Say It in Hebrew

“Ta’am.”
“Gourmet.”

After reading this article from Ha’aretz’s “Underground” page, I wanted to see this market, Tiv Ta’am, which boasts all sorts of sushi prep and other non-Israeli foods. However, since the market is in Rishon LeZiyyon, (certainly inaccessible by foot; not on the train line; off-limits, by bus; and rather expensive by taxi), it’s unlikely I’ll get there.

No problem–I discovered today that the organic store on Herzl sells a small but fascinating variety of foreign foods. Sushi ingredients are shelved next to the tortilla chips; there’s a whole shrine to tofu, in the form of a refrigerated section; and (if you have any money left after shelling out 8 shekels for a pristine, pesticide-free plum) the store sells an abbreviated line of L’Occitaine.

Still no decent blue cheese or baguettes in town, grumble, grumble.

“Yafo ba lila.”
“Jaffa at night.”

Last night, we went to Yafo / Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, with a friend from Serbia and her friend, Omer, who is Israeli, and the only one of us with a car. Omer is extremely tall, thirty-ish, with a clean-shaven head and a dark mustache and beard. He looks like what I imagine Moses looked like in his pre-Commandment days. Omer is unflappable, generous, and takes one step where the rest of us might take four. It’s a rather Biblical stride: vast, decisive, focused.

“Have you been in Yafo?” Omer asked, as we pulled out of Rehovot.

“We were there, once, this winter,” my husband said. “Erin was there for Easter.”

The Serbian friend hadn’t been, yet.

“Hmm, I hope I remember how to get there,” Omer mused. He swerved casually to avoid imminent death by a taxi driver on the left, and continued down the highway. With the wind rushing past, it actually felt cool outside.

“When were you last there?” my husband called up to Omer, in the front seat.

“Oh, two and a half years ago.”

Close to Yafo, we stopped for a red light at an intersection anchored, on one corner, by a prison and morgue. The tan building loomed up in spotlights, behind rusted barbed wire.

“That’s where they keep prisoners and dead people,” Omer said in his laconic way.

My husband noted that it looked heavily guarded.

“The prisoners, yes,” Omer agreed, flicking on the turn signal. “The dead are not guarded so much.”

We arrived at the southern edge of Yafo, and Omer parked in a lot at the end of Yefet Street, off Kedumim Square, which was lighted by dozens of lightbulbs strung on wires above the path into the square. An enormous bass beat thudded through the air, coming from a disco that appeared to be operating on the second story of an apartment building across the street from the parking lot.

“Let’s go look at Andromeda’s Rock!” Omer shouted over the music, and we went through the square, past the church where I attended the multilingual Easter Mass, this spring, and stopped near the Al-Adin Restaurant, where, between the extremely pale English-speakers going in and out of Al-Adin, you could glimpse whitecaps crashing out in the dark sea. According to Greek myth, Andromeda was chained to a rock in the Mediterranean to appease the gods for the misdeed of some distant relative. Meanwhile, as a horrible sea monster is nibbling on her toes and worse, Persues (son of Zeus and bearer of Medusa’s snaky, severed head) drops by, proclaims Andromeda beautiful, promises to marry her, and kills the sea monster by flourishing the head of the Gorgon (aka Medusa) at him.

“Mythical Greek Sea Monster” does not appear to be on the menu at Al-Adin.

We continued down the coastal path, which you can take all the way to the Tel Aviv beaches, but stopped to turn back to Yafo. Omer wanted to take us to the Abu Al-Afiya, Yafo’s famous Arabic bakery. He treated us to small pizzas from their wood-fired ovens. Abu Al-Afiya, on the main street of modern Yafo (which is about a block of lively real estate, at night), was doing a healthy business. To order, you walk up to the counter and peer past or through the giant clear plastic cylinders of baked goods: all sorts of pitas, bagels, sesame-seed-dusted breads, sesame candies, and baklava in dazzling shapes.

We went back to Old Yafo, walking past the coastal side, and the small port, and then went up via a steep stone staircase, and through a dozen old arched passageways, back to Kedumim Square.

My husband remembered that Yafo was well-known for its celebrity residents. “Vanunu lived here, didn’t he?” he asked Omer.

“Vanunu?” Omer gulped on his pita. “You know about him in Europe?” Well, not really, my husband admitted. Omer looked relieved, and took up the cause.

“Yes! Celebrity homes in Yafo!” He looked delighted. “We will find them. Would you like to?” he asked us. I demurred: this struck me as an Israeli version of a Hollywood “Homes of the Stars” tour, which, as any native of Southern California will tell you, is only for tourists of the most gullible variety. Did I care to see Natalie Portman eating an omelette in her Yafo kitchen? No, thank you.

I was outnumbered. Omer asked a passerby for directions to the celebrity neighborhood; I could swear the passerby and his friends snickered wildly as Omer led us away.

We ended up back near the parking lot, and were somehow drawn in through a set of vast metal gates (marked with large crosses) to the direction of the music. Inside the gates, though, the disco was the least interesting element of the scene: a giant church stood in the middle of the yard; beside it was a blacktop, flooded with light, where kids were playing an unorganized game of soccer. Past the blacktop were stairs up to a long outdoor cafe. Behind the outdoor cafe and a long wall rose a block of luxury apartment buildings–evidently the Andromeda neighborhood. Dozens of men were sitting, drinking coffee and smoking. Next to the church, two women sat in patio chairs and smoked a nargilah, shooing away the kids.

A woman in a purple top, with her hair pulled so tightly back that it erased some of her wrinkles, was sweeping the flat stone parterre in front of the church. Our friend from Serbia stepped delicately around her to walk toward the church doors. “Segur, segur!” the woman yelled at us. “Closed, closed!”

The churchyard was crowded, on one side, with dozens of women sitting and chatting. Kids were threading in between everyone, on bikes, skates, and feet. The longer we stood there, the more conspicuous we were; but the more we stood there, looking at the church, the stranger it grew.

On the base of the outer wall of the church was a marble tombstone with a large cross at the top and Arabic lettering down the center. There was also an outline of a neon Christmas tree decoration, hanging on the side of the church.

Gradually, it began to dawn on me that this was a Christian Arabic church. If nothing else, the five-foot wooden Santa Claus cutout attached to a tall pine tree next to the church seemed to suggest this.

“Are there Arabic Catholics?” my husband asked me. I had to admit I didn’t know.

“I guess so,” I replied. But, I thought, it’s not the sort of thing you read about in the parish newsletter.

We walked out of the churchyard–some of us more dazed than others.

“Something more to eat? Drink?” Omer asked. We headed back to Abu Al-Afiya, walking past two blocks of studios or shops that were shut tightly with corrugated-metal doors. About a block away from the bakery, from under a huge pile of cauliflower leaves and cardboard fruit boxes, something came dashing out of the shadows.

“A rat!” our Serbian friend cried. I watched it gallop past my husband’s fully-clothed pant leg and briefly wished I had worn jeans. Of course, the rat’s furry little mind was not focused on running up tourist pant legs attached to shrieking tourists, but of getting home after an all-you-can-gorge-on banquet in the trash pile. The rat ran further down the block, and finally, with great effort, stuffed itself into a hole in the wall.

We all required some fortification afterwards. Omer treated us to fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, carrot juice, and a pita stuffed with cheese. We, too, went back down the block in a semi-gorged state.

On the ride home, our Serbian friend asked if we had heard about Tu b’Av, or what seemed to me to be the Israeli Valentine’s Day.

Omer clarified the source of the story. “When the ancient tribes of Israel were warring, Binyamin smote one city, and all that was left of it were six hundred men who hid. Then, the six hundred men had to find wives, so they chose from other tribes’ women.”

“This is related in the Bible?” the Serbian friend asked Omer. She sounded skeptical. “Maybe you will show me where.”

A mile or so later, the Serbian friend asked Omer if he believed that he was descended from one of these tribes. Israeli Jews, he said, believe that they are descended from the son of the son of the son of the son….of King David.

“Do you think you are?” the Serbian friend asked Omer.

Omer thought while navigating the car through a late-night traffic jam on the Ayalon Highway. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a chance.” Then he rubbed his head. “But you know, I don’t think so. King David was a redhead.”

“Me-chi-RA!”
“Sale!”

P.T. Barnum would be delighted.

“Hit-nat-KUT.”
“Disengagement.”

Insight into the word’s connotation in Hebrew.

Last Friday’s newspaper contained a sixty-four page section on disengagement, with analysis, opinions / editorials, advertisements for mostly left-of-center organizations, and a few texts of relevant policies, such as the much-referred-to road map for peace. Virtually none of the stages of the road map, as far as I can tell, have actually been implemented.

Anyway, it was enough reading material to carry an outside (way outside) observer through until mid-week, after the period of legal residency in the settlements expired, and reports began to pour in from the thousand or so journalists camped out in Gaza about families preparing either for a final stand, or a final glance around the house before departing.

We don’t even have a tv, and I was overwhelmed. Western press seized on the sensational aspects of disengagement in an attempt to hear all sides of the story: on the major English-language mainstream news websites, you can choose to read accounts from every “type” available: “reasonable” and “unreasonable” settlers; thoughtful soldiers; angry rabbis; angry Palestinians; thoughtful Palestinians; etc., etc., etc.

If the narrative angle doesn’t appeal, then you can choose from hundreds of analytical or opinion pieces. Two of the more interesting questions I came across while reading about the hitnatkut this week were: 1) Why isn’t it being covered in the Arab press? (Why wasn’t the murder of Israeli Arabs two weeks ago in Shfaram given more coverage in the Arab press?) 2) Why does the Western world find this issue so fascinating, compared to genocide and starvation in Darfur?

The only two aspects of disengagement that we’ve been exposed to in the last few months are elements of popular culture. You can’t walk down the street without seeing orange ribbons (and blue and white ones) on cars; orange, for those against disengagement; blue and white for those who are pro-disengagement. Girls in long skirts and long-sleeved shirts stood in the midday sun at major intersections, handing out ribbons, for the last two months. The few times I watched, at least half of the drivers kept their windows rolled up and looked away; the other half of drivers happily accepted ribbons to add to their collection.

And–bumper stickers. You can see examples of these at the Jerusalem Post website, in the “Disengagement Guide” box. (Scroll down, and look on the right side, under the “Gallery” section.) One of these stickers, which began appearing exclusively on buses after the Shfarm murders, translates, “Just don’t disengage from each other.” (I thought it was a giant sign saying, “No weapons allowed on board,” but this was a hopelessly naive misreading, since members of the armed forces ride free, and frequently, on the bus lines, armed.)

Since last fall, we’ve been seeing posters on nearly every streetcorner and strip of empty fence that read, “A Jew does not expel a Jew”, perhaps the major slogan of the anti-disengagement movement. For the first few months, it seems that most analysis of this slogan focused on how the slogan relies on religious identification, and links the expellers to the Judenrat, Jewish citizens in Third-Reich Germany who were forced to inform on their own communities to the German authorities. Most of the criticism of the slogan revolved around the use of such Holocaust imagery for politcal means. Disengagement opponents’ use of the Star of David, in this way, raised similar ire. Only in the last couple of months have opinion and editorial pieces began to examine the flip side of the saying, arguing that the inherent flaw of the slogan, morally, is that it implies that a Jew in Israel can expel a non-Jew; i.e., an Arab.

So. There it is. This far away from Gaza, in a secular and international neighborhood where most neighbors are too busy with science and their own lives to bother meeting each other, that’s how it looks. Posters, bumper stickers, and ribbons flap and whiz by on the street, but the whole affair (the “balagan”, or “chaos/mess”, as I’ve read it’s called in conversation) seems remote and baffling.

From Ahad Ha’am Street with Love

Ahad Ha’am Street is parallel to Herzl Street, and, in many ways, parallel to the rest of downtown Rehovot. Despite the familiar array of book stores, appliance stores, and furniture shops on Ahad Ha’am, one thing is vitally different: everything is in Cyrillic. With the exception of one flagrantly French storefront with a red-striped and scalloped awning, delicate iron cafe chairs, and “PATISSERIE” painted in red on the window, the street seems to be the main artery of Russian life in Rehovot.

Near the end of the block, the “Karl Berg” market gives an outsider a glimpse into a Russian grocery store; or, at least, a Russian grocery store in Israel. A sizeable chunk of the market is devoted to the liquor section: tall, dark shelves with a greater variety of vodka choices than I have have ever seen before, or, really, ever hope to see again. (Oddly, the Stolichnaya is easily reachable, while the Southern Comfort is locked behind glass doors.)

Otherwise, the Karl Berg market happily subverts any preconceived notions one might have about a Russian grocery. The vodka selection boggles the mind, but, then, so does the variety of Italian wines, Amaretto, and Vermouth. Beer? It’s on another tall shelf, with enough kinds of Krusovice, Staropramen, and Budvar to delight an expat Czech. (No Coors.)

Here and there, the market offers other exotic but puzzling options: boxes of rectangular-shaped cookies from Poland, a glass case with all sorts of pickled fish in pinkish sauces, rows of mayonnaise jars bearing both Cyrillic lettering and an image of the American flag, and frozen raspberries. (Hey, they’re exotic if you haven’t seen them in a year.)

And, at the end of the store, practically pulsing with non-kosherness, lies the deli. Some meats–namely, the one shaped suspiciously like a pig’s ear–were, in fact, a little too vividly non-kosher, for me. Nevertheless: bacon. Since everyone in line at the deli counter was speaking Hebrew, I felt like less of an impostor than I thought I would have, and gracefully escaped with ham slices and dignity intact.

Other preconceptions challenged…