The Temescal Pool entrance fee went up from 3.25$ to 5$ in 6 months. They built another Berkeley Bowl, so the lines seem a little less mythical at the grocery store. The house smells like old wood and incense, like an exotic vacation home, full of dark Victorian panelling that I never would have expected to end up in, growing up in a cramped apartment in Ramot where the stairwell sometimes smelled like pee. Every morning I walk to German class at 8 am, where a defective air conditioning unit makes a strange hissing sound that hasn't been fixed. My bedroom is a very quiet nest at the top of the house, behind two sets of doors, and nothing disturbs my sleep - no moving trucks, no one singing along at the top of their voice with the radio, no sirens, no text messages from my mother and sister, complex negotiations about our lunch dates.
When I think about my immigration from Israel to America, I think I immigrated from a place (Jerusalem!) into my own mind. Berkeley is full of cafes and people thinking at their tables at their cafes, and every so often we look up from our thoughts and books and journals and say hello to each other: take a little break from our swirling minds, which have become swollen into entire countries.
This morning I jumped on a quick bus up the hill on Bancroft Street and the bus driver was an old student from when I taught college. I remember she used to complain how everyone used to try and touch her long hair. She said, "Stay close, up here. How are you? Do you have any babies yet?" I asked her about her daughter, would her daughter go to college? I felt like we were trapped in rehearsed dialogue: I said what the Teacher is supposed to say. Is this something American, this inability to burst the bubble, to say something sharp and surprising? Or is it the skills of an immigrant, mouthing the words, singing along, but some key ingredient is missing?
I've been waiting for the perfect image, the perfect moment of return, like the closing of a circle, or at least finding the beginning of the ball of yarn that's been unspooling and winding me through all these cities: Toronto, Jerusalem, Tel, Aviv, Istanbul, Berlin. I want a ceremony. I'm back, and the wild beasts didn't get me! But of course back and forth are always going to be turned around (home is a dangerous question) so meanwhile I'm just trying not to get tangled in the ball of yarn, or worse, tangled in the metaphor. Meanwhile, שלום שלום לרחוק ולקרוב
~Sefa
PS And on the non-metaphorical level, I have some readings coming up, for you know, non-virtual interactions...
Sept 16th in Davis at Bistro 33
Oct 17th (Litquake) in San Francisco
Stateless (Hah!) with a Band at Travelling Jewish Theatre sometime mid November, also in SF
I'll post better details on facebook when they become clear to me, or email me.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Gaps and Ghosts
Walking home this afternoon through Ben Gurion Strasse, I was thinking that coming to Berlin as an Israeli is like discovering a secret crush: all this time you were living your life, your usual concerns and obsessions, and someone was watching you, thinking of you, caring for you from a distance. At Shlactensee on Saturday, (I did not got to nearby Wannessee, I only wanted to swim) I asked two brainy looking girls to watch my bag while I went swimming in the Lake. Sabine, with better English, explained how it's hard for Germans to be critical of Israeli policy; how she went to hear Amira Hass speak and bought her book; how when she visited Tel Aviv she was ashamed to speak German in the street.
I told my roommate how much better informed people here seem about Israel (than in the States); she said, well, of course, it's Germany! All the time when Germany was the black hole you didn't go to, I didn't think of all the Germans reading the weekend papers about Israeli weddings in Cyprus, watching Waltz with Bashir dubbed into German in the Park, and meeting Amira Hass. I know the romance metaphor for Germany will break down very quickly if you think about it too long, but I want to think about all our intimate Others, all our fun house mirror images. I want to triangulate: not only Israelis and Palestinians, but Israelis and Germans.
At a Shwarma place, my second day here, feeling out of place, I exclaimed to the Palestinian falafel maker, "Oh! We're brothers! Cousins!"
He said, "no, no, we're not."
When I left Tel Aviv for Berlin, in high heat and light, everyone from my hairdresser to academic advisor said, "Oh, Berlin, you're so lucky. " Maybe they already knew the pleasure of becoming a fetish object.
J. grew up on the East side of Berlin, tells me about the underground trains using the same pre-war tracks but going straight through the station, not stopping; the ghosted underground train stations of East Berlin are the places and stories that live inside me here, and I don't stop, I keep traveling through.
I told my roommate how much better informed people here seem about Israel (than in the States); she said, well, of course, it's Germany! All the time when Germany was the black hole you didn't go to, I didn't think of all the Germans reading the weekend papers about Israeli weddings in Cyprus, watching Waltz with Bashir dubbed into German in the Park, and meeting Amira Hass. I know the romance metaphor for Germany will break down very quickly if you think about it too long, but I want to think about all our intimate Others, all our fun house mirror images. I want to triangulate: not only Israelis and Palestinians, but Israelis and Germans.
At a Shwarma place, my second day here, feeling out of place, I exclaimed to the Palestinian falafel maker, "Oh! We're brothers! Cousins!"
He said, "no, no, we're not."
When I left Tel Aviv for Berlin, in high heat and light, everyone from my hairdresser to academic advisor said, "Oh, Berlin, you're so lucky. " Maybe they already knew the pleasure of becoming a fetish object.
J. grew up on the East side of Berlin, tells me about the underground trains using the same pre-war tracks but going straight through the station, not stopping; the ghosted underground train stations of East Berlin are the places and stories that live inside me here, and I don't stop, I keep traveling through.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
And Now Berlin
Saturday morning in Prezlauer Berg, Berlin. Outside the window it's all green trees and sunflowers, and right downstairs a clean and shiny Farmer's Market where they sell bread, pickles, organic Turkish stuffed pita, and pomegranate juice.
What am I doing here? Outside the kitchen window there's a forest of a Jewish cemetery: when I drink my morning tea I can make out "Rivka" and "Yisrael" on the gravestones. A bee stung my hand while I was sleeping, and after I woke up and applied ice, my tall blond roommate searched the room for more bees (finding another under the blanket) clucking all the while at my lack of common sense -- haven't I ever lived in the country? Don't I know anything about dealing with insects?
My apartment is in a beautiful old remodelled building with high ceilings, lavish moldings, and a smell of history in the stairwell. Apparently the neighborhood had fallen into disrepair during GDR days, and after the fall of the Wall the hipsters moved in and yuppied it up. My roommate says that when she first moved in, in '94, the neighborhood wasn't connected to the phone lines. As I'm locking up one morning a fox tries to run up the tall window, scrambling at the stained glass, and I'm scared to get close enough to open the window for him. I finally manage to get by, but shut him in the building, too scared to get close enough to open a door or a window. He probably lives in the cemetery, or in the overgrown "Judengasse" - Jewish-Alley, where Jews had to walk instead of on the main street, that has been left a long swatch of overgrown grass and wildflowers in back of the house.
Drinks at a temporary Art Gallery at the edge of a huge hole left by the destruction of the "Palace of the Republic," an asbestos filled socialist beast of a building. It is going to be replaced by the replica of the Kaiser's castle that used to be on the spot, but meanwhile, there are artists spinning records and a beautiful open sunset. F., French author, on the run in Berlin from Proust, tells me he is writing a novel about remodeling an apartment. Memory and forgetfulness in microcosm. They need each other like the North and South Pole. F. has transparent skin, fine hands. R., my roommate, says, something about being "very German."
"Very German?" he echoes.
How I love those fucked up Jewish boys. They are the same all over the world, even when everything changes around you.
And for another menagerie of Berliners at an exhibition last night: a tall woman with tattoos all over her back and leg, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman's daughter in Synechdoche, New York, a woman wearing one black stocking and one white stocking, a woman in blue leiderhosen and elaborately arranged hair like an alien princess, and in the exhibit boys, boys, boys everywhere - famous paintings recreated by models with huge erections, an Asian Jesus with an erection inside a purple-sprayed frames, the English translations accompanying the exhibit like some weird abstract quasi German-art language. In the next room a system of giant disco balls in another room gesture toward a dance club and people aren't sure if they should dance or stand quietly in the corners and act artsy. I'm turned around in the darkness, the glimmering red lights, the tall people smoking and drinking -- all my longing has suddenly disappeared.
A note on housekeeping: I think I'll post once or twice more from Berlin, and once when I get back to Berkeley...so I envision the blog lasting till about September. I'm really curious to hear reader's reactions to the blog over the next few weeks, especially the imaginary cities you carry with you through your life, so please post me a post and keep me company through the last few weeks of my journey!
What am I doing here? Outside the kitchen window there's a forest of a Jewish cemetery: when I drink my morning tea I can make out "Rivka" and "Yisrael" on the gravestones. A bee stung my hand while I was sleeping, and after I woke up and applied ice, my tall blond roommate searched the room for more bees (finding another under the blanket) clucking all the while at my lack of common sense -- haven't I ever lived in the country? Don't I know anything about dealing with insects?
My apartment is in a beautiful old remodelled building with high ceilings, lavish moldings, and a smell of history in the stairwell. Apparently the neighborhood had fallen into disrepair during GDR days, and after the fall of the Wall the hipsters moved in and yuppied it up. My roommate says that when she first moved in, in '94, the neighborhood wasn't connected to the phone lines. As I'm locking up one morning a fox tries to run up the tall window, scrambling at the stained glass, and I'm scared to get close enough to open the window for him. I finally manage to get by, but shut him in the building, too scared to get close enough to open a door or a window. He probably lives in the cemetery, or in the overgrown "Judengasse" - Jewish-Alley, where Jews had to walk instead of on the main street, that has been left a long swatch of overgrown grass and wildflowers in back of the house.
Drinks at a temporary Art Gallery at the edge of a huge hole left by the destruction of the "Palace of the Republic," an asbestos filled socialist beast of a building. It is going to be replaced by the replica of the Kaiser's castle that used to be on the spot, but meanwhile, there are artists spinning records and a beautiful open sunset. F., French author, on the run in Berlin from Proust, tells me he is writing a novel about remodeling an apartment. Memory and forgetfulness in microcosm. They need each other like the North and South Pole. F. has transparent skin, fine hands. R., my roommate, says, something about being "very German."
"Very German?" he echoes.
How I love those fucked up Jewish boys. They are the same all over the world, even when everything changes around you.
And for another menagerie of Berliners at an exhibition last night: a tall woman with tattoos all over her back and leg, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman's daughter in Synechdoche, New York, a woman wearing one black stocking and one white stocking, a woman in blue leiderhosen and elaborately arranged hair like an alien princess, and in the exhibit boys, boys, boys everywhere - famous paintings recreated by models with huge erections, an Asian Jesus with an erection inside a purple-sprayed frames, the English translations accompanying the exhibit like some weird abstract quasi German-art language. In the next room a system of giant disco balls in another room gesture toward a dance club and people aren't sure if they should dance or stand quietly in the corners and act artsy. I'm turned around in the darkness, the glimmering red lights, the tall people smoking and drinking -- all my longing has suddenly disappeared.
A note on housekeeping: I think I'll post once or twice more from Berlin, and once when I get back to Berkeley...so I envision the blog lasting till about September. I'm really curious to hear reader's reactions to the blog over the next few weeks, especially the imaginary cities you carry with you through your life, so please post me a post and keep me company through the last few weeks of my journey!
Monday, July 6, 2009
Another Imaginary City!
At the exact spot where Asia kisses Europe there's a heavy cloud of fried mackerel from the fish sandwich stands near the docks: you can smell it even from the ferry or from the windows of the New Mosque across the street. Ah Istanbul! At breakfast the hotel puts out a giant tray of dripping honeycomb to eat with bread. The afternoon sunlight comes through the grating of the mosque windows and four women in brilliant headscarves bow their prayers quietly while outside the women's section a little girl twirls a dance all across the soft carpets. It seems impossible not to romanticize our cousin city where East and West meet just like here, but better: less violently, at least to the naked eye.
In my imaginary city of Istanbul, we walk through the colored lights of the Grand Bazaar and rest our feet on the carpets of the Blue Mosque. The call to prayer across the bridges of the Bosphorus is wrenching and melancholy because of the distance between us and God, and not because of the invisible boundaries which it demarcates: the battle and fear lines.
On the plane from Tel Aviv to Istanbul I run into Yaqub (I'd call him Y. too but there are all too many Y.'s running through this narrative...) the Jewish-American-Israeli-Muslim-Sufi owner of Olam Qatan bookstore in Jerusalem, on his seasonal run to Turkey for Sufi music. He's travelling with an Arab-Israeli poet friend and his son, and for a few moments it seems that in our Istanbuli imagination we can all go on a wild goose chase for live Sufi music together: an American bookstore owner with a hippy beard and cap, a Tel-Avivi hipster, an Arab-Israeli poet, a sulky Arab-Israeli teenager with a muscle T-shirt, gold necklace, and me.
A half a kilo of cherries and a few hours later of eating, walking, googling in Turkish, etc. the Sufis did not reveal themselves and we had to conclude that if the Sufis do not want to be found, you will not find them.
Two nights later in the New City, away from the Disneyland version of Istanbul for tourists, a man twirled in a blue skirt and white crescents painted on his face like clown makeup. Is it just the tourists that are Sufi crazy, or is is the Istanbulis too? Yaqub says that the American obsession with Rumi is what is stopping Iran from attacking the US. Y. says you can love one part of the culture, even fetishize it, and still be enemies. Look at how we Israelis adore our humus, esp. Arab humus.
O for a teaching gig in Istanbul! O ferry rides to mysterious destinations! Oh Haman - you epitome of human civilization! O water borekas! At the airport, the escalator leads us to a special closed of gate where we undergo security twice. Back to Tel Aviv. The plane ride is filled with Palestinian tourists; they've also gone to the mirror land for a vacation.
In my imaginary city of Istanbul, we walk through the colored lights of the Grand Bazaar and rest our feet on the carpets of the Blue Mosque. The call to prayer across the bridges of the Bosphorus is wrenching and melancholy because of the distance between us and God, and not because of the invisible boundaries which it demarcates: the battle and fear lines.
On the plane from Tel Aviv to Istanbul I run into Yaqub (I'd call him Y. too but there are all too many Y.'s running through this narrative...) the Jewish-American-Israeli-Muslim-Sufi owner of Olam Qatan bookstore in Jerusalem, on his seasonal run to Turkey for Sufi music. He's travelling with an Arab-Israeli poet friend and his son, and for a few moments it seems that in our Istanbuli imagination we can all go on a wild goose chase for live Sufi music together: an American bookstore owner with a hippy beard and cap, a Tel-Avivi hipster, an Arab-Israeli poet, a sulky Arab-Israeli teenager with a muscle T-shirt, gold necklace, and me.
A half a kilo of cherries and a few hours later of eating, walking, googling in Turkish, etc. the Sufis did not reveal themselves and we had to conclude that if the Sufis do not want to be found, you will not find them.
Two nights later in the New City, away from the Disneyland version of Istanbul for tourists, a man twirled in a blue skirt and white crescents painted on his face like clown makeup. Is it just the tourists that are Sufi crazy, or is is the Istanbulis too? Yaqub says that the American obsession with Rumi is what is stopping Iran from attacking the US. Y. says you can love one part of the culture, even fetishize it, and still be enemies. Look at how we Israelis adore our humus, esp. Arab humus.
O for a teaching gig in Istanbul! O ferry rides to mysterious destinations! Oh Haman - you epitome of human civilization! O water borekas! At the airport, the escalator leads us to a special closed of gate where we undergo security twice. Back to Tel Aviv. The plane ride is filled with Palestinian tourists; they've also gone to the mirror land for a vacation.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Waltz with Bashir
My first date with Y. was on a Friday afternoon, Rothschild Avenue: I saw people drinking coffee and smoking, a teenagers' band, bicycles, unicycles, art for sale -- an epiphany of "normal everyday Israel" -- everything Jerusalem could never be. At the cafe in the center of the boulevard with the high stools, he showed me where they drew the first scene of *Waltz with Bashir*" - the nightmare scene where the snarling dogs come overturning the stools.
I know I'm a very belated movie critic, as the movie came out over a year ago, but in my defense I'll say I got to watch it with Y., who is an animator, and even drew a shot of the inside of the tank, and could point out how one of the girls dancing in the discotheque was a portrait of an animator who worked on the movie, and the unshaven man slouching across the Beirut street in flip flops was a portrait of his teacher at Betzalel Art School. The inside scoop.
Today on the bus I kept seeing the Tel Aviv street scenes disassociate as if they were drawn in my mind, and then back again to real. The way the ululating women of Sabra and Shatila suddenly turn from cartoon characters into real and then the movie stops. I was imagining how they had to simulate ululation for the movie, how they gathered them in a room together and said, "Scream like you mean it." But of course, the soundtrack was real women who were encountering the horror, not animations.
Circling around the evening: South Tel Aviv. The darkly knowing look on the face of a middle aged prostitute wearing a pretty ruffled mini-dress as I walk down Chelnov Street. I'm lying on the bed waiting for the movie to start, reading Y.'s copy of Frankenstein, which he tells me his father used to read to him when he visited him in military jail (Sorry Y.: maybe you shouldn't date a writer...) where he had gotten for refusing to serve and then writing about it for the paper.
Of course the movie is deeply disappointing in the way that it refuses responsibility. The main character's journey to understand his war experiences results in a kind of negative apotheosis: he blocked it out because he thought he was responsible, but in fact, he was only lifting the light fixtures. He wasn't involved in the massacre. He was there that day, yes, but the Israeli soldiers didn't really know what was going on, not the simple foot soldiers, not our young men.
And Ari Folman's beautifully lyrical memory of bathing naked in the sepia sea and stepping out into the refugee camp on the day of the massacre, buttoning up his khaki uniform, remains unexplained. The therapist friend in the movie says, "The sea is your fears, what's blocking you." Very unsatisfying. Since when is "the sea," fears? My Jungian friends would never agree to that. The therapist friend also says "'the camps' were in you way before Sabra and Shatila. Your parents were in the camps, right?" Also seems too easy to me.
Y. says the sea is the sea of tears from so much "shooting and crying" - which is the Hebrew expression for a kind of bleeding heart Israeli liberalism that takes pity on the soldiers who must commit the atrocities, without any sense of the context or ultimately the responsibility they bear. My boyfriend who suffered through his army service twenty years later seems like the bastard son of these left wing filmmakers smoking joints in Amsterdam, talking about the war in Lebanon, feeling helpless. All they want to do is make art for art's sake, or sell falafel to gullible Dutch health nuts, or be left alone. Y. says this movie is a kind of luxury of mourning and regret. We didn't really ccommit the massacre, but still look how sorry and traumatized we are. Today the Israeli army does much worse things and nobody regrets them.
I think the sea is something mysterious that Ari Folman couldn't really touch with his theories and fake therapists, but he could touch with his drawings: some further mystery in the experience of life and death, of soldiers emerging like babies from the amniotic sea and going off to kill. I can't put it into words either.
And me? I turn from animation too into the real and back into an animated figure. Girlfriend into me again in all my familiar unworded flesh, like some naked creature bathing in the sea, and back again to a nice girlfriend. I'm angry at Ari Folman for not taking responsibility, for not being a good father, but I know I'm playing the same games circling through my own dreams while terrible things are happening just outside the door.
I know I'm a very belated movie critic, as the movie came out over a year ago, but in my defense I'll say I got to watch it with Y., who is an animator, and even drew a shot of the inside of the tank, and could point out how one of the girls dancing in the discotheque was a portrait of an animator who worked on the movie, and the unshaven man slouching across the Beirut street in flip flops was a portrait of his teacher at Betzalel Art School. The inside scoop.
Today on the bus I kept seeing the Tel Aviv street scenes disassociate as if they were drawn in my mind, and then back again to real. The way the ululating women of Sabra and Shatila suddenly turn from cartoon characters into real and then the movie stops. I was imagining how they had to simulate ululation for the movie, how they gathered them in a room together and said, "Scream like you mean it." But of course, the soundtrack was real women who were encountering the horror, not animations.
Circling around the evening: South Tel Aviv. The darkly knowing look on the face of a middle aged prostitute wearing a pretty ruffled mini-dress as I walk down Chelnov Street. I'm lying on the bed waiting for the movie to start, reading Y.'s copy of Frankenstein, which he tells me his father used to read to him when he visited him in military jail (Sorry Y.: maybe you shouldn't date a writer...) where he had gotten for refusing to serve and then writing about it for the paper.
Of course the movie is deeply disappointing in the way that it refuses responsibility. The main character's journey to understand his war experiences results in a kind of negative apotheosis: he blocked it out because he thought he was responsible, but in fact, he was only lifting the light fixtures. He wasn't involved in the massacre. He was there that day, yes, but the Israeli soldiers didn't really know what was going on, not the simple foot soldiers, not our young men.
And Ari Folman's beautifully lyrical memory of bathing naked in the sepia sea and stepping out into the refugee camp on the day of the massacre, buttoning up his khaki uniform, remains unexplained. The therapist friend in the movie says, "The sea is your fears, what's blocking you." Very unsatisfying. Since when is "the sea," fears? My Jungian friends would never agree to that. The therapist friend also says "'the camps' were in you way before Sabra and Shatila. Your parents were in the camps, right?" Also seems too easy to me.
Y. says the sea is the sea of tears from so much "shooting and crying" - which is the Hebrew expression for a kind of bleeding heart Israeli liberalism that takes pity on the soldiers who must commit the atrocities, without any sense of the context or ultimately the responsibility they bear. My boyfriend who suffered through his army service twenty years later seems like the bastard son of these left wing filmmakers smoking joints in Amsterdam, talking about the war in Lebanon, feeling helpless. All they want to do is make art for art's sake, or sell falafel to gullible Dutch health nuts, or be left alone. Y. says this movie is a kind of luxury of mourning and regret. We didn't really ccommit the massacre, but still look how sorry and traumatized we are. Today the Israeli army does much worse things and nobody regrets them.
I think the sea is something mysterious that Ari Folman couldn't really touch with his theories and fake therapists, but he could touch with his drawings: some further mystery in the experience of life and death, of soldiers emerging like babies from the amniotic sea and going off to kill. I can't put it into words either.
And me? I turn from animation too into the real and back into an animated figure. Girlfriend into me again in all my familiar unworded flesh, like some naked creature bathing in the sea, and back again to a nice girlfriend. I'm angry at Ari Folman for not taking responsibility, for not being a good father, but I know I'm playing the same games circling through my own dreams while terrible things are happening just outside the door.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Burning Napkins, Famous Poets
Today I found myself dreaming of the empty coasts of the Marin Headlands, the neon green forests of upstate New York where I did my artist's residency last summer, or even the big clear patch of sky above the BART parking lot outside my house in Berkeley. Friday I escaped Jerusalem with a plastic bag full of wet laundry as the commune near my parents' house was having an afternoon trance party that was making the walls shake. The Indian woman in the purple sari dug her knees into my back on the shared taxi, and Tel Aviv is exploding with people.
The older ones are promenading on the beach boardwalk and eating fish dinners all night long, the pre-teens are finding dark corners on the deserted orthodox separate bathing enclosure, and clumps of hipsters with shiny minidresses and slicked back hair are congregating in Florentin, their cars parked haphazardly around the dumpsters, their table candles setting fire to napkins.
At the rooftop restaurant/bar our table spilled over into the next table. The blond girl asked us, "How old are you? Did you all go to the same class? Guess how old I am?"
And it's Hebrew Book Week, so I dragged myself off with the rest of the crowds to Rabin Square for a good deal on poetry, or maybe a new concordance. When I pushed my way to the front and asked about the two-for-one books I realized that I had been speaking to Natan Zach himself, one of Israel's handful of famous living poets, if not the most. Crowds and space. No artist's residency for him tonight. Or maybe ever. Poets here don't have the license to go off into the silence: they're in the crowded sticky city like everyone else, full of gossip and terrible interconnection. Even the Hebrew poems themselves I'm reading this week seem crowded - all this intertextuality! So much crowding from Bible and Midrash and Bialik etc. etc.! It's so crowded here on the page.
Outside Y.'s bedroom window, the Filipino boys are blowing bubbles. I can hear their delighted tones as if they were right here in the room with me, and I don't remember the last time I heard silence.
The older ones are promenading on the beach boardwalk and eating fish dinners all night long, the pre-teens are finding dark corners on the deserted orthodox separate bathing enclosure, and clumps of hipsters with shiny minidresses and slicked back hair are congregating in Florentin, their cars parked haphazardly around the dumpsters, their table candles setting fire to napkins.
At the rooftop restaurant/bar our table spilled over into the next table. The blond girl asked us, "How old are you? Did you all go to the same class? Guess how old I am?"
And it's Hebrew Book Week, so I dragged myself off with the rest of the crowds to Rabin Square for a good deal on poetry, or maybe a new concordance. When I pushed my way to the front and asked about the two-for-one books I realized that I had been speaking to Natan Zach himself, one of Israel's handful of famous living poets, if not the most. Crowds and space. No artist's residency for him tonight. Or maybe ever. Poets here don't have the license to go off into the silence: they're in the crowded sticky city like everyone else, full of gossip and terrible interconnection. Even the Hebrew poems themselves I'm reading this week seem crowded - all this intertextuality! So much crowding from Bible and Midrash and Bialik etc. etc.! It's so crowded here on the page.
Outside Y.'s bedroom window, the Filipino boys are blowing bubbles. I can hear their delighted tones as if they were right here in the room with me, and I don't remember the last time I heard silence.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
An Odd Assortment & A Personal Request
Dear kind and patient readers,
Instead of a long posting, here's a few notes from my Israelian week. Read them in order or choose your own adventure.
1. On Friday night we discussed ritual bathing over dinner. You learn so much about cultures through their bathing. Japanese baths, Turkish hammams. Etc. This is one of my set/pet subjects. Jews, I said, had ritual baths, but what about Israelis? G. said the Golan heights were full of springs that had been built up with rocks and plants as memorials for people killed, I think mostly in the army or terrorist attacks. Friends come and build the rocks around the spring together, then hikers go and bathe in them.
2. Still chewing on my inability to go to Hebron to see the occupation for myself, or go to a checkpoint to bear witness, and generally take part in political activity here. Is it because I'm lazy, scared, need more time to get into things here before jumping in?
3. Instead of going to Hebron I...went to eat at El Babur, maybe the best Palestinian resteraunt right outside of Um El Fahem in the Galillee and had tiny grape leaves. You could taste the tang of the grape leaf, not all the stuffed pointless white rice getting in the way of the tree.
4. Instead of going to Hebron I...drove with my father from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv at sunset the Northen Way, i.e. through the West Bank, both sides of the road often blocked off by a high cement wall. We agreed to disagree: (Arab)terrorism and the apartheid-state were a chicken and egg question. He told me about a Shabbat he spent in Hebron in 1969 with settlers who seemed very idealistic, very non-materialistic. Everything was less clear cut back then, he said.
5. Instead of going to Hebron I...begged and begged Naama to write in this blog about her trip to Hebron and her witnessing activities. I'm like the child that doesn't know what to ask, but I want to know what was it like there today, this city that is so close and so far away? What did it smell like? Was anyone happy to see you? Grateful? What do you do with what is witnessed - pass it like a hot potato from hand to hand quickly so it doesn't burn you?
6. There are more things I want to say about studying the prophets in Jerusalem and not in Berkeley, broken pots as signs of destruction, the Brutal Architechture of Hebrew University where this takes place -- but I'll save this for now and hope the computer Gods stay with me at least until the next few posts.
(P.S. Family vacation at the Sea of Galilee. A family friend recommends the Pilgerhaus, a German-Christian hotel, because Christianity is so relaxing. Later I hear a friend of a friend went psychotic on *her* family vacation.)
Instead of a long posting, here's a few notes from my Israelian week. Read them in order or choose your own adventure.
1. On Friday night we discussed ritual bathing over dinner. You learn so much about cultures through their bathing. Japanese baths, Turkish hammams. Etc. This is one of my set/pet subjects. Jews, I said, had ritual baths, but what about Israelis? G. said the Golan heights were full of springs that had been built up with rocks and plants as memorials for people killed, I think mostly in the army or terrorist attacks. Friends come and build the rocks around the spring together, then hikers go and bathe in them.
2. Still chewing on my inability to go to Hebron to see the occupation for myself, or go to a checkpoint to bear witness, and generally take part in political activity here. Is it because I'm lazy, scared, need more time to get into things here before jumping in?
3. Instead of going to Hebron I...went to eat at El Babur, maybe the best Palestinian resteraunt right outside of Um El Fahem in the Galillee and had tiny grape leaves. You could taste the tang of the grape leaf, not all the stuffed pointless white rice getting in the way of the tree.
4. Instead of going to Hebron I...drove with my father from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv at sunset the Northen Way, i.e. through the West Bank, both sides of the road often blocked off by a high cement wall. We agreed to disagree: (Arab)terrorism and the apartheid-state were a chicken and egg question. He told me about a Shabbat he spent in Hebron in 1969 with settlers who seemed very idealistic, very non-materialistic. Everything was less clear cut back then, he said.
5. Instead of going to Hebron I...begged and begged Naama to write in this blog about her trip to Hebron and her witnessing activities. I'm like the child that doesn't know what to ask, but I want to know what was it like there today, this city that is so close and so far away? What did it smell like? Was anyone happy to see you? Grateful? What do you do with what is witnessed - pass it like a hot potato from hand to hand quickly so it doesn't burn you?
6. There are more things I want to say about studying the prophets in Jerusalem and not in Berkeley, broken pots as signs of destruction, the Brutal Architechture of Hebrew University where this takes place -- but I'll save this for now and hope the computer Gods stay with me at least until the next few posts.
(P.S. Family vacation at the Sea of Galilee. A family friend recommends the Pilgerhaus, a German-Christian hotel, because Christianity is so relaxing. Later I hear a friend of a friend went psychotic on *her* family vacation.)
Saturday, May 30, 2009
White Night
There's a woman in shuk Ha-Karmel that comes up to you, with a ragged ponytail and two bottom front teeth and says, "Give me to eat. Give me to eat." Today I saw her just as I was going to the movies on Saturday afternoon. What a bummer! Someone should make a law or something against miserable people coming and ruining your lovely Saturday afternoon leisure time with their rude and inappropriate desire to eat. Wait, I think they're trying to pass a law like that in the Knesset these days.
Of all the "patriotic" laws being proposed in the Knesset recently the law against commemorating the Nakba (i.e. the Palestinian disaster) during Israeli Independence Day seems to me to be the most nefarious, striking an even lower blow than the law suggesting that a person's citizenship can be taken away if they are not loyal to Israel as a democratic and Jewish state.
This past Wednesday, one night before Shavuot, Tel Aviv had a huge secular pre-holiday party. Stores and cafes were open all night, Rock bands performed at Rabin square and there was ethnic music at Bialik square. They closed off Rothschild Boulevard to cars and filled it with tableaus of old time Tel Aviv: actors in glowing white dresses and top hats lit by florescent lights, a horse floated above us while the hired actor kicked his legs like a happy boy holding a bunch of helium balloons. Designer dresses from the twenties; around midnight a twenty piece band drove by in an open bus dressed in dandy suits playing "When the Saints Come Marching in."
The theme was white: white for the spring holiday dresses, white for the ricotta cheese I bought in the market from unshaved men smoking cigarettes, white for the city that never sleeps, white for purity, white for the Bauhaus architecture, white for whitewashing. It takes the zing out of my holiday when I consider legislation against someone else having a different holiday experience. Suddenly a casual Tel Aviv party looks a little less innocent, a little more enforced, and this endless barrage of holidays from Purim to Shavuot (Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day = not Nakba) starts to seem demonic. All the holiday programs on the radio interviewing people about their holiday customs make you feel like you're in a fun house hall of mirrors.
Walking up Sheinkin to meet my friends on Rothschild Blvd., I got stopped by a bomb scare. Everyone was waiting around, talking on their cellphones, while the police cut off foot traffic. After a few minutes there was a giant pop, like a champagne cork getting released, or a bomb, and the throngs of people started moving again. The only people to put their hands to their mouth were me and an American tourist who said, "What happened?!" Everyone else ignored the sound. I felt like a newbie. You can legislate against commemorating the Nakba, and then you can try and block out these bumps of fear and disorder and enjoy the goddamn party.
Of all the "patriotic" laws being proposed in the Knesset recently the law against commemorating the Nakba (i.e. the Palestinian disaster) during Israeli Independence Day seems to me to be the most nefarious, striking an even lower blow than the law suggesting that a person's citizenship can be taken away if they are not loyal to Israel as a democratic and Jewish state.
This past Wednesday, one night before Shavuot, Tel Aviv had a huge secular pre-holiday party. Stores and cafes were open all night, Rock bands performed at Rabin square and there was ethnic music at Bialik square. They closed off Rothschild Boulevard to cars and filled it with tableaus of old time Tel Aviv: actors in glowing white dresses and top hats lit by florescent lights, a horse floated above us while the hired actor kicked his legs like a happy boy holding a bunch of helium balloons. Designer dresses from the twenties; around midnight a twenty piece band drove by in an open bus dressed in dandy suits playing "When the Saints Come Marching in."
The theme was white: white for the spring holiday dresses, white for the ricotta cheese I bought in the market from unshaved men smoking cigarettes, white for the city that never sleeps, white for purity, white for the Bauhaus architecture, white for whitewashing. It takes the zing out of my holiday when I consider legislation against someone else having a different holiday experience. Suddenly a casual Tel Aviv party looks a little less innocent, a little more enforced, and this endless barrage of holidays from Purim to Shavuot (Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day = not Nakba) starts to seem demonic. All the holiday programs on the radio interviewing people about their holiday customs make you feel like you're in a fun house hall of mirrors.
Walking up Sheinkin to meet my friends on Rothschild Blvd., I got stopped by a bomb scare. Everyone was waiting around, talking on their cellphones, while the police cut off foot traffic. After a few minutes there was a giant pop, like a champagne cork getting released, or a bomb, and the throngs of people started moving again. The only people to put their hands to their mouth were me and an American tourist who said, "What happened?!" Everyone else ignored the sound. I felt like a newbie. You can legislate against commemorating the Nakba, and then you can try and block out these bumps of fear and disorder and enjoy the goddamn party.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
A Well of Milk in the Middle of the City
Sometimes you're just minding your own business in your (temporary) apartment when a pigeon falls into the spare room and flutters back and forth and you're torn between pity and revulsion.
My roommate was trying to move it off the windowsill and it fell *inside* instead of falling *outside.* We brought it water in the top of a Tupperware container, but envisioned a slow painful death all afternoon. Before scooping it up in a carton and leaving it to die in the front yard, my last ditch attempt to trust in The Law was to call the Tel-Aviv municipality hotline (106 for you locals!) A sweaty veterinarian arrived within the hour. He seemed to be throwing our pigeon on the floor, thereby further injuring it, but he said, in a somewhat surly tone, that he was checking its flight capabilities. He said it was still a baby, and he would leave it on the bushes to let its parents find it. He hurried off, taking two stairs at a time, holding our pigeon in his bare hands. What did Jesus say about a single sparrow, and what can I say about the tender care of the Tel-Aviv Municipality for a single pigeon?
And somehow this is related to the astounding poetry reading I just came back from -- maybe because I arrived at the little square at the end of Bialik street just at sunset when all the birds were circling in the sky and cooing. There's also something here for me about tangibility: all week I have been reading about Bialik's poem about the Kishinev Pogroms from 1903 and here I am almost by chance at his house -- a strange pseudo-Mediterranean villa for the Russian-Yiddish-Hebrew Father of Modern Hebrew Poetry.
Perhaps it's a move from metaphor to metonymy - from my games with imaginary cities to the pigeon that dropped into the room. Or, I've been having these intense conversations with N., who I hope very much will post some guest blogs here in the next few weeks about witnessing. I told her that my reading on Bialik visiting the Jews post pogrom in Kishinev reminded me of her work with the Palestinians who were given cameras by Amnesty International in Hebron. In the beginning it seemed to be a metaphorical connection, but the more we kept talking about the way Bialik's poem shaped Zionism and attitudes toward victims, it became clear that there is a real family connection here: a physical linkage and not just a circumstancial connection.
How is this connected to the wonderful luminous Chezzi Leskly reading I went to tonight in honor of the new Collected Works" recently released by Am Oved? I think Chezzi Lesky might have approved of S.'s question to me - which I bring here in tribute - are you experiencing Tel Aviv with a condom or bareback?
I'll translate a taste of tonight, very bloggily, a little segment from "Poetry." p. 175
Poetry can be a kind of jam
in other words, a dead and tasty fruit.
Poetry can be saccharine
in other words an artificial and cancerous sweetener
poetry can build
an apartment building
a hospital
a school
a jail house
a synagogue
but it prefers
to discover
a well of milk in the middle of the city.
My roommate was trying to move it off the windowsill and it fell *inside* instead of falling *outside.* We brought it water in the top of a Tupperware container, but envisioned a slow painful death all afternoon. Before scooping it up in a carton and leaving it to die in the front yard, my last ditch attempt to trust in The Law was to call the Tel-Aviv municipality hotline (106 for you locals!) A sweaty veterinarian arrived within the hour. He seemed to be throwing our pigeon on the floor, thereby further injuring it, but he said, in a somewhat surly tone, that he was checking its flight capabilities. He said it was still a baby, and he would leave it on the bushes to let its parents find it. He hurried off, taking two stairs at a time, holding our pigeon in his bare hands. What did Jesus say about a single sparrow, and what can I say about the tender care of the Tel-Aviv Municipality for a single pigeon?
And somehow this is related to the astounding poetry reading I just came back from -- maybe because I arrived at the little square at the end of Bialik street just at sunset when all the birds were circling in the sky and cooing. There's also something here for me about tangibility: all week I have been reading about Bialik's poem about the Kishinev Pogroms from 1903 and here I am almost by chance at his house -- a strange pseudo-Mediterranean villa for the Russian-Yiddish-Hebrew Father of Modern Hebrew Poetry.
Perhaps it's a move from metaphor to metonymy - from my games with imaginary cities to the pigeon that dropped into the room. Or, I've been having these intense conversations with N., who I hope very much will post some guest blogs here in the next few weeks about witnessing. I told her that my reading on Bialik visiting the Jews post pogrom in Kishinev reminded me of her work with the Palestinians who were given cameras by Amnesty International in Hebron. In the beginning it seemed to be a metaphorical connection, but the more we kept talking about the way Bialik's poem shaped Zionism and attitudes toward victims, it became clear that there is a real family connection here: a physical linkage and not just a circumstancial connection.
How is this connected to the wonderful luminous Chezzi Leskly reading I went to tonight in honor of the new Collected Works" recently released by Am Oved? I think Chezzi Lesky might have approved of S.'s question to me - which I bring here in tribute - are you experiencing Tel Aviv with a condom or bareback?
I'll translate a taste of tonight, very bloggily, a little segment from "Poetry." p. 175
Poetry can be a kind of jam
in other words, a dead and tasty fruit.
Poetry can be saccharine
in other words an artificial and cancerous sweetener
poetry can build
an apartment building
a hospital
a school
a jail house
a synagogue
but it prefers
to discover
a well of milk in the middle of the city.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Eschatology at the Market
I met a woman from my poetry seminar at Hebrew University at Super HaMoshava, a ritzy minimarket, on Friday afternoon. She was doing her Shabbat shopping with her daughter and I was coming home from the pool buying a single pear, slightly off schedule for Shabbat, baby etc. She was wearing dangly gold earings, and a headscarf that fashionably covered only her hairline. She said she grew up in Jerusalem, that she is the sixth generation in this city. I couldn't imagine that kind of rootedness, or even that kind of clear-cut desire to live in your parents' city. I wanted to stay and talk with her about prophecy; I think she believes Uri Zvi Greenberg, the modernist poet we are studying, had true prophetic powers, but she had to rush off into her Shabbat schedule.
And more on vegetables: What a shock it was this week to have breakfast in the Mahane Yehuda vegetable market, my place of middle school truancy. Back then it was slippery with rotten tomatoes on the floor, people screaming prices at you in every direction. We took our American tourist visitors there as a kind of endurance test, or when we had had enough of them. It's gorgeous now, with covered stalls, pseudo-marble paving in the alleys, and imported French cheeses. We had a lovely breakfast at a cafe that overlooks a cheap bag store and a butcher with huge hanging carcasses. Ugh, still gross. But the cafe sells pasta with asparagus and truffles. The truffle lying down with with the squished tomato? The Tel Aviv yuppie picking over fruit with the charedi Jerusalem housewife? Have the days of the Messiah arrived in Mahane Yehuda market? (which, btw, translates as "the camp of Judah." And you know what tribe King David comes from...)
Perhaps the market should have been left as it was in all it's falling-down glory, but it looks like they did an okay job keeping vegetable stalls, though I know many artists' studios were destroyed...plus it had a bad few years when no one would go there because of a bad bombing. I'm curious what Mahane Yehuda fans think. (I could say many ponderous things about Orientalism and Urban Development, but I'll hold back for now. )
So then I had to go to Shuk HaKarmel in Tel Aviv on Friday just to see how it compared, and it was ecstasy. There were women rooting through a square table of awful bras just like I remembered, and two shekel apricot drink, and a woman who tried to sell me really expensive dried rosebuds. The butcher had plastic toys of cows, sheep, and goats. There were strange and wonderful smells to follow, and when we turned the corner, an afternoon Mizrahi Karoke session music was going on...a man was singing Zohar Argov hits in a red cowboy hat. You could buy fresh thyme, basil, rosemary, louisa, chilbe, (what is that in English?), chives, parsley, cilantro. The watermelon seller was yelling, "Honey, it's like honey!" Y. said it would be great here if they didn't have to yell so much. Why do they have to yell? I said, they're yelling because they're happy.
And more on vegetables: What a shock it was this week to have breakfast in the Mahane Yehuda vegetable market, my place of middle school truancy. Back then it was slippery with rotten tomatoes on the floor, people screaming prices at you in every direction. We took our American tourist visitors there as a kind of endurance test, or when we had had enough of them. It's gorgeous now, with covered stalls, pseudo-marble paving in the alleys, and imported French cheeses. We had a lovely breakfast at a cafe that overlooks a cheap bag store and a butcher with huge hanging carcasses. Ugh, still gross. But the cafe sells pasta with asparagus and truffles. The truffle lying down with with the squished tomato? The Tel Aviv yuppie picking over fruit with the charedi Jerusalem housewife? Have the days of the Messiah arrived in Mahane Yehuda market? (which, btw, translates as "the camp of Judah." And you know what tribe King David comes from...)
Perhaps the market should have been left as it was in all it's falling-down glory, but it looks like they did an okay job keeping vegetable stalls, though I know many artists' studios were destroyed...plus it had a bad few years when no one would go there because of a bad bombing. I'm curious what Mahane Yehuda fans think. (I could say many ponderous things about Orientalism and Urban Development, but I'll hold back for now. )
So then I had to go to Shuk HaKarmel in Tel Aviv on Friday just to see how it compared, and it was ecstasy. There were women rooting through a square table of awful bras just like I remembered, and two shekel apricot drink, and a woman who tried to sell me really expensive dried rosebuds. The butcher had plastic toys of cows, sheep, and goats. There were strange and wonderful smells to follow, and when we turned the corner, an afternoon Mizrahi Karoke session music was going on...a man was singing Zohar Argov hits in a red cowboy hat. You could buy fresh thyme, basil, rosemary, louisa, chilbe, (what is that in English?), chives, parsley, cilantro. The watermelon seller was yelling, "Honey, it's like honey!" Y. said it would be great here if they didn't have to yell so much. Why do they have to yell? I said, they're yelling because they're happy.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Independence Day
Last week I was trapped with a migraine at a college reunion at a kibbutz outside the city; I finally got to Harel junction and all the buses to Tel Aviv went by without stopping. When one finally stopped after an hour, it was standing room only. I boarded the bus and announced in a loud voice that I was about to be sick and who was going to give me their seat. A woman who was a bit younger than me stood up immediately and spent the rest of the trip sitting on the bus floor, her bags settled around her. She even poured me water from her water bottle into my water bottle, and when I tried to thank her she seemed genuinely offended by such intrusive displays of gratitude. I sank into my seat, looked out the window into the familiar Jerusalem-Tel Aviv landscape and tried to look sicker than I already was. I thought, that's it, I don't want to leave here, I'm home.
I find such moments so confusing; it's as if I recognize home on the cellular level. A familiar song played on the radio I haven't heard since high school. A familiar smell. A familiar way of holding my body -- freely pushing my way into a crowd, not having to perform polite Americaness. I'm scared of what can be erased of my life in such overwhelming moments. All these years of working and reading and writing and talking.
In this week of Memorial sirens and Memorial Days -- that siren calling you into attention, into citizenship, into a feeling of belonging, there's something in me that wants to fight against this feeling. It's not really in my body, this feeling of Israeliness: it doesn't come from my cells or my bones. That's just a metaphor. And stones don't have human hearts. It's how we construct collective memory.
At the drugstore on the Eve of Independence Day, there's a special deal: buy 12 condoms, get a plastic hammer free. The hammers are for bashing each other. That's what you do on Independence Day, right?
I find such moments so confusing; it's as if I recognize home on the cellular level. A familiar song played on the radio I haven't heard since high school. A familiar smell. A familiar way of holding my body -- freely pushing my way into a crowd, not having to perform polite Americaness. I'm scared of what can be erased of my life in such overwhelming moments. All these years of working and reading and writing and talking.
In this week of Memorial sirens and Memorial Days -- that siren calling you into attention, into citizenship, into a feeling of belonging, there's something in me that wants to fight against this feeling. It's not really in my body, this feeling of Israeliness: it doesn't come from my cells or my bones. That's just a metaphor. And stones don't have human hearts. It's how we construct collective memory.
At the drugstore on the Eve of Independence Day, there's a special deal: buy 12 condoms, get a plastic hammer free. The hammers are for bashing each other. That's what you do on Independence Day, right?
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Us and Them
On the bus to the reunion I meet my old T.A. who says people from Jerusalem are special. They're more serious than Tel-Avivians; they get him better. And these people, on the bus to the reunion of the Hebrew University Amirim Interdisciplinary Program, are the most Jerusalem of Jerusalem. The most serious, the most deep, the most geeky. He's almost overcome with geeky reverence.
When we get there, M. motions me aside. Instead of going into the colloquium on the Sorry State of the Humanities Today, we go off and smoke long feminine cigarettes that come in a rectangular box like high class tampons. He's the black sheep of his settler family. It's strange, we muse, how polite one's settler family can be. He gave a ride once to some settlers going off to volunteer for a disabled children's camp who in the same breath spoke murderous words about Arab killings. My settler relatives too, oblivious to our anger, continue to populate the hills around Jerusalem, killing off the peace process year by year, and invite me with relentless politeness to weddings and births.
M. says the warm blanket of approval I've felt since I've arrived in Israel isn't a contradiction to the latest horrible war in Gaza, but connected. When there's a "them" to be against the feeling of "us" gets stronger. When I arrived in Tel-Aviv with my prodigal daughter narrative, I made all of "us" feel better.
Meanwhile, the professors congratulated us and themselves for Hebrew University's pursuit of excellence, and I thought, like one of the bad sons at the Seder, why are there no Arabs here, or even Russians, Ethiopians - hardly any Sephardic Jews, hardly any women on the panel? They were not chosen by Hebrew University for excellence.
This week is sandwiched between Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, and Israeli Independence Day. So many Days to grieve and mourn and celebrate! So many days to feel "us". What do we do? We light memorial candles, we grill meat, we hang our flags from the window, we dance in the streets to shake off 2,000 years of exile. What do "they" do while "we" are doing our remembering?
When we get there, M. motions me aside. Instead of going into the colloquium on the Sorry State of the Humanities Today, we go off and smoke long feminine cigarettes that come in a rectangular box like high class tampons. He's the black sheep of his settler family. It's strange, we muse, how polite one's settler family can be. He gave a ride once to some settlers going off to volunteer for a disabled children's camp who in the same breath spoke murderous words about Arab killings. My settler relatives too, oblivious to our anger, continue to populate the hills around Jerusalem, killing off the peace process year by year, and invite me with relentless politeness to weddings and births.
M. says the warm blanket of approval I've felt since I've arrived in Israel isn't a contradiction to the latest horrible war in Gaza, but connected. When there's a "them" to be against the feeling of "us" gets stronger. When I arrived in Tel-Aviv with my prodigal daughter narrative, I made all of "us" feel better.
Meanwhile, the professors congratulated us and themselves for Hebrew University's pursuit of excellence, and I thought, like one of the bad sons at the Seder, why are there no Arabs here, or even Russians, Ethiopians - hardly any Sephardic Jews, hardly any women on the panel? They were not chosen by Hebrew University for excellence.
This week is sandwiched between Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day, and Israeli Independence Day. So many Days to grieve and mourn and celebrate! So many days to feel "us". What do we do? We light memorial candles, we grill meat, we hang our flags from the window, we dance in the streets to shake off 2,000 years of exile. What do "they" do while "we" are doing our remembering?
Friday, April 17, 2009
Jericho and Jerusalem
When I was in high school there used to be a guy who used to stride down Agripas Street into the vegetable market in a blue robe and staff, a silver breastplate hung across his chest, as if he was practicing to be the high priest for the Third Temple. Also, there was a restaurant you could eat at in the Jewish Quarter that recreated life in Roman Times. They served you roasted meat and figs, whilst dressing you up in a white sheet. My parents got married at the Holy Land Hotel, famous for its historically accurate model of the Second Temple. Tourists can go see it, and then go see the Western Wall and see what's missing.
The latest musical trend in return and recreation of Psalms and Medieval liturgy seems to merit an entire posting, especially the work of the Avichai foundation, (="my father is alive") which hosts concerts and study groups, lectures and art exhibits to do with Jewish culture -- all with an agenda I haven't fully sniffed out yet -- but more on that in a later posting.
When I was invited to the "The Voices of the Levites: Tracing the lost musical instruments of the Temple," I expected a sophisticated version of these recreation activities. Some good new compositions of the Psalms, musicians in blue and white clothes with touches of silver with yearning, earnest looks on their faces. I suspect that this is what the kugel-fed crowd looking for a good Passover activity was also expecting. With the first deep and weird tones of the female vocalist (full disclaimer: my wonderful sister!) three men in large white kippot escaped the hall lest they be drawn into temptation hearing the nakedness of a woman's voice, and when she sang the explicit name of God another young couple left quietly, a guitar swinging from his back.
The Levites had to draw lots to serve in the Temple -- disembodied text flashed across the wall behind the musicians -- lest they push and shove each other. These Levites came through in fragments. Nobody was trying to actually be a Levite. (What a relief!) The recreation of the Levites voices in the temple, as well as a the imaginary instruments described in the Psalms was both a labor of love and a spectacular purposeful failure.
Though Ilan Green, formerly of the "the Tractor's Revenge," and the visioner of the project, built a a drum shaped like a star of David, shakers in the shapes of the seven species and an otherworldly tree hung with bells called Ayelet Hashachar (="the Doe of Dawn"?) the band did not actually play any psalms on the instruments. The texts were fragments: a few opening superscriptions (the "choir instructions" for the psalms that were probably added much later) a prayer from Qumran, something from the song of Songs, a meditation on King David as a man who lived his life in tents, always running.
At one point we heard that that the singing of the Psalms in the Temple were so loud they could hear it all the way to Jericho. Jericho is a city extra-sensitive to music, because Jericho's walls were brought down by music. These Psalms are ghosts, and we are not Jerusalem, though we are sitting in this opulent concert hall in the New Jerusalem. As moderns, we are Jericho, we are what has been destroyed by the violence of the ram's horns. What we recreate is our ability to listen.
After the concert a starry eyed bearded boy asks me if the instruments are historically accurate.
He says, "I think these musicians would have a lot to contribute when the Third Temple is rebuilt."
I say, "Well, not the woman. She couldn't sing at the temple." He nods his head regretfully, agreeing.
I say, "I think they would all have to move to Germany if they built a Third Temple."
"Really?"
"Yes, I would probably also move to Germany."
He says, "Are you Jewish?" I turn in profile to show him my nose.
"What do you think?"
The latest musical trend in return and recreation of Psalms and Medieval liturgy seems to merit an entire posting, especially the work of the Avichai foundation, (="my father is alive") which hosts concerts and study groups, lectures and art exhibits to do with Jewish culture -- all with an agenda I haven't fully sniffed out yet -- but more on that in a later posting.
When I was invited to the "The Voices of the Levites: Tracing the lost musical instruments of the Temple," I expected a sophisticated version of these recreation activities. Some good new compositions of the Psalms, musicians in blue and white clothes with touches of silver with yearning, earnest looks on their faces. I suspect that this is what the kugel-fed crowd looking for a good Passover activity was also expecting. With the first deep and weird tones of the female vocalist (full disclaimer: my wonderful sister!) three men in large white kippot escaped the hall lest they be drawn into temptation hearing the nakedness of a woman's voice, and when she sang the explicit name of God another young couple left quietly, a guitar swinging from his back.
The Levites had to draw lots to serve in the Temple -- disembodied text flashed across the wall behind the musicians -- lest they push and shove each other. These Levites came through in fragments. Nobody was trying to actually be a Levite. (What a relief!) The recreation of the Levites voices in the temple, as well as a the imaginary instruments described in the Psalms was both a labor of love and a spectacular purposeful failure.
Though Ilan Green, formerly of the "the Tractor's Revenge," and the visioner of the project, built a a drum shaped like a star of David, shakers in the shapes of the seven species and an otherworldly tree hung with bells called Ayelet Hashachar (="the Doe of Dawn"?) the band did not actually play any psalms on the instruments. The texts were fragments: a few opening superscriptions (the "choir instructions" for the psalms that were probably added much later) a prayer from Qumran, something from the song of Songs, a meditation on King David as a man who lived his life in tents, always running.
At one point we heard that that the singing of the Psalms in the Temple were so loud they could hear it all the way to Jericho. Jericho is a city extra-sensitive to music, because Jericho's walls were brought down by music. These Psalms are ghosts, and we are not Jerusalem, though we are sitting in this opulent concert hall in the New Jerusalem. As moderns, we are Jericho, we are what has been destroyed by the violence of the ram's horns. What we recreate is our ability to listen.
After the concert a starry eyed bearded boy asks me if the instruments are historically accurate.
He says, "I think these musicians would have a lot to contribute when the Third Temple is rebuilt."
I say, "Well, not the woman. She couldn't sing at the temple." He nods his head regretfully, agreeing.
I say, "I think they would all have to move to Germany if they built a Third Temple."
"Really?"
"Yes, I would probably also move to Germany."
He says, "Are you Jewish?" I turn in profile to show him my nose.
"What do you think?"
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Flour and Water
My mother says the matzah on the Seder table can be an object of meditation. Something we come back to again and again, like the breath. What is this matzah but flour and water? Just like us: dust and water. My mother's hair is flattened from lying down -- she hasn't been feeling well. Last year in Berkeley I said, "next year in Jerusalem" at the Seder with a kind of glee, conflating the literal and metaphorical. This year, the first day of Chol Hamoed, these passover pilgrims are everywhere, streaming out of the old city, making it hard to sit at a cafe and work.
The family dog knows the extended family: when we get to my half sisters' house, she runs up the stairs full of excitement and lets Odelia smush her ears in patiently. She goes into my sister Avital's house like it is her home and climbs up on the couch like she is a person, to watch Zoolander with us. But at the Seder itself we're shrunk down - it's just my father, my mother and me with some friends. It's confusing - all my friends are in Berkeley having a beautiful meal without me, and I'd like to be with them, but when I was in Berkeley I thought something was missing because I wasn't home...that there was some other Seder waiting for me full of family and meaning, with the old songs we used to sing, the old melodies.
My mother says the matzah on the table is on object for projection, transformation: what was once just flour and water becomes at the end of the meal the most sublime delight. A little afikomen square of goodness better than the best chocolate mousse cake. (We used to make it every year together, mixing fast, trying not to let the egg yokes congeal.) Our lives, our bodies, just water and dust. But if you keep chewing...
Driving home from watching the sunset on Samson Valley my friends are singing Waltzing Matilda in faint voices. This sweet nostalgia for somewhere I never was can be savored.
My mother says, after the Seder, let me lean on you. I take her elbow and she says, no, that's you leaning on me, so we change the clasp.
The family dog knows the extended family: when we get to my half sisters' house, she runs up the stairs full of excitement and lets Odelia smush her ears in patiently. She goes into my sister Avital's house like it is her home and climbs up on the couch like she is a person, to watch Zoolander with us. But at the Seder itself we're shrunk down - it's just my father, my mother and me with some friends. It's confusing - all my friends are in Berkeley having a beautiful meal without me, and I'd like to be with them, but when I was in Berkeley I thought something was missing because I wasn't home...that there was some other Seder waiting for me full of family and meaning, with the old songs we used to sing, the old melodies.
My mother says the matzah on the table is on object for projection, transformation: what was once just flour and water becomes at the end of the meal the most sublime delight. A little afikomen square of goodness better than the best chocolate mousse cake. (We used to make it every year together, mixing fast, trying not to let the egg yokes congeal.) Our lives, our bodies, just water and dust. But if you keep chewing...
Driving home from watching the sunset on Samson Valley my friends are singing Waltzing Matilda in faint voices. This sweet nostalgia for somewhere I never was can be savored.
My mother says, after the Seder, let me lean on you. I take her elbow and she says, no, that's you leaning on me, so we change the clasp.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Happy Birthday Tel Aviv!
Five days before Passover, and everyone* in Jerusalem is cleaning to save their lives; meanwhile, Tel Aviv is full of Dionysian spring energy, colored lights on Rothschild Blvd. and huge blown up old photos of old time Tel Aviv kitsch from the twenties and thirties: little girls playing with what looks like retro doll sets, stiff sepia photos taken to send back to the relatives in Europe - everything twice life sized. Tonight there's supposed to be dancing in the streets, fireworks maybe. In Jerusalem it's easier to see the seam lines: the yuppie neighborhoods still carry the names of the Arab villages they displaced. Here, one hundred years ago -- only sand. It's a more complicated mental exercise to imagine what if's. What if Tel Aviv weren't here? What would be here instead?
The kube soup guy at Rabin Square tells me he brings his kube all the way from Jerusalem, it's more authentic; the hipsters have taken over the old ladies' cafe on Ben Yehuda street, and the old ladies with the knotted silk scarves now order their cafes and sweet things at the new geletarias. The frozen yogurt trend is being replaced by a French rotisserie trend. Passports are the new pornography: this one has a Polish passport, this one a Hungarian one, a German one -- the German classes are full to the brim (I counted 8 beginner classes at Goethe and 12 intermediate), everyone says they want to get out, and they ride around the wide modernist boulevards without any helmets. The pregnant ladies wear skintight clothes (take note Berkeley pregnant ladies!), and at the beach eleven African tourists in full tribal garb stroll at the water. Apparently, I'm the only woman without a tattoo in the entire city. Happy Birthday Tel Aviv!
* Ok, hyperbolic...
The kube soup guy at Rabin Square tells me he brings his kube all the way from Jerusalem, it's more authentic; the hipsters have taken over the old ladies' cafe on Ben Yehuda street, and the old ladies with the knotted silk scarves now order their cafes and sweet things at the new geletarias. The frozen yogurt trend is being replaced by a French rotisserie trend. Passports are the new pornography: this one has a Polish passport, this one a Hungarian one, a German one -- the German classes are full to the brim (I counted 8 beginner classes at Goethe and 12 intermediate), everyone says they want to get out, and they ride around the wide modernist boulevards without any helmets. The pregnant ladies wear skintight clothes (take note Berkeley pregnant ladies!), and at the beach eleven African tourists in full tribal garb stroll at the water. Apparently, I'm the only woman without a tattoo in the entire city. Happy Birthday Tel Aviv!
* Ok, hyperbolic...
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Metaphysics of the Shared Taxi
Late Monday morning, I'm waiting for the taxi from Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv to fill up at the stand on Rav Kook Street. There are three guys standing outside smoking cigarettes also waiting. The guy across from me is too big to fit into the seat, so he sits sideways in a pink shirt, charcoal grey suit jacket, talking on his cellphone. A comfortable burger, a businessman -- I imagine he owns an electronics store and is going to Tel-Aviv to meet with his suppliers. The Philippina lady in a baseball hat is cracking jokes in Hebrew to anyone who will listen. G. told me that when she first moved back to Israel, she had to get over her fear that the Arab man sitting beside her was a terrorist. Any of them could be. But I have no fear; I feel comfortable with the Arabic around me, the driver talking to his businessmen passengers. They are so involved in their gossip - how could they want to blow me up? There's even a kind of delicacy to the usual experience of being surrounded by four cellphone conversations, a more respectful distance, or maybe it's the faint Orientalism imprinted in my genetic makeup which lets me doze into a Middle Eastern fantasy.
Maybe the ease I feel though, is because the shared taxi is not regulated like the bus. You are not checked with the metal detector when you go into the station, your bag is not searched. Nobody examines the color of your ID card if you sound suspicious. You take your chances. And Arabic is spoken freely. "Ta'al, ta'al," the driver says to the guys smoking outside and off we go on our journey.
The shared taxi is the black market of intercity travel. There's an intimacy to this crossing of boundaries, to the way a taxi can slide into Jerusalem late on a Friday afternoon, no traffic, everyone in synagogue, parting the streets like butter. Usually one of the windows are broken, often the driver speeds, sometimes the driver listens to a Russian techno station.
And we're not surrounded by soldiers: their stripes, their clanking guns which I confess I used to think were sexy. Soldiers ride free on the bus. They're part of the apparatus: dormant, sleeping beauties like the rest of us, but ready to spring into action. Even the bus driver, I believe, is taught judo or at least is trained as a combat medic in case of need.
If you travel by bus, entering the station is unavoidable: the flashing lights, the mounds of borekas, cheap underwear, ten shekel discs. You're processed. You can't avoid the State: its guards and its split-second categorizations.
The shared taxi makes a stop a block away, where the old central bus station used to be. Now it's the neighborhood of the semi-legal foreign workers, prostitutes and "discrete houses," pork stores with signs in Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish and Chinese.
The three Arab businessmen, carrying no bags, jump off the shared taxi and disappear into the neighborhood as if they never existed.
Postscript
Tuesday, again on the taxi, I meet a sculpture teacher from Bezalel art school, who'd like me to write about the physics of the taxi, why the metaphysics? He says his sculptures are bigger than this van. He's straight out of Hemingway with a cane and a handlebar moustache, walks around his classroom with a glass of scotch. He says, put me on page three, not page one, if you write about me. Put me in the moleskin journal, not that little Chinese embossed one you're carrying around. He says, "One day a student came in and said, see that man in the paper? I shot him. He was a sniper, you see." I'm not sure I've put the sculptor in the right place in the story; there's a sense that we're caught in a story that's unsuited to us, no matter what moustache we grow.
"What did you say to him?"
"A killer, in my classroom. But he's a nice guy, a really nice guy."
Maybe the ease I feel though, is because the shared taxi is not regulated like the bus. You are not checked with the metal detector when you go into the station, your bag is not searched. Nobody examines the color of your ID card if you sound suspicious. You take your chances. And Arabic is spoken freely. "Ta'al, ta'al," the driver says to the guys smoking outside and off we go on our journey.
The shared taxi is the black market of intercity travel. There's an intimacy to this crossing of boundaries, to the way a taxi can slide into Jerusalem late on a Friday afternoon, no traffic, everyone in synagogue, parting the streets like butter. Usually one of the windows are broken, often the driver speeds, sometimes the driver listens to a Russian techno station.
And we're not surrounded by soldiers: their stripes, their clanking guns which I confess I used to think were sexy. Soldiers ride free on the bus. They're part of the apparatus: dormant, sleeping beauties like the rest of us, but ready to spring into action. Even the bus driver, I believe, is taught judo or at least is trained as a combat medic in case of need.
If you travel by bus, entering the station is unavoidable: the flashing lights, the mounds of borekas, cheap underwear, ten shekel discs. You're processed. You can't avoid the State: its guards and its split-second categorizations.
The shared taxi makes a stop a block away, where the old central bus station used to be. Now it's the neighborhood of the semi-legal foreign workers, prostitutes and "discrete houses," pork stores with signs in Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish and Chinese.
The three Arab businessmen, carrying no bags, jump off the shared taxi and disappear into the neighborhood as if they never existed.
Postscript
Tuesday, again on the taxi, I meet a sculpture teacher from Bezalel art school, who'd like me to write about the physics of the taxi, why the metaphysics? He says his sculptures are bigger than this van. He's straight out of Hemingway with a cane and a handlebar moustache, walks around his classroom with a glass of scotch. He says, put me on page three, not page one, if you write about me. Put me in the moleskin journal, not that little Chinese embossed one you're carrying around. He says, "One day a student came in and said, see that man in the paper? I shot him. He was a sniper, you see." I'm not sure I've put the sculptor in the right place in the story; there's a sense that we're caught in a story that's unsuited to us, no matter what moustache we grow.
"What did you say to him?"
"A killer, in my classroom. But he's a nice guy, a really nice guy."
Friday, March 20, 2009
The Passion of the Boy Soldier
I ran into a friend from college on the bus and when the news came on the radio, I shushed her, to hear if there was anything new with Gilaad Shalit. Then I realized it was okay: if they announced that he had been released everyone would be talking. You wouldn't even need to listen: you would see it on their faces. It would be like a Messianic redemption scene, everyone jumping up for joy, golden light coming out of the clouds, and everything we had lost three years ago when he disappeared restored back to us. No second war in Lebanon, no "Cast Lead Operation." We could wake up and say that had all been a a bad dream, and we brought our child-soldier home.
The talk about Gilaad Shalit surrounds us like a constant murmur, rising and falling, and we move inside of it. On Purim, the tabloids show his photograph as a boy dressed up. "Sad Clown," they scream. "Save me!" his silk screened picture implores at the entrance to Jerusalem, and hung from apartment buildings --"save me!" And we want to save him so badly. At the protest tent in from of the Prime Minister's house, there's a timeline for the days he's been gone with little markers for his first Rosh Hashana in captivity, his second Passover in captivity. My mother says, if it was you, don't you think I would do the same?
The man who is trying to sell me his mattress happens to head the campaign to free Gilaad. I'm lying on my back, checking out the springs, tell him I'm interested in the situation. He sitting on a chair -- a slightly cramped room, and him in his slippers -- he says, there is no "interested" in Israel anymore. There is only sad, happy, angry.
It reminds me of a terrible Hollywood movie I saw with S. before I left. Liam Neeson's spoiled daughter gets kidnapped in Europe and he uses all his most violent, former-CIA-FBI-macho-letter powers to get her back, destroying scores of buildings, cars, killing petty criminals and bystanders, letting her more slutty friends die in the process. The equation of lives just doesn't add up. Some days I think, our caring is no caring at all, if we didn't care when we turned off the electricity in Gaza and the food, and killed children going to school. But then some days I think that this recent bout of complete Gilaad Shalit obsession is some misguided attempt to regain our caring, to believe that we could be good parents after all if only we tried hard enough to get him back, like a magic spell, a resurrection.
The talk about Gilaad Shalit surrounds us like a constant murmur, rising and falling, and we move inside of it. On Purim, the tabloids show his photograph as a boy dressed up. "Sad Clown," they scream. "Save me!" his silk screened picture implores at the entrance to Jerusalem, and hung from apartment buildings --"save me!" And we want to save him so badly. At the protest tent in from of the Prime Minister's house, there's a timeline for the days he's been gone with little markers for his first Rosh Hashana in captivity, his second Passover in captivity. My mother says, if it was you, don't you think I would do the same?
The man who is trying to sell me his mattress happens to head the campaign to free Gilaad. I'm lying on my back, checking out the springs, tell him I'm interested in the situation. He sitting on a chair -- a slightly cramped room, and him in his slippers -- he says, there is no "interested" in Israel anymore. There is only sad, happy, angry.
It reminds me of a terrible Hollywood movie I saw with S. before I left. Liam Neeson's spoiled daughter gets kidnapped in Europe and he uses all his most violent, former-CIA-FBI-macho-letter powers to get her back, destroying scores of buildings, cars, killing petty criminals and bystanders, letting her more slutty friends die in the process. The equation of lives just doesn't add up. Some days I think, our caring is no caring at all, if we didn't care when we turned off the electricity in Gaza and the food, and killed children going to school. But then some days I think that this recent bout of complete Gilaad Shalit obsession is some misguided attempt to regain our caring, to believe that we could be good parents after all if only we tried hard enough to get him back, like a magic spell, a resurrection.
First Thoughts
I used to think poets shouldn't blog, they should stay in their garret and preform their suffered acts of inspiration in silence -- perhaps on occasion letting out a sigh, groan or even barbaric yawp. I'm writing now because my mind is filled with parts of conversations I'm having with so many of you, my friends in Berkeley, about what it's like to come back to Israel after years of being gone, the mix of familiarity and strangeness. I'm hoping that all these snippets of conversations can also be woven into the bigger Conversation we are having with each other about places and homes, belonging and not belonging. I'm also writing to gnaw at this question that I bring to this particular visit -- the question of the past war, and how it is that these nice people who give me kube soup, and call me motek, who match-make me and send me to their favorite yoga teacher, who remember me from middle school, *my people*, supported this war. Or, in other words, how to put together the acts of brutality done by the state of Israel in my name (all Israelis? all Jews?) with the way you pay for a shared taxi cab in Tel Aviv: you tap on the shoulder of the person sitting in front of you, and give them your fifty shekel note, and then they pass the money back and forth to the driver, your change always coming back through the passengers perfectly accurate, coins poured from palm to palm, Israeli to Palestinian to foreign worker and back. I can't put it together.
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