Say It in Hebrew

“Cizinec.”
“Foreigner.”

Reentry is always a little strange, starting at the airport. Flights to Tel Aviv from Prague tend to leave in the middle of the night, for some reason, yet everyone seems to perk up after check-in, and after a tour of the duty-free offerings. Even though the screen in the A terminal of the Prague airport announced that our flight would board in fifteen minutes, we detoured through one of the stores to stock up on Becherovka (spirits) and Studentska chocolate.

At the gate, we unloaded our stuff and collapsed into chairs, watching as a group of Russian-speaking tourists gathered in the opposite row of chairs. The couples looked to be in their early seventies, and chattered excitedly to each other. One woman came hurrying toward the counter, out of breath, with a Czech Airlines representative in pursuit.

“This is not the gate!” she said in an accent, waving her boarding pass. The rest of her group fell silent and looked at the representative, who peered at the woman’s passport and boarding pass.

“Yes, it is,” he said in English, then gave the flight number slowly in Czech. The woman lowered her passport and boarding card, and bashfully sat down with her group. The Czech Airlines man hurried off.

Each group member was sitting with his or her hands crossed, holding onto a dark-blue U.S. passport, speaking in Russian.

This seemed like quite an anachronism to me, but I’d been up for fifteen hours at that point, so very little made sense.

“Hey,” I said to J. in a revelatory tone, “They’re Americans!”

“They probably immigrated,” he replied, unwrapping the Studentska bar.

I looked at them through sleep-dazed nostalgia. What did we have in common, as Americans? Perhaps this group of tourists would have had greater commonality with my great-great grandparents than they would with me, assuming that the post-Soviet world had anything in common with the Old World, which is a stretch.

“Do you think they would join me in the national anthem?” I wondered out loud.

Through his chocolate, my husband asked, “Which one?”

“Oh.” I pondered this. The novelty of sitting among fellow Americans lasted until the flight began to board, and there was the usual mad dash to the head of the line. J. and I were wedged in between two of the Russian-American tourists, two women who planted themselves in the middle of the line and then proceeded to hunt for their boarding cards. I dodged one of their hands, gripping a passport.

“That’s not how we do it in my country,” I grumbled obnoxiously. My husband, who demonstrates levels of politeness in these situations unknown to most people, calmly stood there and watched the ladies rifle through their bags, while the crowd pressed up against us. When both women started edging us out, I gave up on public diplomacy and intranational warmth and shoved back. My fellow Americans had evidently embraced the notion of the democratic free-for-all, shared citizenship be damned. I bumped my bags around angrily and barged past them.

“I was here way before you were!” I said, and then hastily added, “In the line, I mean.” Being the descendant of immigrants is nothing at all like being an immigrant. I could see my ancestors shaking their heads in dismay. And anyway, “here” was technically Prague, where I was just a tourist. Surely, with more sleep, I had a more rational, open-minded attitude. Didn’t I?

The Russian-American women muttered something at me, but I shoved my passport in my pocket, took my boarding pass back from the Czech Airlines rep, and headed off down the jetway.

On the plane, when the Russian women passed the row I was sitting in, I hid rather conspicuously behind my free copy of the Herald Tribune . My husband showed up, a few seconds later, with a bemused look.

“Why are you reading that?” he asked, settling in with his papers: a Czech literary magazine and the newspaper Lidove Noviny. “I thought you couldn’t stand it.”

“Vazeny cestujici.”
“Dear passengers.”

Wednesday, Oct. 19
Prague – Mautern

The train from Prague to Veseli nad Luznici takes about three hours; in Veseli, we changed to a smaller train that goes to the Czech-Austrian border town of Ceske Velenice and stops in all manner of villages along the way. In the smallest villages, there are no boarding platforms; the train simply stops in front of the small station building, and people descend. Nearly everyone on the 4:00 train to Ceske Velenice seemed to be a highschooler. Most of the kids squeezed four onto a bench and talked to each other as the train bumped along; three boys sitting across the aisle from us spent the hour playing games on someone’s cell phone. Near the end of the ride, one of the boys pulled out what looked like a report card and showed it to his friend with a casually happy shrug. The boy’s friend looked duly impressed and slugged him in a congratulatory way.

The train ended up being half an hour late into Ceske Velenice, where Uncle V. was waiting. We got into his car, arranged the passports in a multicolor fan, and headed for the Czech border, passing the cheap shops and the working girls strutting outside a local hotel. One girl, huddled in a parka, turned-up jeans, short socks, and mules, eyed us coldly as we drove by. The border guards barely looked up as we slowed at the border, waving i.d.; on the Austrian side, they also simply glanced out the window and motioned us on, while a convoy of trucks filled with lopped-off fir trees waited on the side of the road, stuck in border lumber limbo.

Although it was sunny in Prague when we left at noon, by 4:30, the sun was setting in Gmund, near the border, in a cold, red fall haze. The air was smoke-rich and mossy.

An hour later, at the end of the drive into Mautern, Uncle V. recommended that we stop for a drink at the Piano Bar. Outside, a sign for Oktoberfest was swinging, and inside, the bar was emblazoned with blue and white cloth and paper streamers (the colors of Bavaria, home of Oktoberfest). Strips of blue and white crepe paper fluttered from bike rims hanging from the ceiling and turning on a chain; blue-and-white checked swags were draped on the walls, and on the bar’s brass railings. When the bartender appeared, he was wearing lederhosen–and not the fake kind, either.

Uncle V. is the Vasari of regional spirits. He knows the storied history and quality of everything poured in the Wachau Valley, and probably in Austria.

“Try the red beer,” he said. “It’s made from pure rye!” We recovered from four hours of train travel with beer and pretzels the size of pumpkins. The longer we were there, the warmer and shinier the bar seemed to get, until it was practically a golden and blue-and-white glow.

On Wednesday, we went with Aunt D. to Treismauer. This town, about fifteen minutes outside of Mautern, has one giant church, a couple of cafes, the Pizzeria Maradonna (fifty-seven pizza choices), and two bakeries. Aunt D.’s dental practice is here, and, while she worked, we explored the town, although it was foggy and freezing outside.

Inside the solid eighteenth-century church, the Baroque altar gleamed dimly, and two candles flickered in a side chapel. In the vestibule, J. noticed a large framed commemoration of Treismauer soliders who fell during World War II.

“But they were fighting on the wrong side,” J. pointed out. We peered closely at the soldiers’ uniforms and epaulets, and then backed out of the church in shock.

Around one corner, J. spotted a sign for the town museum, which turned out to be closed. Next to it was the Hunger Tower, a massive, stocky gray tower, built, we figured, like the Prague Hunger Wall, in the seventeeth- or eighteenth-century solely to employ citizens and thus prevent them from starvation.

We stopped at a newly-opened cafe for coffee and then went to the pizzeria for lunch. One room of the pizzeria was dark, but the few tables around the bar quickly filled up both with blue-jumpsuited workers and townspeople. A white-haired tanned man wearing a light brown jacket sat down at a table, and the bartender seemed to ask him if he wanted the usual. He nodded wearily, and then accepted a beer a couple of minutes later. Soon afterwards, an equally-tanned and wrinkled woman showed up, and slumped into the booth next to him. She stirred her beer with a bored look. A giant red stone pendant around her neck looked more interesting than she did.

I wanted to yell at them, Gee whiz, people! You live in the Austrian Napa! Look alive!

They looked a little like Adam and Eve, eighty years out of paradise.

“Al yadh ha-ram-ZOHR.”
“At the traffic light.”

During the twenty-five hour fast of Yom Kippur, the country ceases to function: radio and television stations stop broadcasting, the airport shuts down, and nearly every vehicle sits motionless. A day without the incessant blaring of car horns!

It’s far more quiet than Christmas morning in the U.S. But only for a few seconds.

Because traffic of any sort stops (except for ambulances), kids take to the street in screaming hordes with bikes, rollerblades, and lungpower.

“It’s just one night,” J. said, when I complained.

“But I thought it was a day of mourning,” I said. (After wishing a friend “Happy Holidays!”, I was informed that, while the others this month are joyous, this one was not.) “Why aren’t these kids fasting and atoning?”

My husband looked at me incredulously. “They’re just kids!”

“Well, when my brother and I were kids, we couldn’t just run around the neighborhood screaming,” I said pompously.

“But this is Israel,” J. reminded me. “Parents let their kids do anything.”

(This, on the surface, appears to be true: Israeli parents happily report that the country is so safe, their children can walk around town at night with no problem whatsoever.

I, however, prefer not to see eleven-year-olds strolling down the street at midnight in packs, trying to look twenty-five. It may be possible to do this safely, but why would you choose to let your child do this?)

Now, however, an hour after sunset, everyone appears to have been whisked inside for the breaking-the-fast feast, and it really is blissfully silent.

“Zoog nuh-a-LAH-yeem.”
“A pair of shoes.”

Dear Lord,

In all Your infinite wisdom, You must have Your reasons for populating the Holy Land with ugly shoes. Far be it for me to question Your judgment. Perhaps it is meant as a test.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 teaches us that “To everything there is a season.”

However, Lord, I humbly submit that there is no season for lime-green platforms. Yet Your servants willfully clomp around in these, and in thick-soled buckled shoes that are the footwear equivalent of nerdy eyeglasses.

Naot, the Israeli Birkenstock, delivers sensible, comfortable sandals. Caligula Shoes (a strange name for a store, when you consider that Caligula, the third Emperor of Rome, noted for his tyranny and cruelty, went nuts and died) offers fewer stylish choices and are currently touting a wickedly pointy series of boots. Gazit Shoes, however, offers the widest and most outrageous variety of pseudo-stylish Israeli women’s footwear: shoes with four-inch thick rubber soles, tennis shoes with a ridiculous spike heel, shoes with spangles and splashes of neon, shoes with pointless straps and buckles and floppy little fake leather ties. Verily, they are a blight upon the land, not to mention the feet.

Your mysteries of the universe are truly numerous.

“Is-UR.”
“Taboo.”

Definitely Causing a Commotion.

Madonna has popularized kabbalah studies. If the Galilee mountain town of Tsfat, where the Jewish mysticism known as kabbalah originated, hasn’t seen a surge in kabbalah tourism from North America as a result, in part, of Madonna’s interest, then call me meshuggah.

Does kabbalah tourism and popularization pose a threat to the sanctity of kabbalah studies? I certainly can’t say.

It does raise some interesting questions about how ultra-Orthodox custodians of the religion react to modern-day intrusions…