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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.

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.