All our troubles seemed so far away.
But we were fooling ourselves. WWIII seems to have begun last year and we’re just dealing with the details All we don’t know is “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born?”
That’s why Yeats was drawn to fascism for a period, to control that “rough beast.”
We just have to make sure that the controls are not self-destructive.
yesterday – jan 16, 2023 Read Post »
After more than 80,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv last night, and tens of thousands more demonstrated elsewhere, including the President’s home, the gloves are off.
Amos Schocken wrote an editorial this morning about the Finance Minister’s prevarications
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-01-15/ty-article/.premium/israels-new-justice-minister-a-liar/000
00185-b232-de56-a5b5-f6b6aba90000
But this isn’t the only one. The attacks on the government right now are coming from all directions, and the feeling is that the restraint that we have been exercising is finally breaking.
Tsipi Livni, who really wanted to retire from public life, also spoke at the demonstration, and I would not be surprised if she doesn’t take over the divided left and succeed.
I’ll know more tonight when I meet the ‘in’ people, but I know we have to keep it moving.
now what? Jan 15, 2023 Read Post »
In the end, I chickened out. The kids not interested in the demonstration didn’t try to convince me, but it worked. I’m scared of the effort, the danger, the possibility that things will get out of control.
So Ezi invited kids over and has been cooking all day. Me, I’m immobile.
demonstration – jan 14, 2023 Read Post »
We were supposed to go to the theater tomorrow evening, but since there is going to be a big demonstration tomorrow against the domination of the high courts by the government in Tel Aviv, we changed the date to late this morning. And it was an amazing experience. Amos Tamam surprised me as a profound Oedipus and Keren Mor played a very flirtatious Jocasta. The play was well worth seeing, and the music (by my old partner Roy Yarkoni) was powerful. I even spotted tears on my guest’s cheeks.
But what about the demonstration tomorrow? Ezi objects to endangering us in crowds of people but is for the cause of separation of the legal system from the government. Some of my kids are very much involved in objecting to any aspect of the government taking over more and more of citizen’s rights, some of my kids don’t really know what’s going on, and some say that the government was determined by a majority and what they do is now their business. Democracy demands, they claim, that we voice our opinion within the law. So even though I’m going to go, I’m a divided family.
Oedipus, Shmedipus – as they say – as long as you love your mother.
oedipus rex – jan 13, 2023 Read Post »
Evusheld for Ezi
Because Ezi lacks antibodies and the Evusheld was advised for him again, he made an appointment for the nearest clinic. It turned out to be Holon, which, it turns out, is very busy and very efficient. Moreover, he got a double dose, which means it might work this time. Last time we had so much faith in it, we went straight to Manhattan, where he contracted Covid almost immediately.
It was a murderous vacation – sitting in a hotel room in New York for two weeks, trying to find a flight that would accept the fact that he was well because he had been given paxlovid.
But I digress. Immediately after the injection, with Ezi feeling now he could conquer the world, I began to feel vulnerable, and began to wear a mask. Painfully aware that I was the only person in the shopping mall wearing a mask, I was also aware that I was attracting attention. Even the clerk at the self-check-out counter came over to examine my purchases.
But I also noticed that he too, like many of the others around me, was coughing. And I remembered that one of my best friends was in the hospital with pneumonia, and even my young accomplice in Arabic translation, Maizun, begged off our meeting claiming illness.
I came home feeling sick.
will I make it to the opening of “Oedipus Rex” tomorrow? I fear Ezi’s Evusheld has not protected me enough.
evusheld – jan 12, 2023 Read Post »
As my cousin Howard reminded me, my parents also learned English. They came to England in 1939 and the records note that they knew no English. But by the time I came around, they were pretty fluent, and even figured out the different between British English and American English.
And before that, my grandmother learned languages. One of my first books had this poem:
A Lithuanian Legacy
The soldiers would come
into my grandmother’s yard
pull the head off a chicken
and thrust it into her hand
Cook it woman
The Russian soldier the German
then
the Russian again
language Graveyard – Jan 11, 2023 Read Post »
I’m slowly backing down. More important than protests, education, reorganization, and preparation are critical. First off, I don’t see any possibility of alteration through public protests – What we seem to be getting is a dangerous further division that leads nowhere. Secondly, I myself caught a cold even before the protests began on Saturday evening. It was a reminder that I am a little too vulnerable to protest the way I did during the Vietnam war.
I am not, however, deterred by BenGvir’s threats to take action against the protesters. The more authoritative the government behaves, the greater the imperative to protest.
backing down – jan 10, 2023 Read Post »
At a crowded conference today on language, which encouraged me to keep writing funny poems in Yiddish, the lectures after mine were concerned with the way the intentional demise of Yiddish in Israel led to a great depression among Yiddish speakers and the Hebrew imperative destroyed many other languages at the same time. Not just Ladino and many other Jewish dialects as in Jewish Moroccan, Iraqi, etc. Thinking about it in retrospect, we Jews who lived in other countries always created some kind of way to communicate secretly, even while using the lingua franca of our neighborhood.
Multilingualism has always been attractive to me – a comment coming from another direction always gives a perspective to the situation.
I have a feeling it makes you smarter. My parents spoke Russian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Esperanto, Lithuanian, and who knows what else…
language graveyard Read Post »
