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.