Ezi spent all day yesterday preparing a powerpoint with all the family history, childhood photographs, and dozens of pictures and diagrams of buildings and bridges his family built.  This morning our neice came with her daughter to preview the powerpoint before the trip around Tel Aviv to visit the sites themselves. 

Some of our grandkids have seen the watertowers, the breakwaters, the edifices Ezi’s father and gradfather built.  Some even know Ezi’s part in the story.  But I wish we could have filmed it all.  We wound up refreshing the tombstones of Ezi’s grandparents in Trumpeldor cemetery.   

This is definitely my favorite cemetery – not only because so many of Ezi’s relative are there. and all the ‘streets of Tel Aviv’ are there, but because it’s so informal.  You can see that a cemetery in Judaism is just a place to dump the body and not to take up space.  There are dozens of ‘anonymous’ graves too, that remind one that lots of people came here alone, usually because their families had been killed, and they never got the know anyone before the wars took them.  

i also love the fact that it’s in the middle, part of the city – and it’s hard to distinguish the famous poet’s grave from the apartment building around it.  This is Tschernichovsky’s grave

and if you know nothing else about him, remember these lines: 

“Laugh, laugh at my dreams

I laugh at them too

laugh that I believe in mankind

that I still believe in you.”

(Most people translate it a more formal tone like here: https://www.emjc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Tchernichovskythe-other-national-poet.pdf

And not far away is Arik Einstein, who turns my heart upside down every time a song of his is played on the radio:

https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/2013-12-25/ty-article/.premium/poem-of-the-week-our-sinatra-our-cleese-our-seeger-our-jew/0000017f-db06-df62-a9ff-dfd7a9d40000