A few days ago at an IAWE board meeting, someone suggested we have an evening on Leonard Cohen, so while we were babysitting a hyperactive dog today, we watched the movie of Hallelujah. The religious Jewish element seems so strong to me – and each word of the prayers is taken seriously, as a way to understand the self in the universe. . So unlike the new religious government we’re about to have here, which is about imposing behavior and not understanding.
This world cup is broadcast live on the main channel here – And with every game, I see how much politics is not only in the players but also the viewers. I judge the game not on the playing but on the nationality. I don’t condemn the dirty players, but the policies of their leaders. I don’t seem to be the only one. I know this is wrong, but it is on one hand a channeling, a displacement from actual battles, but on the other hand a reminder of our own disagreements. A friend of mine relates every game to the way Jews were/are treated in the countries of the teams. The Holocaust and the Middle East are major factors.
Churchill is dead. When Ezi told me I said “he is released” The last times I saw him, he had something in his brain and he was weak and barely communicative, but He was still a musician to watch. I’m so sorry we;re going to miss him.
Churchill – Dec 8, 2022 Read Post »
it’s an incredibly crowded place, with graves of many streets in Tel Aviv – or at least the people they were named after. And after an amazing lunch at Moon Sushi Bar, Ezi wanted to visit his grandparents and relatives in the nearby cemetery.
It was getting dark, and I was afraid we would be locked in, but we went first to the grave of Ezi’s aunt, who died at the age of 18 from meningitis, then to his father’s parents, and finally to his mother’s parents. We visited the great heroes of this country, from H.N. Bialik to Dvora Baron to Arik Einstein, and left before the sunset.
It is not only Ezi’s history that is buried here but also the history of Jews all over the world. The memorials to towns destroyed in the Holocaust, the suicides of those who survived, and only as we were leaving did I see the memorials to all those who died as a result of the exile of Jews from Tel Aviv in the early years of the city.
Somewhere I have a recording of a radio program I did with Ziv Yonatan long ago where he interviewed me in this cemetery. It was fascinating to me then, and it remains a fascinating place.
trumpeldor cemetery – dec 7, 2022 Read Post »
As we raced to finalize our arrangements for our granddaughter’s birthday, we passed the study center surrounded by black-hatted men who looked away as I passed, and then made our purchases at the bakery and the pharmacy where the salesmen and pharmacists spoke Arabic to each other. And as we were leaving, I whispered to Ezi, “you realize we’re a minority wherever we go…”
I had just left the hairdresser where the guy replacing my hairdresser who needed a vacation spoke mostly German and English. And now I too look a bit German.
So, since someone asked me the point of this discussion, it is that Hebrew speakers are becoming a minority. That whole big fight for Hebrew from the beginning of the twentieth century that killed Yiddish seems to be in danger of being lost. And the worst part is that the Yiddish spoken is dirty and limited and garbled. It’s the Yiddish you learn on duolingo. If it were the complex and intellectual Yiddish like Lithuanian Yiddish it wouldn’t be so bad. The Arabic spoken here, on the other hand, is something we can learn from.
minority – Dec 6, 2022 Read Post »
There is no doubt he’s the most popular poet in this country, even though there is a controversy about his style. Anyway we had a zoom with him tonight and it was so sweet – so colorful, so Iraqi, such a great insight into Israeli society.
The only problem was that somehow we screwed up the advertising – somehow we had a small audience. We usually have 70 odd people and tonight was 25, I’ll have to screen the recording of the zoom first.
Here’s the last poem of his I’ve translated.
Daisy
The autumn of flesh is the hardest of Falls.
When the almost-green eyes shed leaves,
The arm is a bending branch,
The leg a shaky trunk.
In a season like this, words are disguised as beasts,
And roars hide themselves in the throat.
The woman I’m writing about is
My mother.
If I had Arabic ink in my pen,
I would call her Scheherazade.
If I knew how to draw crowns,
She’d be a queen,
And in the courtyard of her palace
You could hear
The rustle of sands she sweeps
From the piles of strife.
But even now, when her gait is rough,
and the teeth of winter bite at her feet,
you can feel how much hunger there had been
in the fingers that wove the reddest of carpets
which on now she treads slowly
the remains of her days.
Translated from the Hebrew by Karen Alkalay-Gut
ronny sommek – dec 4, 2022 Read Post »
Long ago I used to do music with a band that worked with my poetry. I thought I was terrible, but now I see I was pretty good. See?
let me know if you can’t see this, or if you can’t bear seeing this.
