Say It in Hebrew

“Bechirot.”
“Elections.”

Why didn’t we think of this?

Election Day, here, is a national holiday!

And the polls stay open until 10:00 pm! (Albeit with massive campaigning going on right outside them, by all the parties, and their cardtables piled with pamphlets.)

Read all about it.

“Puh-mee-YAH [yuh-ma-NEET] smo-LEET a-soo-RAH.”
“No [right] left turn.”

This afternoon, we were sitting in Cafe Netanela when Crazy Man #3 roared in, a Likud sign tangled in his hands. With his long ponytailed white hair, silver earring, and a spiked watchband, Crazy Man #3 looks like he’s playing the title role in “King Lear,” directed by David Bowie.

Since everyone and his brother is armed, here, it shouldn’t make me nervous that he had a pistol stuffed in his waistband. Nevertheless, when Crazy Man #3 ended his loud tirade against Netanyahu by tearing the poster in two, stomping on it, and spitting on it, I figured tea time might as well be over.

Here’s a practical philosophy, here: The worst is not / So long as we can say “This is the worst.” (King Lear, 4.1.27-28)

Yes, elections are on Tuesday. The party most likely to win (Kadima) has been relying on the image of its founder to propel it to victory; never mind that the founder himself is in a coma. Netanyahu, in an effort to show that he is by no means in a coma, storms around the country, holding rallies in Hebrew and Russian. Kadima and the Likud are likely to wage a battle for Knesset seats, while other parties like Labor, Shas, and Etiud Ahad (for Ethiopian immigrants, on whose governing panel sit two Americans) will lag behind.

There is no third party, here, either.

One image the country would like to present is that it is well-accustomed to accepting immigrants, and integrating them without ignoring their heritage. The reality behind this image, however, seems fairly stark, through the lens of elections: the Russians distrust the Sephardis, the old generation of Russians regards the new generation suspiciously, Israelis with Ashkenazi heritage hold the key positions of power, the main parties virtually ignored the Israeli Arab vote, a small number of secular Russians will vote for Shas (religious party) out of protest against the others, and immigrants from Ethiopia have essentially no political representation.

Last night, friends invited us over to celebrate the birth of their baby, in the near future; the father-to-be is Israeli, and his brother and his brother’s girlfriend arrived later in the evening, after the four of us guests and the future parents had consumed a shocking amount of food in the form of chopped salad, hummus, tehina, sandwiches spread with chopped red onion and smoked fish, crackers, and cheese. The guests were excited to discover that some food remained, and that a significant chunk of those at the party were from abroad.

“Are there any peculiar things that Israelis do that you find odd?” the brother asked us sweetly, after a round of introductions, as he sank into an armchair.

There was a pause of about five seconds, while everyone scrolled mentally through his or her long list of Baffling Things They Do Here, thought better of responding, and then struck up a conversation with whomever was sitting to his or her left.

“Nothing surprises me, anymore,” I replied. “It’s no stranger than anywhere else.” Translation: that’s a really loaded question; how could we possibly answer it diplomatically? Are you crazy? Nice to meet you!

Later, as must occur when there are at least two pregnant women (not your grateful correspondent) in the room, the conversation turned to epidurals.

“The science of epidurals is at least twenty years old,” the guest of honor and hostess (who grew up in Yugoslavia) remarked. “But it’s certainly not common in my country.”

“It’s been a practice in the U.S. for at least that long,” I said.

“Here, too,” Omer said.

“Yes, we must have copied it from America,” his brother added, munching on a cracker. “Everything they do, we copy.” He sighed. “May I have some more Pompaudour tea, please?” he asked his brother in English.

“Pompadour is the brand name, you nitwit,” Omer told him. The graying father-to-be and his brother collapsed in a pile of laughter, while the mother-to-be looked on, her dessert plate balanced delicately on her belly, and rolled her eyes.

“Shtu-YOT.”
“Drivel.”

Dear Ha’aretz Weather Editor/Copywriter, English-language edition:

PLEASE STOP WRITING THE FORECAST IN RHYME.

Thank you,
Concerned Poet

p.s. Try sonnets, instead.

“Ha-ma-kha-LAYTS.”
“The corkscrew.”

Last Sunday, we awoke at 8:15 am to music blaring from the school a half-block away. (Pity our friends, and all the retired profs in Tenure Tower, who live next door to the school.) This continued for fifteen minutes.

I’m a big fan of music in school (and especially over the PA during passing periods), but this was egregious. I don’t do forced merriment; not before 10 am, anyway.

“It must be Purim,” J. mumbled.

Sure enough, a stroll around Rehovot, later, proved him right. On campus, proud babushkas jockeyed for prime sidewalk positions to show off their costumed grandchildren: I stepped into the grass to let a tiger in a striped daysuit pad by with a three-year-old mermaid who was shuffling along slowly, glancing dolefully at her tail, which wagged behind her Keds.

Americans have Halloween and Mardi Gras; Brazilians and Italians have the Carnival/Carnevale. Israelis have Purim and Adloyada parades.

Near Pinsker Gate, I stopped to stare at a highschooler walking home from school for lunch in the most ingenious costume I’ve ever seen, here. From the waist down, she was a Hawaiian hula dancer, with palm-frond skirt and flip-flops with plastic hibiscus flowers.

Waist up, she wore a suit coat, collared shirt, beard, round glasses, and a hat. She looked like the most reformed rabbi in town.

I met J. for lunch at Hummus Weizmann, to whose hummus and falafel we have become addicted. (Never again will we have to eat industrial hummus, now that we know they sell hummus by 100 grams, for takeout.) We sat outside and watched more highschoolers trickle home from school, dressed outrageously and devouring the attention their costumes earned them on Herzl. The most shocking costumes involved some combination of a miniskirt, wings, tiara, and teetery shoes.

Purim itself was on Monday, and stretched far into the night, for some: the emphasis on drinking, on this holiday (and the cautions against it), rival the traditions surrounding New Year’s, in the U.S.

This afternoon, the main street of town was much more quiet: Benny’s Cafe, which is usually packed during the day with old men only, was open but empty; the gelato place was just beginning to put out its tables; and next door, at the blue-collar cafe, two guys filled out a Lotto card, while a girl with an absent look stared at the bus stop and munched on a bureka.

The fertility festival on the grassy space outside Cafe Mada’a is really the only action of any kind in Rehovot on a Saturday afternoon. Dozens of young couples with babies and kids are scattered across the lawns, playing catch, running around, or relaxing on blankets. There are so many different makes and models of strollers that it looks like a dealers’ convention.

If you’re between the ages of 21 and 35, and you walk by without evidence of children or children in the near future, you get looks of pity. Every woman I know here who is my age is pregnant.

To say this is strange would be a gross understatement.

With one exception, none of my friends from college, grad school, or teaching is pregnant or has kids. There was no cultural pressure to have kids. Here, the cultural pressure (including secular culture) is huge, comparatively.

Is it just Israel? Is it not being in a group of like-minded, feminist women? Is it being outside the U.S., where–say what you will–feminism isn’t regarded as the territory of far-left-wing bluestockings?

Don’t get me wrong: I like kids. But this place is obsessed with them, in a weird fairy-taleish sort of way that eventually casts its spell on nearly every woman of childbearing age who lands in the country.

Except me. The only use I would have for a stroller, at the moment, is if I wanted to cart a manuscript from one part of town to another.

Cootchy-cootchy-coo!

Hmph.

“Sha-KHAKH-tee et kas-PEE.”
“I forgot my money.”

Nurit’s fabric shop is in a light, one-room building with dark wooden beams that come to an apex high over the middle of the room; rows and rows of fabrics line the walls. It’s rather like what I imagine being inside a kaleidoscope must be.

She has a lilting Australian accent, the result of a five-year posting to Melbourne for her husband’s work, but is originally from Israel. “I’ve lived all over the country,” she laughed, unrolling one bolt of blue fabric. With her eye, I matched the fabrics that I needed, and she measured and cut them, all the while talking and keeping precise track of the yardage.
I consider it a good day when I can walk and chew gum at the same time, let alone calculate yardage.

As Nurit opened the scissors over the first bolt of fabric, I had a twinge of panic.

“It’s possible to pay by card, right?” I asked.

She looked at me sympathetically. “No, I’m afraid we don’t have that ability. We only take cash.”

I peered into my wallet, but I already knew that I’d paid the $5 fee to withdraw less than it turned out that I needed.

“There’s an ATM in Gedera, though,” she offered, “so you don’t have to come back on a second trip.”

I reached back with an invisible leg and kicked myself for assuming a small shop would take plastic, and for not calling to find this out before taxiing out to Kidron.

“I came by taxi,” I explained.

“Oh, heavens.” She looked horrified for a moment. “You came all the way here by taxi? Never mind.” She waved her hand in dismissal. “It’s no problem at all. You can send a check.”

I was stunned. “I can pay part of it in cash,” I offered.

“No, no, no,” she sang, and sliced away at the fabric. “Just find someone to write a check and send it in the next week.”

Her husband, too, was knowledgeable and generous; he appeared in the shop around the same time one of their neighbors, a tall blond woman who’d lived in Los Angeles, arrived in a four-wheel drive.

“You can pick out a fat quarter,” he told me, beaming. “One each for first-time visitors!”

The neighbor poked around the shop with the happy air of a regular.

“You hid some fabric away last time,” Nurit reminded her, wrapping up my fabric. “Let’s see if you remember where you put it,” she teased.

“Absolutely!” replied the neighbor, and leaned over to pluck a group of blocks from behind a book on Nurit’s desk.

I gathered up my bag, thanked them, and went outside to the street, where I noticed, upon glancing at the cell phone, that it had one measly battery-dot left. I dialed Amos’s number and hoped for the best, as the wind started up, again.

“Ken?” he answered.

“Shalom, ani Erin; ani be Kidron,” I yelled.

“Hamesh-esrai minut!” Amos shouted back, from Rehovot. “Fifteen minutes!”

After I hung up and our phone gave a feeble peep of dead-batterydom, I had a North by Northwest moment, standing there by the long, empty road, which was eerily quiet in the windstorm.

(It occurred to me to go back into the store, but I figured I’d lose my ride.)

Amos faithfully turned up in under ten minutes; heaven only knows how many rules of the road he broke in the process. Although I could see the taxi coming about two blocks away, he honked when he got within twenty feet of me, in case I hadn’t noticed.

“Thanks for coming back,” I said. I have no idea what this is in Hebrew, but I think he understood that I was very grateful not to have to walk back to Rehovot.

Amos smiled and knocked on his watch confidently, then executed a getaway spin and rocketed away from the fabric store. Not since Scarlett O’Hara ripped down her curtains has there been such action in such close proximity to chintz, I think.

We made it back to Rehovot by driving on two wheels, for part of the way, in ten minutes. Taxis here should really come with ejection seats.

When we got to Rehovot, I asked Amos if he could drop me at the shuk.

“En baya!” he said. “No problem!” Furthermore, if I ever needed to go anywhere–airport, Tel Aviv, Haifa–I should call him and he would arrange it, he assured me. Wow. I guess I overtipped.

And that was my glorious adventure to Moshav Kidron, and the best fabric shop on the planet.

–Fat quarter fabric image from Pissott