I have no idea what this literary event is going to be like.  I only know that this afternoon on "The Zohar, Poetry and the Portion of the week" is going to be interesting.  At the Writers' House on 6 Kaplan Street on March 30, Orna Rav-Hon is going to host Rafi Weichert, Gad Yacobi, Meiron Isaacson and me and we're going to read poetry.  The point of the whole event i think is to create more positive vibrations at the Writers' House which has been in great disarray for years primarily due to bad feelings.  It's at 11 next Friday morning. 

How did those children ever find their way walking from Poland to Iran to Israel? Ben Zion Tomer was one of those 830 odd children who came to Israel on this day in 1943 after having left Poland in 1939. The story can be read here. I know Tomer never got over it. You can read some of his poems about this here. I translated them when he was still alive, and cannot remember where they were first published. But whenever I think of him I first remember that he called me "a born orphan" and I wondered at the fact that he identified me so clearly. You can read about him here. He was happiest I think in his final years, and in a way made his peace with the loss of his past, his family, his life.

for the rest of the pictures see my old site: http://www.karenalkalay-gut.com. 

 

I promised a little more about our little tour of Drejat. So here is the school. Note how the 850 residents take care to keep the school perfectly clean. The library has books in three languages - three alphabets.

It is next to the computer room. Unfortunately the town in not connected to water or electricity - they have their own generators and wells.

Well, you can probably get all that information on their site. Let me tell you something you can't get elsewhere: We are standing in the cave that Jabber's father carved out when he came from Hebron, and Jabber is explaining in the large space where the cows slept, where the camels slept, where the goats slept and where the family slept. "How can you have privacy if the children and the parents sleep in the same room?" one of the ladies asks him. He answers with a story of parents and the child in a very small apartment. Every time they wanted to have sex, they would send the boy out to the balcony. "And tell us the whole time exactly what you see." "I see a black car coming by, some people crossing the street, a bird...." And so they would send the boy out to the balcony. One day, they sent him out, and he began to recite, "I see a bird, a yellow car, all the neighbors are having sex..." "WHAT? How do you see THAT?" "Well, all the children are on their balconies..." The cave resounds with our laughter.

We go back to Tel Aviv and tell this story to our friends, and everyone laughs.

It takes me a few days to realize that the joke Jabber has told was a culturally specific urban tale, that it had nothing to do in any way with Djerat. That's when I remembered I'd heard the joke a few dozen years ago. That's also when I realize the amazing cultural abyss that the traditional people of Djerat have crossed in bringing us to their town and making their lives understandable to us. There have been over 5000 visitors since they opened it to visitors last year. And I'm sure they are all satisfied that it was worth the trip. First Jabber feeds us his wife's cooking. Then he takes us through the town and the little children come out to shout, "Shalom!" Then we visit the cave, the original dwelling of the town, passing their generator (their local nuclear reactor, Jabber calls it), the numerous satellite dishes, the colorful and varied homes, and leave pleased.

Photos as usual are either by me or Ezi. I don't remember.

And of course I spent the whole week wondering what the smell was like in the cave at night with those cows.

I can't move.  We were fed such amazing delicacies at Yakimono tonight that I couldn't refuse anything and now I can barely sit up straight without my belly falling between my knees.  19 Rothchild Street  - old Tel Aviv - and the restaurant is on a par with any NY Japanese restaurant I know (except the one on E. 43rd). 

As we walked out Naomi said, over there - where Bank Hapoalim is - that's where my grandmother lived.   My sister remembers the garden well. 

How many times have I heard that kind of connection with the past.  We're walking in Tel Aviv and someone will suddenly say - this is my great aunt's store.  Ezi used to surprise me all the time with that.  When I admired the Great Synagogue on Allenby Street, he mentioned that his grandfather had built it....

On a different note, perhaps, the song we're entering in the Eurovision song contest is called "Push the Button" about how Iran is going to blow us up.