Tel Aviv Diary - April 25-29, 2013 - Karen Alkalay-Gut
April 25, 2013 Technical difficulties. Sorry.
April 27, 2013 Hectic banalities. Dentist, shopping, babysitting, and a little antibiotics. We catch up with old friends who are still exhausted after the holidays - whether they were vacationing, cooking, or just coping with the mad weather. Me, I am beginning to taste the summer - the temperature is rising and we're off to the pool. It was a hot day - sharav - very dry - and i forgot to drink - and with antibiotics in the pool I dehydrated. At the same time fires are breaking out all over the country. Not only the Lag B'Omer fires, but the ones of dry kindling fires. I used to love Lag B'Omer - but now I find the bonfires destructive, and I have been trying to think of more spiritual ways to celebrate it but there is something about fire that can't be beat.
April 28, 2013 A flawed play, the "Family Affair" by Edna Mazia. A play where I sat with a red pencil and thought - I'd take out this scene, that subplot, or these eyebrows, and I'd change all the articles in the program. Otherwise, I loved it. It is billed as a play about German immigration to Palestine in the '30s, but that part is totally underplayed in the plot and in the acting. The real story, that no one mentions, is of love and fate. The holocaust is only relevant as background. But it is amazing how it is imperative for an Israeli playwright to connect personal stories to the history. Maybe I just don't get it/ April 29, 2013 In the past few days there has been a great to-do about money - Our new bills have poets on them. You would think this was amazing in itself, wouldn't you, and the fact that two of them are women (Rachel, Leah Goldberg, Shaul Tshernichovsky and Natan Alterman) but we're always fighting about something. So the poets are all of Ashkenazi origins, and the Mizrachis want some representation as well. The problem is that in the previous generation most of the pioneers developing the language in poetry were ashkenazi, and it took me a while to remember the mizrachi poets I know. Anyway, I'm happy that the discussion of money is about poetic representation and not about economics for a change. In the past few days we've been fighting the fires resulting from combination of heat wave and lag b'omer.