Tel Aviv Diary - March 9-13, 2010 Karen Alkalay-Gut
Here's some of the Bowery Poetry Club Performance with Liz Magnes, making magic on a rinky-dink piano.
For Tony Soprano and Morning Science
March 10, 2010
The young woman who called asking for responses to one of those Mina Tsemach surveys didn't sound like she was surprised when i questioned every question. "are you scared about the future?" "I wasn't until you made me think about it" "would you vote for Netanyahu, Barak or Livni?" "that's a loaded question. i would vote for Mitzna if i had my choices" "if we get out of the golan without a public referendum, would there be a civil war?" "aren't there any other alternatives?" I protested the whole concept of the questionnaire, and gave my age, making me officially a crochety old woman. March 11, 2010 I couldn't attend Biden's talk today at the university because i was teaching. The helicopters above constantly reminded me of what I was missing a few meters away, but I'm content teaching poetry instead of waiting two hours to hear about how much we are loved but how we have to start negotiating. I would have been all excited and enthusiastic but what good would it do. I still have Eli Yishai to contend with. March 12, 2010 That siege on Gaza? Those tunnels transporting food, viagra and explosives? What if we sheetpiled the tunnels and checked the bags at the border? What an unusual solution. Those displaced people in Sheikh Jerach? By the same law that displaced them they should be displacing the people in Jaffa who live now where their families lived (oh no, i forgot, we made that against the law). March 13, 2010 This evening I had the honor and the privilege to see the Cameri's new production of Yehoshua Sobol's play "Ghetto." The story of the Jewish theater in the Vilna Ghetto (which was just one of 1140 ghettoes in Europe)is simply riveting, and the acting, the pace, the complexity of the moral situation as well as the physical and psychological one, is outstanding. Hani Firstenberg as the marionette and Itai Tiran as the Nazi soldier were flawless, as was Natan Datner at Ganz, the head of the Judenratt. The Bundist, Herman Krook, provided the moral opposition, and my identification was in some way with him - because he kept a diary. His obsessive charting of the destruction of the jews of Vilna was similar to what I would have done. But his refusal to cooperate with the Germans would have been too hard for me. I would have grasped at any straw that would help me believe in humanity, even if it was hopeless. In other words I was so involved in the play I could not see it from without. It was that good.
March 9, 2010