Driving through the city today I was struck by the tall buildings. Ezi always wanted to live in a high penthouse but I am a down-to-earth type of person. Anyway he commented on one of the new buildings on Derech Petach Tivka – self-contained star-studded little cities. “This one looks like a match that could break easily in an earthquake.” “Earthquake? Earthquake? Nor dos felt mir!” I burst out. “That’s all I’m missing in my life!” “We’re not really on a fault-line,” says Ezi. “There is no evidence of earthquake in the past here.” “That’s because earlier people were too smart to build a city on the sand, so there’s no evidence!”
I used to go up to the hill behind the university during the Gulf War, and look at the city. The view there is magnificent – showing the tall buildings, the bright lights, the Yarkon river that borders the north of the city, and all the highways. It can’t be, I used to say, that this city will be destroyed. The rockets were falling so close the windows at the university shattered, and by sundown it was not safe to be away from a shelter. I wasn’t a heroine. By six I was right there with my kids and dog, ready to put my gas mask on at any moment, But in the day, I joined my friends at the cafes, shopped as much as I could, and admired the city.
Silly woman, says my friend, Tel Aviv is not a city of the past, but of the future. “In medicine, in high-tech, in food, dance, theater, music – Tel Aviv is the place. All the medical services, bank services, shopping, post, everything online you enjoy, he said, it’s all part of this city. The parking lot signs that guide you to where there are spaces – the eternal summer atmosphere, the casual barbarism, the intimacy of slippers in the street. He went on and on and warmed with each thought.
His enthusiasm was contagious.
Amazing how so much of Tel Aviv is disintegrating. I noticed it recently when squiring a tourist around, and today when I translated a catalogue for my account. he’s doing a photography exhibit on the crumbling of the apartment he grew up in. It’s really ugly, but i guess it’s comfortable for me, like old slippers. And I love the old sooty buildings almost as much as I love old trees. Remember, I said to myself when I passed Hassan Bek mosque the other day, remember when you took photographs and I wrote poems about this place when it was deserted, decrepit? The photos were lost, the photographer is long dead, and I have no idea about what happened to the poems. The building has been restored, but it still holds the memory of our afternoon together…
There is no way I would give up Fridays in Tel Aviv. Even though I haven’t had time to enjoy them lately, there is something absolutely irresistable about sitting in a cafe or walking down a Tel Aviv street in the atmosphere of the coming sabbath. Even if it’s a business meeting, it’s somehow slower than the usual meeting. In the old days we’d meet every Friday afternoon at the Writers’ House, tables and tables of writers. But it was long ago, before the little squabbles began and all the money for writers got cut off. We were like a special class in and of ourselves, talking philosophy, literary criticism, gossip. And today, when we all met at Pappa’s today to have a beer with Mark Strand and talk about poetry and society, I longed for the old days. Yes, we’re all busy – and we have all kinds of problems and commitments – and we live farther away too – but it is so wonderful to meet we have to do it again.
< a href="http://www.jpost.com/Headlines/Article.aspx?id=221979">Jerusalem Post suggests that they’re very problematic in Scotland. What does this mean? That our books are bombs? That we are so dangerous we must be censored? That people actually read in Scotland?
For years I’ve been trying to wake up the dormant local chapter of PEN. There have been no elections in at least a dozen years, no meetings, no attempts to promote literary freedom. Not that I think there is censorship or arrests of writers as writers, but I’d like to be able to answer the constant questions and charges that come from abroad. But the last elected officers and the secretary (who was salaried and not elected) haven’t moved. Last year I made a determined push to have them call a meeting, but met with total indifference, and then a bit of hostility. Maybe when I take a sabbatical, and Ezi recovers, I’ll have the energy to try again, because I don’t believe that the writers are that passive.
May 23, 2011
I don’t like going to Tel Hashomer Hospital. It takes forever to get there because there’s always a traffic jam, once you get there you have to hunt for parking up and down the narrow laned parking tower, and then you have to walk for almost 10 minutes before you get to the place you need, Last year it was for Orit’s birth that I had to spend all those hours. And now it looks like Ezi’s going to entrust them with his transplant. Because once we got there it looks like they know what they’re doing.
Maybe not, when Orit was giving birth no one was around except Yaniv and me – not a good team for birthin babies.
But Oncology looks okay – kind of like a real hospital.
Clear my head tonight with Maricruz and Mark on the boardwalk. there was a wine festival and a cheese festival and all kinds water shows. I was disappointed because the sex store was closed, but otherwise the spa, clothes shop, and restaurant could be have been a great place.
What did Obama say? Is anyone satisfied that he knows what he is involved?
And yet, is there any operable alternative?
And where is the plan? After you make a declaration like that, aren’t you supposed to say – come, let’s all meet in June and decide to decide?
But of course is there any operable alternative?
Linda just sent me an interesting article from the National Voice of JEwish Democrats” Makes sense.
May 13, 2011
We went deep into the Ramon crater today, stopping at the Carpentry to climb the mound of petrified lava that resembles wood chips. We were all alone in the crater – at least it seemed that way for a while – and suddenly I realized why desert people don’t have problems of identity. You have to know who you are when you’re surrounded by nothing but stone and lizards. There is no possibility of considering your reflected self-image and all that. An hour after that we were in line in the supermarket and Orit noted that the line is the same here as it is in Tel Aviv, when we noticed two Beduin in jalabia and headdress with faces fierce as desert fighters, and she retracted her remark. Their sense of self was so strong that even in the ubiquitous supermarket line they stood out. Everyone else – like us – was boring.
Lunch was in Hakatzeh – almost as good as Hachavit was yesterday, but totally unable to beat the view from yesterday evening at the café in Bereishit. Hakatzeh has home-style Israeli food – cheap and tasty and nourishing. Hachavit has great kebab and wonderful soup, and in the evening is said to be hopping. But we were very curious about Bereishit or Genesis, the new exclusive hotel which is still running in, which is said to be the latest in Feng Shui design. And indeed it was pretty impressive. We hadn’t been able to get a room there, which is why we’re staying in the Isrotel Ramon Inn, and we had to check out the place.
It was pretty empty – a few guests and a lot of polite staff – but extremely engaging. Every window of the lobby had an amazing view and every view of the restaurant or café had something amazing to see. The sophisticated primitivism impressed even us, and even from far away this state-of-the art hotel seemed as if it had always been there, dialoging with the crater.