Dec
One of my dearest friends has been working for years on proving that the linguistic source of Yiddish is not German but Khazar. This is to prove that Jews are not from here but somewhere else. It may work. But he still lives here and will probably die down the street from me. That is, he may see a theoretical negation of the ‘narrative’ we live, but we still live here. And I’m going off this morning to see some more of Tel Aviv, to kiss the ground as it were.
The sun urged us to come outside, and Alicia and Jerry Ostriker joined us at the port at Yaffo.
There may be much that is new at the port, but somehow I concentrated on the old. When I suddenly overheard Ezi explaining to Jerry that his grandfather had built the hangars whose decrepit state I was admiring, I was thrilled. I knew it must have been around the early thirties, but considered it only in terms of the personal history of Ezi’s grandfather, Arpad Gut. Ezi photographed them:
Then we spotted an old boat in the parking lot
Where is that from? When was it built? I walked around the boat and found a group of old Arab men. “Sit down, have a cup of tea, let’s have your phone number,” says one. “Don’t give him your number,” warns another, “He’s untrustworthy.” “Well,” I say, “My husband’s over there, he’ll take care of me” – I take the tea and sit down. “Whose boat is this?” I ask. “My grandfather built it,” says the guy in the yellow sweater. “Wow,” I respond, “And my husband’s grandfather built that hangar.” “Can’t be, they were built by the British.” “Yes, he was working for them.” A muttering of Arabic I cannot catch, and do not want to respond to.
I’m having too much fun.
They want to know what I do, and I begin to explain, but then Ezi comes to pick me up and I know he will not be too excited about talking to strange oldtimers, so I promise to come back in a few weeks for more tea, at their repeated invitation.
More another day
