First day of summer – the temperature was 37 centigrade and we are swinging in the park with the children. What was going through our minds? The only thing one should be doing is sitting still. Yossl Birstein told me many years ago that when he came to Israel he used to watch the Beduin sitting under a tree and not moving. He would look and admire – how can they not move when the Jews around them were shovelling and mopping and planting. After a little while he understood – it was the only way to survive, to endure, in the long run. You can have bursts of energy and do things for a little while in the heat, but you can’t last it out.
Archive for June, 2010
As I prepare to take care of business today (and family, and fun) I am apologetic about the brevity of my entries here. I’ll need a couple weeks to get back to normal, but I’ll be taking the kiddies on trips which should be fun.
A recent poll has proved what I have been suspecting. In Haaretz today it notes that 89% want legislative elections this year and 84% believe Fatah will win. Despite the present despair it may be the best time to accomplish something – if only we can get a wider government.
We fell asleep with the news – it was too complicated for our simple foreign minds. A crisis of ‘racial’ segregation really caused by radically different values and proportions. The ‘races’ it turns out, are sephardic and ashkenazic, a difference i thought that was passe, and the problem is more of educational values and influence. It’s so clear that this problem could be solved in other than judicial ways, but why find a simple solution when a complicated one would serve. So the education-religion-oriented Ashkenazi parents are arrested because they won’t send their girls to school with children who seem to come from a very different orientation for fear of contamination of values.
Anyway, we fell asleep.
William Carlos Williams came to mind:
Summer Song
Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?
What would I suggest? Supplementary education for culturally deprived children. When I was in fifth grade I went to public school for the first time after Hebrew Day School, and was very lost – i had posture classes, whispered advice from the teachers on dress, an extra push in gym class (although I was never able to catch up – neither on rope climbing nor baseball nor handwriting nor personal hygiene). I know there is no comparison between an immigrant with a parochial education and a child brought up with neglect and crime in the family, but education is a matter of input, and despite my totally anti-semitic sixth grade teacher, Miss Faye, I was not only Americanized, but I blossomed in my three years of grammar school.
18
Jun
Jun
Against impossible odds we are here, back in Tel Aviv, and expecting to catch up on family and friends after we’ve overcome somewhat the shock of travel. There is no way to describe the wonderful Italians and the fascinating conversations that took place in all kinds of languages in Florence, but yesterday is not yet a blur to me, so I will jot it down. Since we were expected to vacate our rooms at 10:30, and we had a date with our cousin to pick us up at 12:30 at the porta a mensona (which was only a 20 mintes by taxe from our hotel), we went to visit Savanarola’s square, where he stand with his fiery eyes and his cross uplifted to warn us about what happens to people that don’t belong. Then we grabbed our taxi and got left off in the middle of the street, but near a little niche with reading material about Porta a mensano. We had just gotten our luggage arranged under the arch when an extreme hailstorm began. Even the little arch that sheltered us couldn’t take it and began dripping so hard we couldn’t dare to search around for an umbrella inside the luggage. Perhaps if I had used the niche properly, and taken the opportunity for a little prayer, we might have been less ill-abused by the weather, but eventually there was a little let-up, cousin Gideon showed up, and the moment we got into the car, the rain stopped.
We dried off at the Castello di Vincilliato, where Gideon and his family live, and were refreshed by a heavily wine-soaked lunch. Everything tastes good there. Simply.
But the traffic jam on the way to the train station left us breathless with uncertainly about whether we would actually make the 4:10 to Rome or miss it, and miss our flight as well. When it all came together, and we had past customs, ate dinner, bought our earphones and all that, the flight was delayed for an hour, and we arrived home at four in the morning. As thrilled to touch ground as we used to be in the old days when we felt this was the only place to be ever.
Hey where are you guys? I know it’s a little rainy, I know that Ralph Fiennes is reading Dante down the street, but I still expect you to be there tonight. Nine thirty in the library.
I’m still amazed by Florence and will set a seperate page on it when i get home on thursday.
Because this is a Tel Aviv Diary, and not a Florence diary, I have not included all the churches and libraries and restaurants and pharmacies and piazzas in these pages. I have said nothing of the poetry festival in which I am participating, and nothing of the wonderful people I am meeting. Fascinating as it all is, it seems to have no importance, But today, when we came upon the great synagogue of Florence, there is no way I can be silent. First, it is a magnificent structure, and the museum offers a view of Jewish life in Florence for hundreds of years, as well as the sadness of a memorial for those lost in the war. The synagogue itself is a wonderful relief after churches. There are no pedagogical graphics, no paintings of significant wonders, but only the magnificence of abstraction. Moorish, with something of a Christian structure, but with a definite Jewish flavor, the synagogue seems to purposely teach a different lesson about what religion is, and what should be the relationship between the individual and the prayer. It’s not surprising, then, that it is overlooked by most tourists: it’s just so different an experience. What is surprising, though, was the fact the very few Israelis visit. The curator was delighted to see us, and to consider our questions, which come from a different understanding than that of the average tourist (all Jewish as far as I could tell). I wish we had been allowed to take photographs, because there really is so much to see, and so little that can be explained about it.
Why we don’t go back to Poland. An interesting answer to Helen Thomas. My grandparents lived next door to each other on the market in Lida. They each had a house that was ‘lost’ when the families were destroyed. You think they’d
give those houses back to us? I wouldn’t mind sharing the one on my father’s side with my cousins, but on my mother’s side it’s only my brother and me. Maybe we could work something out, although I think the reason they lived there was that they were kicked out Palestine in the first place…
The other day in the public market, I saw a t-shirt that said, “Zaka…collecting people.” Zaka is the organization that appears immediately after a terrorist attack, takes care of the wounded, and more, picks up the body parts. Its a pretty gruesome parody of the “Nokia, connecting people” ad, but it took me a few days to realize that the place this t-shirt was being sold in a place where a number of people had been killed in a terrorist attack, and that although I still shudder, we go everywhere now with almost no panic.
