blog, my life in tel aviv

No one could hope for a more fun vaccination than we had.  At the entrance to the site we got asked – very quickly – if we had fever, have been abroad, had a sense of taste, and as we were getting used to saying no, switched to positive questions like “do you have an appointment?  are you here for the vaccine? …Ha! fooled you! Just checking to see if you were paying attention…”   Then they brought us together to a very cheery nurse – a heavy-set, braided, black man, who picked up on my strange sense of humor and realized that humor relaxes the muscles.  We joked about our respective ages, our health, our reactions… and …we were out… cut our waiting time short and off to bed.  To watch the departure of Trump from the white house.

what a delight – to keep switching channels and hearing the antithetical takes of CNN and FOX on the political games people play….  

 

january 20, 2021 – vaccine and inauguration Read Post »

blog, my life in tel aviv

one of the few things I argue with my husband about is the fact that he doesn’t record his family history, especially the stories of his grandfather, Arpad Gut.  Many of the buildings and bridges and water towers he built in Israel and Hungary are well known, but nothing has ever been written about the Kazinczy Street Synagogue in Budapest.    Arpad built this synagogue in 1913 – before the war – and it was one of the last things he built in the city before he was sent to the Front as an engineer, wound up in a Prisoner of War camp in Kajkstan and walked home after the war.  Once home in Budapest he was uninvited (as a Jew) to the opening of a building he built just before the war, and decided to move to Israel.  The synagogue, to my mind, has great symbolic value to the history of the Jews in Europe in the story I want Ezi to write.

of course he doesn’t read my blog, so he won’t be influenced by my plea…

january 19, 2021 – The Kazinczy Street Synagogue Read Post »

israeli politics, my life in tel aviv

First thing in the morning we will be getting our second vaccine.  Because I seem to react to everything with force, I’m not planning any activity.  But I will be glued to CNN and FOX, my eyes on the football bags. 

Israeli politics is much less dramatic.  We were not even told that all our info has been shared with Pfizer. If the whole debate in the US in recent years has been about the right to privacy, we aren’t in the discussion.  

january 19, 2021 – tomorrow – inauguration Read Post »