I underestimated the storm. Our neighborhood isn’t flooded – but it looks like the rest of the country is. And Gaza must be a total mess. All that water at once – the ground cannot absorb it. So the rain washes away the top layer of earth and leaves behind the sand, the unplanted earth. When the rain is over, we’re left with ….
The fuss we’re making over this storm coming up makes me feel as if we’re avoiding the bigger issue. Normally it would be a big issue in itself, but we’re still in existential danger and we haven’t been addressing it. We focus on the one hostage who hasn’t been returned as if the memory of the incredible massacre will be erased once his body is found.
Byron will pass and I believe we can weather this storm, but I am less and less sure of the damage we are doing to ourselves by not admitting our internal damage, the way we’ve been torn apart physically and morally.
i used to read the newspaper from cover to cover. Every morning at breakfast.
Now I do the Times puzzle after the headlines.
Simply speaking, every day brings worse and worse news about our government and its policies.
But the worst part of it is that, as my late mother-in-law used to say, “We will not take them pour this shit on us. We will open our mouths.”
and that’s the most I can do is to make you laugh. Opening my mouth just makes me swallow more shit.
how to read the papers – 12.8.25 Read Post »
Now that my book about poets and their graves has gone to press in Hebrew, I thought I would spend the day cleaning up the mess I made when I came back from New York. After a few hours of this i threw my back out again and had to rest. So I wound up reading ha’aretz about books in Arabic about Jews. And there I found that Nada Abdelsamad had just published an expanded edition of her book about Jews in Beirut. In Arabic. I managed to download it and begin to translate the introduction with the helo of gpt, and wow. If I don’t control myself I’ll translate it all. the earlier version, called Wadi Abou Jamil: Stories of the Jews of Beirut, but a new version appeared last month.
I don’t understand why it hasn’t appeared in English or Hebrew.
I’ll have to find an ex-student who will help me.
another hobby – 12.7.25 Read Post »
think for a moment of all the musicians who have died in this war so far. Imagine an orchestra in the sky of musicians from all the countries attacking israel playing somewhere together.
A silly thought.
musicians – 12.6.25 Read Post »
This was my thought. If I can stick it out until April it will be 25 years of my keeping the Tel Aviv Diary. This has to be a world record, doesn’t it? for one person reporting on her life in Tel Aviv?
Unfortunately, Guiness is not including Israel or Palestine in its consideration of world records any more.
This reminds me of my trip to Ireland in September, 2001. I wandered into the Dublin Library and found an amazing exhibit of Bibles – in English, Latin, and other languages – but not in Hebrew. And I thought that maybe Hebrew might deserve the Guiness world record for the first bible – but it didn’t get it either. Wonder if i wrote about it. I don’t know because I never read my entries for fear I will try to correct history.
Haven’t done much with poetry because of the book soon in galleys in Hebrew about poets and their graves. this has been a big job, but it turns out I’ve also been writing poems all along. Just avoiding the consernation of being banned by journals I’d come to think of as home. But it turns out that I’ve been publishing poems all along. Google firstofthemonth and my name and you can find a whole bunch of them.
a few words about new poems – 12.3.25 Read Post »
Forgive Bibi?
We had been seeing the development of hatred in Gaza on tv for years – the schoolbooks in which hatred is embedded in the mentality of the children of Gaza, the military camps for children in which they learned to shoot to kill, the parades of hatred…
We saw the way the people of Gaza lined up at the fence in the days before the massacre and threatened to kill us all. (I didn’t sleep the nights I saw them on the news).
We believed Bibi when he promised us there was nothing to fear, even though there were thousands of other things he said and did that we didn’t believe.
I don’t know how we can pardon ourselves much less the prime minister.
