. A woman sat outside the room, at a table, and rearranged welcome packets. No one went in; no one came out; it was completely silent. I wondered if anyone was in there at all.

The next hall was occupied by more Hebrew-language publishers, mostly academic, but the other half of the hall was taken up by international publishers: French, German, Italian, Spanish. It was a little U.N. of books. The French took up two aisles, with orderly, bright rows of books.

On this side, the atmosphere was hushed; the international pavilions were carpeted, and many of the delegations had clearly spent days unpacking and setting up house–some, almost literally. The Italians, for example, had more amenities than some well-appointed Venetian hotels. Their pavilion, which hummed with activity, looked like a cross between a design showroom and a book lover’s cafe. They had giant vases of fresh flowers, an area with stylish wicker couches where four women were chatting, another section that resembled a dining room, with a black-glass table and folding metal-and leather chairs, and an avant-garde spherical screen that continually projected a film of Italian countryside. I stood in the main aisle and listened, for a moment. Was that music? Why, yes: Vivaldi.

All that was missing from the Italian pavilion was fresh pasta and pesto, but they had attempted to cover even that, taking the opportunity to not only promote books, but also food, wine, and tourism. Here, I picked up a poster detailing the traditional dishes and recipes of the Treviso region. (The back of the poster features a culinary map; the city of Treviso itself is distinguished by a tiramisu icon and a duck on a plate with knife and fork–the roast goose icon.) A representative offered me a discount on Italian lessons at the Embassy in Tel Aviv, but I declined politely. If it had been a competition, the Italians would have won; in fact, I expected to see some kind of blue “First Prize” ribbon dangling, somewhere, from their fancy digs.

The German delegation, a ways down, had opted for the more businesslike approach of tall chrome and blue-colored shelves of books. They had nowhere to sit. It reminded me a little bit of the Information counter at Frankfurt International Airport.

Nestled among the big-league players were smaller organizations of worldly book lovers: the Instituto Cervantes and its red drapery, the Institute for Cultural Relations of Israel and Ibero-America, the Warsaw International Book Fair, the Romanian delegation, the Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay, and the red-and-blue themed stall for books from Poland.

By the time I finished walking around the international publishers’ hall, I was thoroughly dazzled…and exhausted. I kept looking for my luggage.

But by far the single most compelling aspect of the Book Fair was a stand devoted to just one book: the Children’s Book, or the Bar/Bat Mitzvah Book, the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, an atlas-sized volume from 1936, which was covered with hammered copper. Dancing figures of children played on the front; as a representative opened the book for a curious onlooker, I glimpsed a row of black-and-white photos of children running down the middle of the page.

“Me-shun-YAH.”
“Strange.”

“And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.” — Hamlet, 1.5.185.

#1: The quartet of lime-green parrots who live somewhere at the west end of our street, are released at dawn, and spend all day progressing eastward, squawking like durable chew-toys. Yesterday, I spotted them on a power line, mid-morning, before they had made it too far up the street. They kept flocking back to a second-floor window, where a woman disappeared behind brown-tinted, sliding glass doors, into a room with polished furniture and yellow cabinets. I stood there, watching the parrots and the apartment doors, until I realized that I must look like an asylum escapee, and hurried away. When I walked back down the street, a few hours later, carting a baguette and (as it turned out, the wrong) ingredients for tomato soup, the parrots had landed in the trees outside our apartment. No more than three would sit in the tree at one time, and if one descended in a storm of green feathers to claim a foothold (clawhold?), another one would bounce up into the air, as though the tree were juggling.

#2: The nightly pack of three-a.m.-howling, wild dogs that roam the neighborhood. This is not your average gang of big, snarly beasts; instead, these are ridiculously small poodles, from the sound of their bark. Wild poodles? More like retired-professor-toys that somehow manage to escape from Tenure Tower in the middle of the night and wreak squeaky havoc on residents’ sleep.

#3: The constant presence of two (often competing) voices in Israeli discourse. It might be more logical to call them the two main topics of Israeli discourse except that both have the urgency of speech. One is the subject of the Holocaust: survivors’ accounts and the work of Yad Vashem, analysis of various’ agents (countries, political figures, individuals) complicity in, and responsibility for, the atrocities. The other main voice focuses on the Territories, and primarily on militant/terrorist violence toward Israel (the continual Quassam attacks; Palestinian conflicts with Jewish settlements, etc.). The one exception to this is the weekly “Twilight Zone” series that runs in Ha’aretz, which portrays the conditions of Palestinians caught in the middle of the political struggle in a sympathetic light. The two voices often speak over each other, or comment on the same topic; Abbas’s Ph.D. discourse, which denies the canonical figure of six million Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust, is a recent example. Another example, more politically charged, is the regular Letters to the Editor in Ha’aretz from left-wing readers, who take their fellow citizens to task for supporting what they view to be atrocious erosions of human rights in the Territories, similar, in their view, to the erosion of Jewish rights by the Third Reich.

In the last month, the discussion of whether aspects of Holocaust memory could be used morally came to a head with some settlers’ appropriation of the Star of David armband to protest disengagement. Those who designed the orange armband with the Star on it claimed they were using it as a symbol of left-wing oppression; in removing settlers from Israeli land, they argued, the proponents of disengagement were acting as a kind of Gestapo. Some Israelis found this appropriate; many found this group of settlers’ equation of the State of Israel with the Nazis to be untenable. (The Attorney General of Israel is now investigating whether the settlers’ use of Nazi imagery violates the law against incitement.)