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.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
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.
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