Sometimes I can’t believe that they let us get away with flying. (By ‘they’ I mean of course: God and his buddies.) I mean, when we tried building the Babel tower and reach them, they made a big fuss about it. And then we went and built giant birds of steel that fly to the heavens – clearly their territory – and they just look the other way.
I always thought there’s something freakish about flying. Not just because I can’t really grasp how it works. I’m stupid that way. There are lots of technical things that are beyond my comprehension. I’ve studied media in college, and took a detailed course in video technology that explained the concept of television in clear wording, but none of it made sense to me. I ended up memorizing it for the exam – word to word – and got an A+. My teacher was convinced that I was a tech genius. But in fact, I don’t get any of it. How do these little people get into the screen? What keeps those giant heavy birds up in the sky? Why can’t I touch the internet?
Planes are weird for many reasons. There’s the dry recycled air that chaps your skin till it hurts, the little neat meals that seem like they were prepared by aliens, those round windows you can’t open, and the forced intimacy with strangers who share your armrest for 10 hours.
But mostly planes are weird because of the huge distance they cover in such short periods. Right now I’m sitting in an Amsterdam café after spending four and a half hours in an airplane, and it just doesn’t seem right. It shouldn’t take 4 and half hours to get from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam. It can’t be that close. It snows here (although right now it’s gorgeous,) people speak Dutch and live on canals and are polite and really tall. You should take a boat for a couple weeks before you can make the shift from my sweltering hot crazy and rude Middle Eastern country - to this.
Somehow boats, cars and trains make more sense. They provide a reasonable amount of adjusting time, so you can process the changes as they take place. You can watch the landscape transform gradually, and adjust to the climate. I suspect you’re more ready to face a new world after a longer in-between stage. Maybe after a week on a boat your longings to what you’ve left behind subside and the excitement of what awaits builds up, so they don't just get mixed up and make you feel crazy, wandering Harlemmerstraat exhausted and emotionally fragile, dressed all wrong for the weather, carrying three types of currency, not sure what’s the time, what day it is, which language to speak, and if any of this is real.
But then again, I can’t help but wonder – who decides what's reasonable? Maybe the reasonable amount of time is the time it takes to walk somewhere – or ride a camel. In my research I’ve learned the distance between Yemeni cities by foot, or on a donkey. Back then, that was their only option. They probably thought cars moved too fast.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not badmouthing aviation. As someone who lives half a world away from her family – I’d be screwed without planes. Just the other day my family complained that I live too far. 16 hour flight is just too long, they said, and I had to agree. “I’m gonna develop a new device - a blinker,” my younger brother said. “You blink and concentrate and get transformed to another place.” For a few minutes we all got carried away in that sweet fantasy and imagined how I'd make it to our family Friday night dinner every week. I know the blinker would allow for no adjusting time at all, cause a sweeping culture shock epidemic, and who knows what it might do to my skin, but I don’t care. I guess nothing is too fast or too freakish when it comes to seeing your loved ones.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
Scary Movie
There’s a Hebrew slang expression I’m very fond of. When a person spends too much time in his head, thinking over and over again about stuff that is likely to cause him worries and fuck him up– we say he’s in movies. If it’s a common problem, an everyday occurrence, we say: he lives in a movie. Sometimes we tell a friend: Motek (sweetie) get out of the movie. What we’re trying to say is: It’s not real. It’s in your head. This expression evolved and expanded over the years – the nature of language, I suppose – and now you can hear conversations such as: “What did you do today?” “Oh, not much. I spent all day in the movie theatre. I was the director, producer, the main actress and the extras.” My sister, who I once coined ‘the reviver of the Hebrew language’ developed this expression to genius levels. She’d ask for popcorn for her movie, tell me she’s trapped in a multiplex watching all the films, complain that the usher locked the theatre and wouldn’t let her leave in the middle.
It is one of those Hebrew expressions I can’t find an English equivalent for, so I just say it in English, and those who are close to me are used to hearing it by now.
I’m telling you this so you’d understand my predicament when I tell you I’ve been living in movies lately. The horror film I’ve been trapped in is called: I am getting old. I used to think I’m not scared of ageing. “Why would anybody be scared of ageing?” I used to say, pleased with my maturity level. “It’s like resisting life itself!” I even told people I look forward to becoming forty. I was all so zen about it. So at peace with my inner clock. It was admirable. Until my 35th birthday approached and suddenly I lost it. 35??? Thirty five? How the hell did that happen? I began to suspect something weird happened to time, and it’s been passing faster than it used to. My sister gladly supported my suspicion, she read somewhere that the globe has been spinning an increment of a second faster. Whatever it is, I’m freaked out. In those dark quiet hours I spend in my own private screening room – I make scary calculations that prove that life is short. I realized that it’s been 15 years since I was twenty, and in 15 more years I’ll be 50. And since 20 doesn’t seem that long ago – the obvious conclusion is that neither is 50. Aghhhhhh!!!!
I’ve been in this movie for a few months now. I’ve seen the sequels and everything. It’s getting boring. I think, except for the obvious reason (my upcoming birthday) that it could be attributed to a few other causes. My research into the past, for example, has revealed some shocking discoveries. After talking to all these old people – some of which I’ve known my whole life as old – reading their letters and looking at their photos, I have solid reason to believe that they were, in fact, once young. And since I was suddenly armed with the ability to see old people as young people - I started seeing young people as old people. It’s like some magic power I never asked for. I look at little children and I can see them age. It’s scary.
Another reason to my new film making aspirations is that I’ve been doing some digging into my own past. My mom has asked me to get rid of the stuff I’ve been storing at her place. It is a large seven room house that my father built for our budding family thirty years ago. Now, when Ima is in her late 60’s the house is nothing more than giant dust trap- a burden for a clean freak such as my mom. She’s tired of working so hard at keeping its seven rooms clean, dusting the ridiculous amount of books her six children store everywhere. She wants to grow old in a small apartment that won’t require five full days of cleaning. Not to mention, this house would be her pension plan, once we demolish it and build an apartment building instead. It would change her life.
I’ve decided to take on the project, organize my stuff, throw away as much as possible, and limit what’s left to two boxes. I thought I was being real mature and helpful about it until I saw my mom’s expression. She wasn’t asking me to throw some away, she was asking me to get rid of it all, throw away some and ship the rest to Canada. She has six children after all, and if each of us had two boxes, where is she going to put it? And what is she going to do with those piles of books? I pretended I wasn’t hurt, and went into my room to cry and hate her a little bit. I’m sure that she wasn’t quite as hard on her other children! Obviously she loves me less! When I got over being a six year old, I started thinking of a solution. What exactly am I going to do? Throw away childhood diaries? What kind of person does that? Big deal, you say, can’t you take your diaries with you to Canada? Well, you obviously underestimate the extent of my graphomania. I was a freak child. In sixth grade alone I wrote 15 diaries – most of which are full with detailed descriptions of petty fights between me and my girlfriends, butterfly stickers and lipstick kisses. One day it’s: “I hate Noga! I will never talk to her again! Ever!!!” And the next: “Noga and I are friends again. She’s my best friend in the whole wide world. We both hate Orit. She’s ugly.” Yup. Nothing really deep or profound. Turns out I wasn’t a genius child after all. Imagine my disappointment once I discovered my diaries are not full with philosophical arguments or spiritual epiphanies.
Diaries (all 50 of them) are just the half of the problem. As I mentioned before, I spent my childhood years writing endlessly, I have about the same amount of notebooks full of stories, novellas, poems, scripts, plays. Unlike my diaries, some of these are quite good and I enjoy reading them. Maybe I wasn’t all stupid after all. Maybe the diaries were like the stream of consciousness – the pre-writing they sometimes recommend in creative writing classes. They were the crap I had to write to free some space for the good stuff. Still, I can’t get rid of them. All together I have about 100 notebooks. This is some heavy shit. Shipping it would cost a fortune.
While I was sorting all these things I came across another problem: my collection of notes, letters and other memorabilia. Remember those days, when people actually sent each other letters? How come communication has become easier, and cheaper, yet we communicate less?
Most of the letters I kept are from my first years of traveling (a few years ago I got rid of most of my many pen pals’ letters). Back in my early 20’s internet wasn’t widespread so I kept giving my family and friends address along the way to send me letters to. One of my favourite spots in the whole world was the GPO (general post office) in New Delhi. In my trips around the subcontinent I was bound to reach New Delhi more often than other places. It was a big junction city, a place to catch trains, buses and planes, so people knew they could always send me letters there. I could hardly sleep the night before going to the GPO. It was like Christmas day, way before I even knew about Christmas. It was an old grey unimaginative building, and inside they had one long counter with a bored clerk, and alphabetized folders where letters were organized by last name. I always had a few letters from family, friends, and old lovers. Sometimes I even had packages from home, with some yummy snacks and magazines. I spent the last two days reading four years of travel worth of letters, and it was one crazy ride. Some of the people who wrote to me were traveling too – my ex boyfriend was writing me from South America, I sent him letters back to the Israeli embassies in different countries. Another ex was working in Germany selling jewelry on the street. My sister was writing me from California, where she was driving an ice cream truck in godforsaken towns. My best friend was writing me her naughty alcohol induced adventures from New York (which led to me flying over there and living with her for a summer.) Boys, sex, drugs and alcohol were a common topic. I read through detailed accounts of drunken night-outs and wild parties, heartaches and love affairs and one night stands. I also read about my own heartaches, through the eyes of my friends. I read their responses to my crazy travel stories and was reminded of it all. And of course I missed it. I missed those crazy years, that feeling of nothing to lose, and no hurry, of taking risks and living on the edge. Of going away with a one way ticket, without knowing when I’ll come back and where I’ll come back from. And I missed my friends, how they were before they got married and had children. That pinch. That bitter sweet ache of nostalgia.
And as I was reading those letters from my early twenties, I suddenly realized why 35 came as such a surprise. I realized I’ve been stuck in my early twenties for years now. I’ve always been a late bloomer, and it helped that I looked younger than my real age (of course, this past month I had two people guessing my real age (!!!) Imagine my horror. I’m still not over it.) I didn’t even notice turning 30 because I was in Thailand barefoot and broke, with a backpack for a home and a one way ticket, just like I did at 23. I was living with 4 roommates, partying excessively and dating boys in their early twenties when I turned 31. I was a waitress at 34. These are the kind of things you do at 23. I may have made progress in my own eyes (I now own furniture, I’m in a long lasting steady relationship. I’ve evolved and grown, became wiser and more mature) but compared to the average, this is not much. At 35 I still own less than most people my age. I’m not married, don’t have children, don’t really have an organized job. I don’t even have a saving account for god sake!!! I guess that’s why I didn’t see 35 coming, that’s why it snuck up on me so unexpectedly, like a well written, cleverly placed plot twist.
It is one of those Hebrew expressions I can’t find an English equivalent for, so I just say it in English, and those who are close to me are used to hearing it by now.
I’m telling you this so you’d understand my predicament when I tell you I’ve been living in movies lately. The horror film I’ve been trapped in is called: I am getting old. I used to think I’m not scared of ageing. “Why would anybody be scared of ageing?” I used to say, pleased with my maturity level. “It’s like resisting life itself!” I even told people I look forward to becoming forty. I was all so zen about it. So at peace with my inner clock. It was admirable. Until my 35th birthday approached and suddenly I lost it. 35??? Thirty five? How the hell did that happen? I began to suspect something weird happened to time, and it’s been passing faster than it used to. My sister gladly supported my suspicion, she read somewhere that the globe has been spinning an increment of a second faster. Whatever it is, I’m freaked out. In those dark quiet hours I spend in my own private screening room – I make scary calculations that prove that life is short. I realized that it’s been 15 years since I was twenty, and in 15 more years I’ll be 50. And since 20 doesn’t seem that long ago – the obvious conclusion is that neither is 50. Aghhhhhh!!!!
I’ve been in this movie for a few months now. I’ve seen the sequels and everything. It’s getting boring. I think, except for the obvious reason (my upcoming birthday) that it could be attributed to a few other causes. My research into the past, for example, has revealed some shocking discoveries. After talking to all these old people – some of which I’ve known my whole life as old – reading their letters and looking at their photos, I have solid reason to believe that they were, in fact, once young. And since I was suddenly armed with the ability to see old people as young people - I started seeing young people as old people. It’s like some magic power I never asked for. I look at little children and I can see them age. It’s scary.
Another reason to my new film making aspirations is that I’ve been doing some digging into my own past. My mom has asked me to get rid of the stuff I’ve been storing at her place. It is a large seven room house that my father built for our budding family thirty years ago. Now, when Ima is in her late 60’s the house is nothing more than giant dust trap- a burden for a clean freak such as my mom. She’s tired of working so hard at keeping its seven rooms clean, dusting the ridiculous amount of books her six children store everywhere. She wants to grow old in a small apartment that won’t require five full days of cleaning. Not to mention, this house would be her pension plan, once we demolish it and build an apartment building instead. It would change her life.
I’ve decided to take on the project, organize my stuff, throw away as much as possible, and limit what’s left to two boxes. I thought I was being real mature and helpful about it until I saw my mom’s expression. She wasn’t asking me to throw some away, she was asking me to get rid of it all, throw away some and ship the rest to Canada. She has six children after all, and if each of us had two boxes, where is she going to put it? And what is she going to do with those piles of books? I pretended I wasn’t hurt, and went into my room to cry and hate her a little bit. I’m sure that she wasn’t quite as hard on her other children! Obviously she loves me less! When I got over being a six year old, I started thinking of a solution. What exactly am I going to do? Throw away childhood diaries? What kind of person does that? Big deal, you say, can’t you take your diaries with you to Canada? Well, you obviously underestimate the extent of my graphomania. I was a freak child. In sixth grade alone I wrote 15 diaries – most of which are full with detailed descriptions of petty fights between me and my girlfriends, butterfly stickers and lipstick kisses. One day it’s: “I hate Noga! I will never talk to her again! Ever!!!” And the next: “Noga and I are friends again. She’s my best friend in the whole wide world. We both hate Orit. She’s ugly.” Yup. Nothing really deep or profound. Turns out I wasn’t a genius child after all. Imagine my disappointment once I discovered my diaries are not full with philosophical arguments or spiritual epiphanies.
Diaries (all 50 of them) are just the half of the problem. As I mentioned before, I spent my childhood years writing endlessly, I have about the same amount of notebooks full of stories, novellas, poems, scripts, plays. Unlike my diaries, some of these are quite good and I enjoy reading them. Maybe I wasn’t all stupid after all. Maybe the diaries were like the stream of consciousness – the pre-writing they sometimes recommend in creative writing classes. They were the crap I had to write to free some space for the good stuff. Still, I can’t get rid of them. All together I have about 100 notebooks. This is some heavy shit. Shipping it would cost a fortune.
While I was sorting all these things I came across another problem: my collection of notes, letters and other memorabilia. Remember those days, when people actually sent each other letters? How come communication has become easier, and cheaper, yet we communicate less?
Most of the letters I kept are from my first years of traveling (a few years ago I got rid of most of my many pen pals’ letters). Back in my early 20’s internet wasn’t widespread so I kept giving my family and friends address along the way to send me letters to. One of my favourite spots in the whole world was the GPO (general post office) in New Delhi. In my trips around the subcontinent I was bound to reach New Delhi more often than other places. It was a big junction city, a place to catch trains, buses and planes, so people knew they could always send me letters there. I could hardly sleep the night before going to the GPO. It was like Christmas day, way before I even knew about Christmas. It was an old grey unimaginative building, and inside they had one long counter with a bored clerk, and alphabetized folders where letters were organized by last name. I always had a few letters from family, friends, and old lovers. Sometimes I even had packages from home, with some yummy snacks and magazines. I spent the last two days reading four years of travel worth of letters, and it was one crazy ride. Some of the people who wrote to me were traveling too – my ex boyfriend was writing me from South America, I sent him letters back to the Israeli embassies in different countries. Another ex was working in Germany selling jewelry on the street. My sister was writing me from California, where she was driving an ice cream truck in godforsaken towns. My best friend was writing me her naughty alcohol induced adventures from New York (which led to me flying over there and living with her for a summer.) Boys, sex, drugs and alcohol were a common topic. I read through detailed accounts of drunken night-outs and wild parties, heartaches and love affairs and one night stands. I also read about my own heartaches, through the eyes of my friends. I read their responses to my crazy travel stories and was reminded of it all. And of course I missed it. I missed those crazy years, that feeling of nothing to lose, and no hurry, of taking risks and living on the edge. Of going away with a one way ticket, without knowing when I’ll come back and where I’ll come back from. And I missed my friends, how they were before they got married and had children. That pinch. That bitter sweet ache of nostalgia.
And as I was reading those letters from my early twenties, I suddenly realized why 35 came as such a surprise. I realized I’ve been stuck in my early twenties for years now. I’ve always been a late bloomer, and it helped that I looked younger than my real age (of course, this past month I had two people guessing my real age (!!!) Imagine my horror. I’m still not over it.) I didn’t even notice turning 30 because I was in Thailand barefoot and broke, with a backpack for a home and a one way ticket, just like I did at 23. I was living with 4 roommates, partying excessively and dating boys in their early twenties when I turned 31. I was a waitress at 34. These are the kind of things you do at 23. I may have made progress in my own eyes (I now own furniture, I’m in a long lasting steady relationship. I’ve evolved and grown, became wiser and more mature) but compared to the average, this is not much. At 35 I still own less than most people my age. I’m not married, don’t have children, don’t really have an organized job. I don’t even have a saving account for god sake!!! I guess that’s why I didn’t see 35 coming, that’s why it snuck up on me so unexpectedly, like a well written, cleverly placed plot twist.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
April 22nd
Today, 25 years ago, my father died. It no longer feels like yesterday. Not even like last week. It still doesn’t feel like 25 years though.
It’s the second year in a row that I’ve started something on March 22nd, so when April 22nd came, it was the anniversary of my achievement, rather than the day my dad died. I guess I was trying (unconsciously, of course) to turn April 22nd into a good day, and it was easy to fool myself since there were always good reasons to choose March 22nd as a day to start things. Last year I chose to quit smoking on that day, because it was the first day of spring. This year I decided to start exercising, walking daily, and eating healthy (ok, let’s call it by its name: I’m on a freakin' diet.) March 22nd was the day Sean left, so I figured it would be a good day to start.
Over the years I’ve been quite creative in my attempts to make April 22nd into something else. Five years ago I changed my ticket from Thailand on the very last minute so April 22nd became the day I left Thailand and the last day I spent with ‘E’ – a guy who at the time I thought I was madly in love with (and who ended up becoming born again Jew – see February 26th post about me running into him in Tel Aviv.) I guess I wanted something new for April 22nd. A different kind of heartache to replace the one I’ve been carrying around for twenty years. Change it up a little.
One of my best friends lost her dad a few years ago on May 13th. “Sean and I met on May 13th,” I mentioned to her last week, and she sighed heavily, annoyed. “Are you mad that Sean and I met on May 13th?” I asked. “Did we steal your May 13th?” She laughed and nodded.
I really tried to make today the day I celebrated a month of my diet, but I couldn’t. Instead, I spent it eating ice cream and chocolate, slacking on my walks (unless you call wandering aimlessly in an air conditioned mall while wearing my sun glasses and eating ice cream - a walk), fighting with my brother and crying. I ended up feeling sick to my stomach. (The ice cream? The mall?)
It doesn’t work. It never worked. April 22nd would always be the day my father died. I can give it a new outfit, slap some makeup on it, and call it September, but it will always be that day.
And that’s all I have to say about it
It’s the second year in a row that I’ve started something on March 22nd, so when April 22nd came, it was the anniversary of my achievement, rather than the day my dad died. I guess I was trying (unconsciously, of course) to turn April 22nd into a good day, and it was easy to fool myself since there were always good reasons to choose March 22nd as a day to start things. Last year I chose to quit smoking on that day, because it was the first day of spring. This year I decided to start exercising, walking daily, and eating healthy (ok, let’s call it by its name: I’m on a freakin' diet.) March 22nd was the day Sean left, so I figured it would be a good day to start.
Over the years I’ve been quite creative in my attempts to make April 22nd into something else. Five years ago I changed my ticket from Thailand on the very last minute so April 22nd became the day I left Thailand and the last day I spent with ‘E’ – a guy who at the time I thought I was madly in love with (and who ended up becoming born again Jew – see February 26th post about me running into him in Tel Aviv.) I guess I wanted something new for April 22nd. A different kind of heartache to replace the one I’ve been carrying around for twenty years. Change it up a little.
One of my best friends lost her dad a few years ago on May 13th. “Sean and I met on May 13th,” I mentioned to her last week, and she sighed heavily, annoyed. “Are you mad that Sean and I met on May 13th?” I asked. “Did we steal your May 13th?” She laughed and nodded.
I really tried to make today the day I celebrated a month of my diet, but I couldn’t. Instead, I spent it eating ice cream and chocolate, slacking on my walks (unless you call wandering aimlessly in an air conditioned mall while wearing my sun glasses and eating ice cream - a walk), fighting with my brother and crying. I ended up feeling sick to my stomach. (The ice cream? The mall?)
It doesn’t work. It never worked. April 22nd would always be the day my father died. I can give it a new outfit, slap some makeup on it, and call it September, but it will always be that day.
And that’s all I have to say about it
Saturday, April 12, 2008
A Love Song to The City that Never Sleeps
I love Tel Aviv. Foolishly and blindly, like a school girl with a crush on the high school stud. I drive its streets at night, roll my windows down and smile stupidly to myself. I breathe its smoggy air as if it was spring blossom. In an age when most of my friends have graduated to quieter suburbs or moved to the country – I still look at it with admiring eyes and fantasize about living here. For a few weeks. Maybe a year. I could live in one of those old white apartment buildings by the sea that were eaten by salt and sea breeze; in a spacious apartment, maybe the kind that has painted tile floors and high ceilings, or maybe in a Bauhaus style building with rounded balconies and view to the water.
I’m pretty sure Tel Aviv one of coolest cities in the world. I’m yet to visit other allegedly cool cities to determine – cities such as Barcelona or Mexico City for example, but I have been around some pretty cool cities and Tel Aviv rules my list, which includes Montreal, New York, London and Amsterdam. I can’t include Vancouver in this list, even though in my opinion it’s cool in its own tame and sedated way, and it has Commercial Drive (definitely up there in the list of cool neighbourhoods!) which is why I live there, but it’s just belongs to a different bracket altogether. I also love Bombay, Bangkok, Phnom Penn and Jerusalem – all very cool cities – but they exist in a different sphere and in my opinion are incomparable.
When I was 22 I moved to Manhattan, seeking coolness that I didn’t think exist in my tiny, confused and holy land. I remember driving the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the famous skyline and thinking: I have made it! I’ve made it to the coolest city in the world, where everybody speaks as if they’re characters in a sitcom and every street corner seems familiar from a movie or a Seinfeld episode. Where Sigourney Weaver passes by with bags of grocery and cops break dance in the middle of a busy intersection while they direct traffic. Where you open your MTV and find that if you left the house now, you’d make it to a Metallica concert in the park, just a few blocks away. I dreamt about New York since I was a teenager. Since I first read Madonna’s story about arriving in New York, how she asked the taxi driver to drop her at the centre of everything and ended up in Times Square with $15 and went on to take over the world. When things got rough at home I could close my eyes and imagine I lived there, in one of those high rises with a cute American boy named Michael or Steve. I’m pretty sure everyone has a place like that in their teens. A better place. A place that symbolizes everything their hometown isn’t. A place where nobody knows them, where they can start new. New York was mine. I loved it so much that I drew its skyline, in shades of gray, on my bedroom wall.
I got there on a flight from New Delhi after traveling through India’s north, and rented a tiny bachelor suite with my best friend on Lexington and 36th , up four flights of stairs. It was mid summer, New York was hot and humid and our air conditioner broke down on the first week. It was ridiculously expensive and I made no friends. I got a little job writing articles for a Hebrew paper intended for the Israeli immigrant community but it didn’t pay much (In fact, I think they still owe me money!) I missed India terribly, followed smells of turmeric and cilantro down the streets and women in saris on the subway. Sometimes, after wandering the streets for hours, I’d even get lonely and bored. Bored! In New York!!! It was nothing like they said it would be. It wasn’t open all night long like they promised. It wasn’t easy to find good 24 hour restaurants, and there wasn’t a 24 hour convenience store at every street corner. It had some great clubs, but nothing I haven't seen at home. One night, after having drinks at a bar with a friend, I was gonna walk home from the bar, when my New Yorker friend told me I was crazy. I was stunned. “But it’s only 4 blocks, and Giuliani cleaned New York!” I said. But apparently it wasn’t safe to walk in New York in the middle of the night, not even a few blocks. “And never take the subway after midnight!” My friend added. What kind of night life is that?
Imagine my shock, realizing that when it comes to night life, my little Middle Eastern Tel Aviv puts the big apple to shame.
I love, love, love Tel Aviv. Sometimes, when it treats me like shit, I briefly hate it. But then, like the sucker I am, I forgive her. (Note: In Hebrew city is female and I find it hard to not think of it in that way…) I forgive her for the traffic, the crazy drivers, the dirt. I forgive her for the impossible parking situation and my pile of unpaid parking tickets (I mean, if there’s no parking anywhere and I mean - ANYWHERE, where do you expect people to park if not on the sidewalk?). I forgive her for the crowded beaches. I even forgive her Friday afternoons, when it’s overrun by visitors from other cities and you can’t even walk Shenkin Street or get a seat in a café because it’s so damn busy.
I started to skip school and spend my days to Tel Aviv in junior high. Sometimes I’d head to school and half way there see the bus to Tel Aviv approaching and change plans. Tel Aviv was everything my suburb wasn’t. It exuded life, while my suburb was all death. Tel Aviv was vibrant and exciting and never at rest, unlike my hometown, which closed shop every day between two and four (for siesta) and where there was only one store open on Saturdays. People were out, celebrating life in fashionable clothing and great hair, sun tanning on beaches in midday, laughing with friends on patios, flagging taxi cabs as they balanced their funky-boutiques shopping bags, sipping cappuccinos at trendy coffee shops. Tourists looked at maps on street corners, and couples kissed on park benches. I walked on the white sand beaches, browsed in record stores. I would sit at cafés and pretend I was a part of it all, trying to breathe in the city, letting its energy rub onto me.
In high school I started working at a teen magazine. I started taking the bus to the magazine’s office, an offshoot of a large daily newspaper, which was located in Tel Aviv. The minute I walked in I knew that this was where I wanted to spend my days. It was so much more exciting than being in school! Clearly I belonged here, at the pulsating heart of a busy magazine, where the phones rang non-stop and the thrill of meeting deadlines and chasing stories was better than any sugar rush or alcohol induced high I had ever experienced. I began conducting interviews in cafes around town, travel around it to cover events and began feeling at home in the city. Around the same time I got accepted to the national theatre’s exclusive youth group in the centre of Tel Aviv. ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ was hitting the charts, playing on the radio every ten minutes, and ‘Dirty dancing’ was showing at theatres. I started spending more time in Tel Aviv than I did at home.
In the army I was posted to an army base in Tel Aviv, which meant that on my lunch breaks, instead of eating free meals at the army base, I’d sit on a restaurant patio and spend too much money, getting myself into debt so I can feel cool. Sometimes, my friend and I would drive to the beach for our lunch break, roll up our uniform sleeves and take off our army shoes and sit in the sand for a half hour before we had to go back to our dull army office.
Then came the Banana Beach days (see February 14h post – On Beaches and Homes). After that I moved into an apartment on Dizzengof Street, right in the heart of Tel Aviv. Even four years ago, already living in Vancouver, I found myself in Tel Aviv with no money after travelling in Thailand, and ended up staying for 6 months, trying to gather money for a flight to Vancouver. Once again I worked at cafe on the beach. I moved into a friend’s apartment in Florentine – Tel Aviv’s lower east side, where Tel Aviv’s young hip residents co-exist with small industry shops, garages, trendy bars and little boutiques. I started thinking I should move back. Why stay in Vancouver? So far away from my family? From Tel Aviv? I planned on going back to Vancouver for a little bit, sort out my life and come back. For good. But when I got back to Vancouver I moved into the Big Yellow House, met Sean, and made many new and wonderful friends. Life had a different plan - a better plan - for me. I stayed in Vancouver. I'm so happy I stayed.
I love Tel Aviv because I can walk by myself late at night and feel safe, because there would always be people on the street. I love it because you can get great coffee (cappuccinos or turkish) anywhere, at any time, and not just at selected coffee shops. I love it for its falafel stands and yummy hummus. I love it because the weather is beautiful, because the beaches are always a great place to hang out for half an hour or an entire day. I love it for its old buildings. I love it because you can drink beer anywhere at any time. I love it because you can get a haircut at midnight, shop at 2 am, eat a fine meal at 4 am, and dance until morning. I love being able to go for a morning swim after partying… then have great coffee and an Israeli breakfast at Banana Beach with my feet buried in the sand…I love it for its crazy markets, for its great fashion, the eclectic selection of restaurants, the love parade, the seawall. I love it for its narrow streets and green gardens, for the beautiful boulevards. I love it for the amazing sunsets on the beach, and how the city’s white buildings blush at this hour, and everything looks a little less blinding, a little more beautiful. I love the mix of east and west. I love that just like me, Tel Aviv is trapped in an eternal identity crisis, trapped between the Middle East and Europe. And most of all, I love it because it allows me to be whoever I want, do whatever I please, at whatever hour I want. It allows me to be me.
I’m pretty sure Tel Aviv one of coolest cities in the world. I’m yet to visit other allegedly cool cities to determine – cities such as Barcelona or Mexico City for example, but I have been around some pretty cool cities and Tel Aviv rules my list, which includes Montreal, New York, London and Amsterdam. I can’t include Vancouver in this list, even though in my opinion it’s cool in its own tame and sedated way, and it has Commercial Drive (definitely up there in the list of cool neighbourhoods!) which is why I live there, but it’s just belongs to a different bracket altogether. I also love Bombay, Bangkok, Phnom Penn and Jerusalem – all very cool cities – but they exist in a different sphere and in my opinion are incomparable.
When I was 22 I moved to Manhattan, seeking coolness that I didn’t think exist in my tiny, confused and holy land. I remember driving the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the famous skyline and thinking: I have made it! I’ve made it to the coolest city in the world, where everybody speaks as if they’re characters in a sitcom and every street corner seems familiar from a movie or a Seinfeld episode. Where Sigourney Weaver passes by with bags of grocery and cops break dance in the middle of a busy intersection while they direct traffic. Where you open your MTV and find that if you left the house now, you’d make it to a Metallica concert in the park, just a few blocks away. I dreamt about New York since I was a teenager. Since I first read Madonna’s story about arriving in New York, how she asked the taxi driver to drop her at the centre of everything and ended up in Times Square with $15 and went on to take over the world. When things got rough at home I could close my eyes and imagine I lived there, in one of those high rises with a cute American boy named Michael or Steve. I’m pretty sure everyone has a place like that in their teens. A better place. A place that symbolizes everything their hometown isn’t. A place where nobody knows them, where they can start new. New York was mine. I loved it so much that I drew its skyline, in shades of gray, on my bedroom wall.
I got there on a flight from New Delhi after traveling through India’s north, and rented a tiny bachelor suite with my best friend on Lexington and 36th , up four flights of stairs. It was mid summer, New York was hot and humid and our air conditioner broke down on the first week. It was ridiculously expensive and I made no friends. I got a little job writing articles for a Hebrew paper intended for the Israeli immigrant community but it didn’t pay much (In fact, I think they still owe me money!) I missed India terribly, followed smells of turmeric and cilantro down the streets and women in saris on the subway. Sometimes, after wandering the streets for hours, I’d even get lonely and bored. Bored! In New York!!! It was nothing like they said it would be. It wasn’t open all night long like they promised. It wasn’t easy to find good 24 hour restaurants, and there wasn’t a 24 hour convenience store at every street corner. It had some great clubs, but nothing I haven't seen at home. One night, after having drinks at a bar with a friend, I was gonna walk home from the bar, when my New Yorker friend told me I was crazy. I was stunned. “But it’s only 4 blocks, and Giuliani cleaned New York!” I said. But apparently it wasn’t safe to walk in New York in the middle of the night, not even a few blocks. “And never take the subway after midnight!” My friend added. What kind of night life is that?
Imagine my shock, realizing that when it comes to night life, my little Middle Eastern Tel Aviv puts the big apple to shame.
I love, love, love Tel Aviv. Sometimes, when it treats me like shit, I briefly hate it. But then, like the sucker I am, I forgive her. (Note: In Hebrew city is female and I find it hard to not think of it in that way…) I forgive her for the traffic, the crazy drivers, the dirt. I forgive her for the impossible parking situation and my pile of unpaid parking tickets (I mean, if there’s no parking anywhere and I mean - ANYWHERE, where do you expect people to park if not on the sidewalk?). I forgive her for the crowded beaches. I even forgive her Friday afternoons, when it’s overrun by visitors from other cities and you can’t even walk Shenkin Street or get a seat in a café because it’s so damn busy.
I started to skip school and spend my days to Tel Aviv in junior high. Sometimes I’d head to school and half way there see the bus to Tel Aviv approaching and change plans. Tel Aviv was everything my suburb wasn’t. It exuded life, while my suburb was all death. Tel Aviv was vibrant and exciting and never at rest, unlike my hometown, which closed shop every day between two and four (for siesta) and where there was only one store open on Saturdays. People were out, celebrating life in fashionable clothing and great hair, sun tanning on beaches in midday, laughing with friends on patios, flagging taxi cabs as they balanced their funky-boutiques shopping bags, sipping cappuccinos at trendy coffee shops. Tourists looked at maps on street corners, and couples kissed on park benches. I walked on the white sand beaches, browsed in record stores. I would sit at cafés and pretend I was a part of it all, trying to breathe in the city, letting its energy rub onto me.
In high school I started working at a teen magazine. I started taking the bus to the magazine’s office, an offshoot of a large daily newspaper, which was located in Tel Aviv. The minute I walked in I knew that this was where I wanted to spend my days. It was so much more exciting than being in school! Clearly I belonged here, at the pulsating heart of a busy magazine, where the phones rang non-stop and the thrill of meeting deadlines and chasing stories was better than any sugar rush or alcohol induced high I had ever experienced. I began conducting interviews in cafes around town, travel around it to cover events and began feeling at home in the city. Around the same time I got accepted to the national theatre’s exclusive youth group in the centre of Tel Aviv. ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ was hitting the charts, playing on the radio every ten minutes, and ‘Dirty dancing’ was showing at theatres. I started spending more time in Tel Aviv than I did at home.
In the army I was posted to an army base in Tel Aviv, which meant that on my lunch breaks, instead of eating free meals at the army base, I’d sit on a restaurant patio and spend too much money, getting myself into debt so I can feel cool. Sometimes, my friend and I would drive to the beach for our lunch break, roll up our uniform sleeves and take off our army shoes and sit in the sand for a half hour before we had to go back to our dull army office.
Then came the Banana Beach days (see February 14h post – On Beaches and Homes). After that I moved into an apartment on Dizzengof Street, right in the heart of Tel Aviv. Even four years ago, already living in Vancouver, I found myself in Tel Aviv with no money after travelling in Thailand, and ended up staying for 6 months, trying to gather money for a flight to Vancouver. Once again I worked at cafe on the beach. I moved into a friend’s apartment in Florentine – Tel Aviv’s lower east side, where Tel Aviv’s young hip residents co-exist with small industry shops, garages, trendy bars and little boutiques. I started thinking I should move back. Why stay in Vancouver? So far away from my family? From Tel Aviv? I planned on going back to Vancouver for a little bit, sort out my life and come back. For good. But when I got back to Vancouver I moved into the Big Yellow House, met Sean, and made many new and wonderful friends. Life had a different plan - a better plan - for me. I stayed in Vancouver. I'm so happy I stayed.
I love Tel Aviv because I can walk by myself late at night and feel safe, because there would always be people on the street. I love it because you can get great coffee (cappuccinos or turkish) anywhere, at any time, and not just at selected coffee shops. I love it for its falafel stands and yummy hummus. I love it because the weather is beautiful, because the beaches are always a great place to hang out for half an hour or an entire day. I love it for its old buildings. I love it because you can drink beer anywhere at any time. I love it because you can get a haircut at midnight, shop at 2 am, eat a fine meal at 4 am, and dance until morning. I love being able to go for a morning swim after partying… then have great coffee and an Israeli breakfast at Banana Beach with my feet buried in the sand…I love it for its crazy markets, for its great fashion, the eclectic selection of restaurants, the love parade, the seawall. I love it for its narrow streets and green gardens, for the beautiful boulevards. I love it for the amazing sunsets on the beach, and how the city’s white buildings blush at this hour, and everything looks a little less blinding, a little more beautiful. I love the mix of east and west. I love that just like me, Tel Aviv is trapped in an eternal identity crisis, trapped between the Middle East and Europe. And most of all, I love it because it allows me to be whoever I want, do whatever I please, at whatever hour I want. It allows me to be me.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
A Visit to Shama's Grave
I used to hate cemeteries.
I mean, what is there to like? It's a place of tears and sorrow, a place that symbolizes loss. More specifically, my father’s loss. I especially hated the cemetery in my town, where my father is buried. I visited this cemetery one time too many, for funerals and memorials, during my teen years. I hated everything about it. Just driving toward it made me uneasy, formed a tight knot in my stomach and a dull headache above my eyebrows. I hated the funeral home at the entrance, a massive ominous stone building; despised the religious men that lured by it, hoping make a buck by praying for your dead. The air was always dusty and dry, and there was hardly any shade, just rows upon rows of marble boxes, bright and shiny like teeth. A desert of stone.
This time, when I enter, I don’t feel any of it. At some point during my visit I actually find a single palm tree next to a lucky grave and stand in its shade for a minute, seeking relief from the blazing sun. I can’t hear the city from here, and there are no birds, which could seem creepy, but today I find it oddly soothing. I enjoy the peace and quiet. Maybe it’s because I’m not here for a funeral ,and the grave I’m looking for is so old that it’s somehow seems easier.
I’m here with Zehava – my second cousin, who’s been helping me with my research – and we’re looking for Shama’s grave, our great grandmother, who died at around 1914 and who’s been the basis for my novel. Zehava has been there once, over 10 years ago with her daughter. They found a mount of old dirt, with a wooden sign stuck in it that read: Shama Madhala. It’s unusual to have graves left without headstones. “Back then the family didn’t think it was important,” Zehava says, “they believed that if they’re already dead, then their souls are gone elsewhere, and why bother spend money on a stone? Don’t forget how poor they were back then!” And so Shama’s grave was left without a headstone for many decades.
Shama’s grave is in the oldest part of the cemetery, on a little hill, and when we stand there we can see the stone desert spread as far as the city’s newest high rises that border the cemetery. These new buildings are plain and stone coloured, and look like an extension of the rows of gravestones they overlook.
They renovated the cemetery since Zehava was last here, put a wall around the lot and stairs to climb the hill, but Zehava remembers the position of the grave from the washrooms and finds the spot easily. Execept… there are no more mounts of dirt. Since the last time Zehava was there the cemetery (maybe with the help of a donor? Or the city?) put up headstones for all the unattended mounts.
The headstones put up by the cemetery are simple and basic, a casting of rectangle concrete with a little square stone, placed like a pillow at the head of the grave. There are many nameless little graves, sad little baby graves, from the days when children died from curable diseases. Others are engraved: “Yemeni woman,” or “Persian child.” Some graves only have first names engraved, like “Esther,” or “Hava” and no other details. One grave reads: “Drowned in the Yarkon River.” Other: “The Young Daughter of Sharabi Family.” I’m fascinated by these graves and the stories behind them. But we can’t find Shama anywhere.
In recent years they built a computerized system to help people find their way in this maze of gravestones. When we type Shama’s name we get: “There are no results for this deceased.” Her grave has disappeared. “But I saw it in my own eyes!” Zehava cries. “How is that possible?” We try Shama’s sisters, even her mother, and their names all appear. We go visit Shama’s mother Simcha’s grave – a simple rectangle of concrete engraved with her name, her father’s name and the year of her death. She died in 1931, outlived her daughter by 17 years. We find pebble stones and place them carefully on her grave. It’s traditional. It’s a way of saying: We were here. We visited you. We remember.
We browse through the rows again and again. Could we have missed it? But if we did, then we should have at least found it on the computer!
Eventually, we realize – to our dismay – that her sign must have flown off before the renovation. I imagine a stormy night, rain washes over graves, shines the marble like mirrors, the wind blows the sign away, and a stream of rainwater carries it down the hill, where it gets covered in mud and dirt. When we walk back to the row of graves, Zehava positions herself back where she thinks the grave is, and finds herself standing by a nameless grave, next to two nameless baby graves. Maybe one of them is her baby daughter, who died at birth, shortly before Shama’s death?
“It’s here,” Zehava whispers with sorrow, “I can feel it. It’s here.”
I'm disappointed. I was hoping to find her time of death, maybe her father's name. I wanted to see her name written. But I'm not surprised. It’s almost expected that Shama’s grave would be nameless. A nameless grave to a woman who lived and died and left no mark, no picture, no document. A woman with no birth certificate and no grave. A woman deleted from history.
We kneel by the grave and touch the stone. The stone feels cool to our hot skin. It’s always so hot and bright in the cemetery. Maybe the sun reflects off the marble, and creates a hot air pocket. Why don’t they have more trees in here?
“I’m sorry, Savta,” Zehava says. Her voice is shaking. “Please forgive us.”
Suddenly I feel a hint of rage. It’s as if a genetic chip inside of me is mad on behalf of my grandmother who can no longer speak her mind. My grandmother who never forgave her mother for abandoning her, who never bothered to look up her grave. I know that if she was here she’d say: “That’s her punishment! For leaving us behind in Yemen, for choosing a man over me and my sister. We should be the ones forgiving her for what she’s done! We shouldn’t be begging her for forgiveness!”
This voice takes me by sueprise. Instead I say quietly: “First she should forgive herself,” and suddenly I know she never did. She died without forgiving herself. I almost feel as if she punished herself, as if she felt she didn’t deserve a proper headstone. And then I think about my character, the one from the novel, and my heart goes out to her. Surely she hoped for more from life. I wish her peace. I wish her to forgive herself and let herself rest.
“How could she have left so little?” I say, and Zehava say: “What do you mean? She left us! She left a dynasty.”
I look for a big pebble stone and place it on her grave.
They have water taps near the exit from the cemetery, and not only so visitors can wash the dust from their hands. According to Jewish tradition, you must wash your hands after visiting a cemetery; wash away the touch of death as if it is dirty, impure. When I was little I treated that rule with the utmost respect and never questioned it. I already felt as if death was a contagious disease I carried with me. I knew so many people who died. I had friends who lost their dads after I’d lost mine. I walked with it like it was my shadow, an invisible stalker. When I was ten I wrote a poem titled: I tasted the taste of cemetery.
This time I don’t bother washing my hands. I feel rebellious. In fact, at some point, as we walk away from the grave, I dare and put my fingers to my mouth. I lick them a little bit, to moisten them, and they taste salty and dusty. I taste the taste of the cemetery.
Then I panic and spit.
I mean, what is there to like? It's a place of tears and sorrow, a place that symbolizes loss. More specifically, my father’s loss. I especially hated the cemetery in my town, where my father is buried. I visited this cemetery one time too many, for funerals and memorials, during my teen years. I hated everything about it. Just driving toward it made me uneasy, formed a tight knot in my stomach and a dull headache above my eyebrows. I hated the funeral home at the entrance, a massive ominous stone building; despised the religious men that lured by it, hoping make a buck by praying for your dead. The air was always dusty and dry, and there was hardly any shade, just rows upon rows of marble boxes, bright and shiny like teeth. A desert of stone.
This time, when I enter, I don’t feel any of it. At some point during my visit I actually find a single palm tree next to a lucky grave and stand in its shade for a minute, seeking relief from the blazing sun. I can’t hear the city from here, and there are no birds, which could seem creepy, but today I find it oddly soothing. I enjoy the peace and quiet. Maybe it’s because I’m not here for a funeral ,and the grave I’m looking for is so old that it’s somehow seems easier.
I’m here with Zehava – my second cousin, who’s been helping me with my research – and we’re looking for Shama’s grave, our great grandmother, who died at around 1914 and who’s been the basis for my novel. Zehava has been there once, over 10 years ago with her daughter. They found a mount of old dirt, with a wooden sign stuck in it that read: Shama Madhala. It’s unusual to have graves left without headstones. “Back then the family didn’t think it was important,” Zehava says, “they believed that if they’re already dead, then their souls are gone elsewhere, and why bother spend money on a stone? Don’t forget how poor they were back then!” And so Shama’s grave was left without a headstone for many decades.
Shama’s grave is in the oldest part of the cemetery, on a little hill, and when we stand there we can see the stone desert spread as far as the city’s newest high rises that border the cemetery. These new buildings are plain and stone coloured, and look like an extension of the rows of gravestones they overlook.
They renovated the cemetery since Zehava was last here, put a wall around the lot and stairs to climb the hill, but Zehava remembers the position of the grave from the washrooms and finds the spot easily. Execept… there are no more mounts of dirt. Since the last time Zehava was there the cemetery (maybe with the help of a donor? Or the city?) put up headstones for all the unattended mounts.
The headstones put up by the cemetery are simple and basic, a casting of rectangle concrete with a little square stone, placed like a pillow at the head of the grave. There are many nameless little graves, sad little baby graves, from the days when children died from curable diseases. Others are engraved: “Yemeni woman,” or “Persian child.” Some graves only have first names engraved, like “Esther,” or “Hava” and no other details. One grave reads: “Drowned in the Yarkon River.” Other: “The Young Daughter of Sharabi Family.” I’m fascinated by these graves and the stories behind them. But we can’t find Shama anywhere.
In recent years they built a computerized system to help people find their way in this maze of gravestones. When we type Shama’s name we get: “There are no results for this deceased.” Her grave has disappeared. “But I saw it in my own eyes!” Zehava cries. “How is that possible?” We try Shama’s sisters, even her mother, and their names all appear. We go visit Shama’s mother Simcha’s grave – a simple rectangle of concrete engraved with her name, her father’s name and the year of her death. She died in 1931, outlived her daughter by 17 years. We find pebble stones and place them carefully on her grave. It’s traditional. It’s a way of saying: We were here. We visited you. We remember.
We browse through the rows again and again. Could we have missed it? But if we did, then we should have at least found it on the computer!
Eventually, we realize – to our dismay – that her sign must have flown off before the renovation. I imagine a stormy night, rain washes over graves, shines the marble like mirrors, the wind blows the sign away, and a stream of rainwater carries it down the hill, where it gets covered in mud and dirt. When we walk back to the row of graves, Zehava positions herself back where she thinks the grave is, and finds herself standing by a nameless grave, next to two nameless baby graves. Maybe one of them is her baby daughter, who died at birth, shortly before Shama’s death?
“It’s here,” Zehava whispers with sorrow, “I can feel it. It’s here.”
I'm disappointed. I was hoping to find her time of death, maybe her father's name. I wanted to see her name written. But I'm not surprised. It’s almost expected that Shama’s grave would be nameless. A nameless grave to a woman who lived and died and left no mark, no picture, no document. A woman with no birth certificate and no grave. A woman deleted from history.
We kneel by the grave and touch the stone. The stone feels cool to our hot skin. It’s always so hot and bright in the cemetery. Maybe the sun reflects off the marble, and creates a hot air pocket. Why don’t they have more trees in here?
“I’m sorry, Savta,” Zehava says. Her voice is shaking. “Please forgive us.”
Suddenly I feel a hint of rage. It’s as if a genetic chip inside of me is mad on behalf of my grandmother who can no longer speak her mind. My grandmother who never forgave her mother for abandoning her, who never bothered to look up her grave. I know that if she was here she’d say: “That’s her punishment! For leaving us behind in Yemen, for choosing a man over me and my sister. We should be the ones forgiving her for what she’s done! We shouldn’t be begging her for forgiveness!”
This voice takes me by sueprise. Instead I say quietly: “First she should forgive herself,” and suddenly I know she never did. She died without forgiving herself. I almost feel as if she punished herself, as if she felt she didn’t deserve a proper headstone. And then I think about my character, the one from the novel, and my heart goes out to her. Surely she hoped for more from life. I wish her peace. I wish her to forgive herself and let herself rest.
“How could she have left so little?” I say, and Zehava say: “What do you mean? She left us! She left a dynasty.”
I look for a big pebble stone and place it on her grave.
They have water taps near the exit from the cemetery, and not only so visitors can wash the dust from their hands. According to Jewish tradition, you must wash your hands after visiting a cemetery; wash away the touch of death as if it is dirty, impure. When I was little I treated that rule with the utmost respect and never questioned it. I already felt as if death was a contagious disease I carried with me. I knew so many people who died. I had friends who lost their dads after I’d lost mine. I walked with it like it was my shadow, an invisible stalker. When I was ten I wrote a poem titled: I tasted the taste of cemetery.
This time I don’t bother washing my hands. I feel rebellious. In fact, at some point, as we walk away from the grave, I dare and put my fingers to my mouth. I lick them a little bit, to moisten them, and they taste salty and dusty. I taste the taste of the cemetery.
Then I panic and spit.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Looking for Shama
I love doing research. It was one of my favourite things about being a journalist. I use to spend hours in archives and libraries (the pre-internet days.) I loved it. It made me feel a little bit like a private investigator.
Recently I’ve been feeling that thrill again. I’ve been spending my days digging into my family’s unwritten past, interviewing old family members and sitting in archives (how I love that old paper smell,) and since most of what I’m looking for is really old – the internet is not much use for me.
Apart from general information about Yemeni Jews, I’ve been looking for some specific details as well: I’d love to find a photo of my great grandmother Shama. Shama is the protagonist of my (fictional) novel. She abandoned my grandmother and her twin sister in Yemen when they were at 2 and moved to Israel with a new man – her third husband. I’ve been told by many how beautiful she was, even though nobody who’s still alive has actually seen her. She died young, a long time ago. I’m thinking around 1914.
I’ve been trying to pinpoint a few dates in my family’s history. For example, I want to know, for once and for all, when my grandmother was born.
M grandmother doesn’t have a birth certificate. She was born in a village in North Yemen, by the village midwife, in a time and a place where birth dates had little importance to people. My grandmother has been eighty for about a decade until a few years ago someone had thought to update her estimated age... Now, her children approximate that she’s about 94-95. Everybody seemed happy with that guess, until I came along to question and stir everything up.
That age didn’t seem right according to my calculations. If she’s 95, then she was born in 1913. But that’s impossible, since I discovered that her younger brother Aharon, who was born in Israel to Shama and her new husband Yair, was born in 1913.
“Who told you that?” My uncles and aunts ask suspiciously when I gently bring up the subject.
“His daughter!” I say, pretty sure of myself.
“Have you seen a birth certificate?”
“Well… no.”
“Then she’s just estimating. She must be wrong.” They conclude.
Pretty much everything that side of the family says is regarded with suspicion, because… well, they’re the OTHER family, the one that was born to Shama in Israel. In that story – they’re the bad guys, even though they have done nothing wrong, except for being descended from the wrong husband. They’re the ones who defend Shama. They seem to think that what she did was excusable, while my family simply sees her as an evil person, a terrible mom and even a bit of a slut. They don’t say it in so many words but I know that some of them are a bit annoyed with me for spending so much time with that side of the family. They don’t really get why I chose to focus on HER story. If it was up to them, they’d rather see me tell my grandmother story, from her point of view. It’s a good thing my grandmother doesn’t know what’s going on, because she would have flipped! Just the other day, I came to the weekly family gathering at my aunt’s house and one of my aunts welcomed me with a glare. “I heard you have a new best friend!!!” She said, referring, of course, to Aharon’s daughter, who’s been helping me with my research (who – just to set things straights - is as stubborn and convinced of her version as my family is of theirs. There’s no convincing of either side.)
Anyways, I go back to see her, hoping for a birth certificate, and sure enough she doesn’t have one. Because even though Aharon was born in Israel, he was born at home and if his parents neglected to register him, like many Yemenis back then did, then his real birth date is nothing more than a guess. His daughter does show me a book published by the Ministry of Security that lists soldiers who died in the independence war, in 1948. The book clearly states that he was born in 1913.
I come back to my family, armed with that new information, but my family isn’t convinced. “Of course the book said that!” They dismiss with a sneer. “The book say whatever the family had told them!”
So I decide go to the only living son of Yair, Shama’s husband. (Are you still following?) Yair, whom Shama went to Israel with, remarried after her death and had many more children. I meet with the youngest of them, the only one who is still alive (at 70+,) and ask him, “When did your father immigrate to Israel?”
“1912,” He says. No hesitation.
“Do you have his immigration papers?”
“Of course not!” He laughs at my stupidity. “They didn’t issue any back then!” He refers me to a history book his father is mentioned in, and the date of his immigration is there as 1912. His date of settling in the Yemeni neighbourhood is 1913. He was one of the founders of our neighborhood.
Well, I figured that’s enough proof. According to the story (and it’s the one detail everyone agrees on) Shama left my grandmother and her sister when they were 2 and immigrated to Israel. This means my grandmother was born in 1910! Which makes her 98. Ninety eight!!!
“He was always a bit weird, that guy,” my family remains suspicious. “I wouldn’t trust what he says.”
To make things easier for me (and my future readers), I’ve decided to make a family tree, a task that proved incredibly difficult, even in a technical sense, because there were so many marriages between cousins and polygamy was widespread. How exactly does one draw a tree like this, where lines cross over from one family to the other, and the same name appear in two different places? My tree looks possessed, like it came from a haunted forest.
The research is more challenging than I expected. I’ve seen Shama’s third husband – Yair, mentioned in books and documents several times, but never with her. The one time his wife was mentioned it was the one he married after Shama’s death. I’ve even seen his photos, but never with her. It’s sad. It’s like she’s been deleted from history. It’s like she really is just a character in my book, a figment of my imagination. How can I not find anything about her? How come I can’t find anybody who knew her? How can a person leave so little behind?
I travel south to a village inhabited by old Yemenis to visit one of my grandmother’s cousins, a vibrant beautiful 90 year old woman who remembers my grandmother from Yemen. “Did you know Shama?” I say, hopeful. “Of course!” She says, “She was my sister!”
Ha?
Apparently, Shama was a common name. It was Jenny of early twentieth century Yemen.
When I ask Yair’s son about her, he claims his father was married to seven women. Which one exactly am I asking about?
I had lots of hope from a meeting with another one of my grandmother’s cousins. He’s Shama’s nephew, the son of Shama’s sister! I’ve been told he was a knowledgeable man, a professor in University. For sure, he’d be able to help. But the man is now in his eighties and in recent years he has suffered significant memory loss. Since Shama died before he was born, he’s having a hard time even remembering her name. “Yes, there was another sister,” he says, unsure. Eventually he gives me something he had written about the family, and in it, to my relief – Shama is mentioned. She was real! She did exist! Unfortunately, some of the information in it contradicts the one I’ve gathered, mainly – the name of Shama’s father (she was his mom’s sister – but only from their mother’s side... )
“Why don’t we ask grandma?” My mom suggests. My grandmother still communicates sometimes, although only when she feels like it (and when you come to think about it, it’s not much different than how she’s always been…)
A few weeks ago, for example, I mentioned to my mom and her siblings that Shama’s mother was named Simcha.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“That was her name. Shama brought her with her to Israel when she immigrated.”
“No, no, no,” they said. “You’re confused. Who told you that?”
When I tell them who, (it’s the other family again!) they narrow their eyes and insist they never heard about it.
Being stubborn is clearly a family trait.
But I guess I made them curious, because the next time they visited my grandmother they asked her: “Mom, what was your mother’s name?”
“Shama.” My grandmother said (now that she’s old, she doesn’t bother going through the list of curses that she had always attached to her mother’s name.)
“And what was her mother’s name?”
To their surprise, my grandmother said: Simcha.
What do you know? I was right! They were wrong!
I was looking forward to talking to my grandmother. I just need her to tell me her grandfather’s name, for the family tree. I’ve narrowed it down to two options, it’s either Salem or Aharon. But my grandmother is having a bad day. She’s not communicating at all, no matter how much we plead and try. “You should have come yesterday!” the nurses say. “She was so clear yesterday!”
It may seem like I’m not making much progress but that’s not the case. I’m quite happy with how things are developing. I’ve found historic documents that included Shama’s third husband; things like the price he paid for his 1913 house for example. I found my grandmother’s immigration papers with a cool picture where she stands next to my grandfather and his second wife… I’m close to decoding our family tree (which a year ago – seemed near impossible!) and I’ve found information about Simcha (Shama’s mom) that I haven’t known before, like the fact that both her husbands divorced her (and not died, as I thought before) because she didn’t bear any boys (and when she did, they died at a young age.)
I found out my grandmother’s age once and for all (and now even her children are starting to believe me!) I heard many great stories about my grandmother and her siblings, and general stories about Yemen and the neighbourhood. I found old photos of Shama’s sisters, and even an ancient photo of Simcha’s second husband!!! I even heard a story about my grandmother birth, that Shama’s sister told her son. They didn’t know that Shama was carrying twins, and after my grandmother came out they all thought they were done. Then, when they realized there was one more, someone ran to notify the husband: “Wait! There’s another one!” After Saida came out, the husband asked: “Anything else? Are we done?”
Next Sunday I’m heading to the National archives in Jerusalem. I’m really excited. I’ve spoke to an advisor there. At first, she didn’t sound so hopeful. The archive only had documents from 1919 and up. She looked into another archive, from the Turks days (Ottoman Empire) that had documents dated until 1907. “Unfortunately, the years between those two dates are not very documented,” she said. Then she remembered a private collection (The Yavnieli Archives) and in it she found a list of Yemeni immigrants from 1912! If I’m lucky, I might even find her photo! But at this point even seeing her name in print would be nice. Anything to make her a little more real.
Recently I’ve been feeling that thrill again. I’ve been spending my days digging into my family’s unwritten past, interviewing old family members and sitting in archives (how I love that old paper smell,) and since most of what I’m looking for is really old – the internet is not much use for me.
Apart from general information about Yemeni Jews, I’ve been looking for some specific details as well: I’d love to find a photo of my great grandmother Shama. Shama is the protagonist of my (fictional) novel. She abandoned my grandmother and her twin sister in Yemen when they were at 2 and moved to Israel with a new man – her third husband. I’ve been told by many how beautiful she was, even though nobody who’s still alive has actually seen her. She died young, a long time ago. I’m thinking around 1914.
I’ve been trying to pinpoint a few dates in my family’s history. For example, I want to know, for once and for all, when my grandmother was born.
M grandmother doesn’t have a birth certificate. She was born in a village in North Yemen, by the village midwife, in a time and a place where birth dates had little importance to people. My grandmother has been eighty for about a decade until a few years ago someone had thought to update her estimated age... Now, her children approximate that she’s about 94-95. Everybody seemed happy with that guess, until I came along to question and stir everything up.
That age didn’t seem right according to my calculations. If she’s 95, then she was born in 1913. But that’s impossible, since I discovered that her younger brother Aharon, who was born in Israel to Shama and her new husband Yair, was born in 1913.
“Who told you that?” My uncles and aunts ask suspiciously when I gently bring up the subject.
“His daughter!” I say, pretty sure of myself.
“Have you seen a birth certificate?”
“Well… no.”
“Then she’s just estimating. She must be wrong.” They conclude.
Pretty much everything that side of the family says is regarded with suspicion, because… well, they’re the OTHER family, the one that was born to Shama in Israel. In that story – they’re the bad guys, even though they have done nothing wrong, except for being descended from the wrong husband. They’re the ones who defend Shama. They seem to think that what she did was excusable, while my family simply sees her as an evil person, a terrible mom and even a bit of a slut. They don’t say it in so many words but I know that some of them are a bit annoyed with me for spending so much time with that side of the family. They don’t really get why I chose to focus on HER story. If it was up to them, they’d rather see me tell my grandmother story, from her point of view. It’s a good thing my grandmother doesn’t know what’s going on, because she would have flipped! Just the other day, I came to the weekly family gathering at my aunt’s house and one of my aunts welcomed me with a glare. “I heard you have a new best friend!!!” She said, referring, of course, to Aharon’s daughter, who’s been helping me with my research (who – just to set things straights - is as stubborn and convinced of her version as my family is of theirs. There’s no convincing of either side.)
Anyways, I go back to see her, hoping for a birth certificate, and sure enough she doesn’t have one. Because even though Aharon was born in Israel, he was born at home and if his parents neglected to register him, like many Yemenis back then did, then his real birth date is nothing more than a guess. His daughter does show me a book published by the Ministry of Security that lists soldiers who died in the independence war, in 1948. The book clearly states that he was born in 1913.
I come back to my family, armed with that new information, but my family isn’t convinced. “Of course the book said that!” They dismiss with a sneer. “The book say whatever the family had told them!”
So I decide go to the only living son of Yair, Shama’s husband. (Are you still following?) Yair, whom Shama went to Israel with, remarried after her death and had many more children. I meet with the youngest of them, the only one who is still alive (at 70+,) and ask him, “When did your father immigrate to Israel?”
“1912,” He says. No hesitation.
“Do you have his immigration papers?”
“Of course not!” He laughs at my stupidity. “They didn’t issue any back then!” He refers me to a history book his father is mentioned in, and the date of his immigration is there as 1912. His date of settling in the Yemeni neighbourhood is 1913. He was one of the founders of our neighborhood.
Well, I figured that’s enough proof. According to the story (and it’s the one detail everyone agrees on) Shama left my grandmother and her sister when they were 2 and immigrated to Israel. This means my grandmother was born in 1910! Which makes her 98. Ninety eight!!!
“He was always a bit weird, that guy,” my family remains suspicious. “I wouldn’t trust what he says.”
To make things easier for me (and my future readers), I’ve decided to make a family tree, a task that proved incredibly difficult, even in a technical sense, because there were so many marriages between cousins and polygamy was widespread. How exactly does one draw a tree like this, where lines cross over from one family to the other, and the same name appear in two different places? My tree looks possessed, like it came from a haunted forest.
The research is more challenging than I expected. I’ve seen Shama’s third husband – Yair, mentioned in books and documents several times, but never with her. The one time his wife was mentioned it was the one he married after Shama’s death. I’ve even seen his photos, but never with her. It’s sad. It’s like she’s been deleted from history. It’s like she really is just a character in my book, a figment of my imagination. How can I not find anything about her? How come I can’t find anybody who knew her? How can a person leave so little behind?
I travel south to a village inhabited by old Yemenis to visit one of my grandmother’s cousins, a vibrant beautiful 90 year old woman who remembers my grandmother from Yemen. “Did you know Shama?” I say, hopeful. “Of course!” She says, “She was my sister!”
Ha?
Apparently, Shama was a common name. It was Jenny of early twentieth century Yemen.
When I ask Yair’s son about her, he claims his father was married to seven women. Which one exactly am I asking about?
I had lots of hope from a meeting with another one of my grandmother’s cousins. He’s Shama’s nephew, the son of Shama’s sister! I’ve been told he was a knowledgeable man, a professor in University. For sure, he’d be able to help. But the man is now in his eighties and in recent years he has suffered significant memory loss. Since Shama died before he was born, he’s having a hard time even remembering her name. “Yes, there was another sister,” he says, unsure. Eventually he gives me something he had written about the family, and in it, to my relief – Shama is mentioned. She was real! She did exist! Unfortunately, some of the information in it contradicts the one I’ve gathered, mainly – the name of Shama’s father (she was his mom’s sister – but only from their mother’s side... )
“Why don’t we ask grandma?” My mom suggests. My grandmother still communicates sometimes, although only when she feels like it (and when you come to think about it, it’s not much different than how she’s always been…)
A few weeks ago, for example, I mentioned to my mom and her siblings that Shama’s mother was named Simcha.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“That was her name. Shama brought her with her to Israel when she immigrated.”
“No, no, no,” they said. “You’re confused. Who told you that?”
When I tell them who, (it’s the other family again!) they narrow their eyes and insist they never heard about it.
Being stubborn is clearly a family trait.
But I guess I made them curious, because the next time they visited my grandmother they asked her: “Mom, what was your mother’s name?”
“Shama.” My grandmother said (now that she’s old, she doesn’t bother going through the list of curses that she had always attached to her mother’s name.)
“And what was her mother’s name?”
To their surprise, my grandmother said: Simcha.
What do you know? I was right! They were wrong!
I was looking forward to talking to my grandmother. I just need her to tell me her grandfather’s name, for the family tree. I’ve narrowed it down to two options, it’s either Salem or Aharon. But my grandmother is having a bad day. She’s not communicating at all, no matter how much we plead and try. “You should have come yesterday!” the nurses say. “She was so clear yesterday!”
It may seem like I’m not making much progress but that’s not the case. I’m quite happy with how things are developing. I’ve found historic documents that included Shama’s third husband; things like the price he paid for his 1913 house for example. I found my grandmother’s immigration papers with a cool picture where she stands next to my grandfather and his second wife… I’m close to decoding our family tree (which a year ago – seemed near impossible!) and I’ve found information about Simcha (Shama’s mom) that I haven’t known before, like the fact that both her husbands divorced her (and not died, as I thought before) because she didn’t bear any boys (and when she did, they died at a young age.)
I found out my grandmother’s age once and for all (and now even her children are starting to believe me!) I heard many great stories about my grandmother and her siblings, and general stories about Yemen and the neighbourhood. I found old photos of Shama’s sisters, and even an ancient photo of Simcha’s second husband!!! I even heard a story about my grandmother birth, that Shama’s sister told her son. They didn’t know that Shama was carrying twins, and after my grandmother came out they all thought they were done. Then, when they realized there was one more, someone ran to notify the husband: “Wait! There’s another one!” After Saida came out, the husband asked: “Anything else? Are we done?”
Next Sunday I’m heading to the National archives in Jerusalem. I’m really excited. I’ve spoke to an advisor there. At first, she didn’t sound so hopeful. The archive only had documents from 1919 and up. She looked into another archive, from the Turks days (Ottoman Empire) that had documents dated until 1907. “Unfortunately, the years between those two dates are not very documented,” she said. Then she remembered a private collection (The Yavnieli Archives) and in it she found a list of Yemeni immigrants from 1912! If I’m lucky, I might even find her photo! But at this point even seeing her name in print would be nice. Anything to make her a little more real.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Lost and Found
I lost my wallet today.
It was a retro green leather wallet I bought at the bargain bin at Virgin Mary’s for $3, fresh from its previous owner who worked behind the counter. It came with a lucky dime, left in the one zipper that was still working. Now – four years later – neither of the zippers is working, which requires me to walk around with an additional change purse and keep my coins separate from the bills. It’s annoying and awkward, and in the past three years (since the second zipper broke) I made failed attempts to replace my wallet, but somehow I could never find a wallet quite as classy and beautiful as this one. It had to be leather, preferably vintage, and it had to be a cool colour. Last Christmas Sean bought me a red leather wallet that was almost right but then I discovered the card slots were defected and returned it. I just can’t seem to let go of my green wallet.
I discovered the tragic loss a couple hours ago. I drove Sean to the airport, already sad about saying goodbye, already fighting a stubborn sense of loss (yes, yes, I know it’s only seven weeks, but this is me, the queen of fear of abandonment,) and when the custom agent who questioned Sean asked for my ID, I realized I can’t find my wallet. I waved goodbye to Sean at the gate and shed a tear. A penniless, driving-licenseless woman with no identity. Loss was like poison released through the air conditioning system at the airport. A melancholic background music playing through the announcement speakers.
Ahem. Excuse the melodrama and the peculiar similes. It’s only been a couple hours and I’m still grieving. The thing is – I’ve been losing lots of things since I came to Israel. Actually, I’d lost my first item a couple days before flying to Israel. My cell phone disappeared at Mona’s rocking staff party. Once I realized it was really gone, I started thinking maybe it was a good thing. Maybe I should let it go, cancel my number, go cell free. There is something liberating about not owning a cell phone. Then I had a scary thought. Maybe if I didn’t have my cell phone number – the one I’ve had for the past four years, the one many people know as my only number – then I wouldn’t be so easy to find. And maybe if I couldn’t be found, I would cease to exist. (Yeah, yeah, there’s facebook and e-mail and I’m at Continental drinking coffee almost every day, but we’ve established my tendency for melodrama in the previous paragraph.) The thought was disturbing and exciting at the same time.
Next I lost my thin red frame eye glasses. I’ve had my glasses for the past 8 years. My prescription had changed, the lenses were scratched and the frame faded but I’ve been too lazy to replace them. Now I’m confined to my contacts, which isn’t very convenient, especially when you wake up in the middle of the night to go pee and have to find your way in the blur. When you’re as blind as I am, living without eye glasses can be very intimidating. You feel exposed and vulnerable.
Next were my sun glasses. My precious Ralph Lauren that Sean had bought for me last time we were in Israel. They were my first expensive pair. I was always so careful with them.
Then I lost my favourite black tank top. I had just bought it before my trip, but it was love at a first sight. It was the perfect black tank, with a lacy neckline that showed just the right amount of cleavage and long enough to be perfect for layering. It was a staple item, and I had needed one just like that for ages.
Next was my green thin sparkly scarf. I bought it at Salt Spring Island last year for $5. It was nothing I can’t live without but still – it sucked to lose it.
I reacted quite well to all these losses. Really. I haven’t been whining as much as I could or was entitled to. But losing my wallet (on the same day I escorted my boyfriend to the airport!) was the last straw. This one wins, and not only because it is frustrating to no end – canceling cards, calling Canada to stop monthly visa payments, paying for a new Israeli driver’s license. It pisses me off because my wallet was full of sentimental items – my father’s photo for example. In addition, losing a wallet adds to the feeling of loss of self. If I have no cell phone and no ID, no visa card, bank card, driving license, library card…. Do I still exist?
But more than anything, this streak of losses freaks me out. Somehow I feel that it’s not so much that I lost these things as they have gone missing. I know it sounds like a way out, a lame excuse to avoid taking responsibility for my carelessness. But I’m really not that careless. I don’t usually lose things, and all of these things disappeared in a mysterious manner. I threw my tank top at the laundry and it never returned. One day my glasses just weren’t there anymore. I don’t know when or how. Can’t trace my steps.
I've always prided myself on not being too materialistic. “It’s like a gift,” I used to babble to innocent victims at parties, “I’ve just never been easily attached to stuff. That’s why I own so little.” Of course, it’s probably the other way around. Maybe I’ve never been too materialistic because I owned so few things I could get attached to. Besides, I may not get attached to material stuff, but I’m awfully sentimental and can attach sentimental value to the most trivial things. Like my visa card. I was upset to lose an essential item, but I was also just sad to see it go. I mean, it was a gold card!!! And it was so pretty. And it was my first card since my early twenties (the financially-responsible-successful-journalist phase, before India happened.) For years they wouldn’t even give me a card! It meant so much to me to finally get approved for one. At 34, I was finally an adult. I was no longer marginal. I could casually pull out my card and pay for things, and pretend I was somebody with money.
Is it all a test? A way to remind me to not get too attached? Does it mirror the sense of loss that I feel here? Something about being of two nationalities, about being home but feeling like a tourist, about watching my family as I know it change, watch friends age. Watch me age.
Maybe it means I need to let go of something. Maybe I shouldn’t be defining myself through ID cards or cell phones, through stuff. Maybe I need a fresh start. Maybe I’ve been too careless, too cocky. Maybe I don’t appreciate what I have.
“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” my sister says. “Maybe it’s just an annoying coincidence.”
Maybe.
p.s. Good News! Since I wrote this, a couple days ago, they found my wallet with everything in it. Yay!!! I still miss that shirt, though.
It was a retro green leather wallet I bought at the bargain bin at Virgin Mary’s for $3, fresh from its previous owner who worked behind the counter. It came with a lucky dime, left in the one zipper that was still working. Now – four years later – neither of the zippers is working, which requires me to walk around with an additional change purse and keep my coins separate from the bills. It’s annoying and awkward, and in the past three years (since the second zipper broke) I made failed attempts to replace my wallet, but somehow I could never find a wallet quite as classy and beautiful as this one. It had to be leather, preferably vintage, and it had to be a cool colour. Last Christmas Sean bought me a red leather wallet that was almost right but then I discovered the card slots were defected and returned it. I just can’t seem to let go of my green wallet.
I discovered the tragic loss a couple hours ago. I drove Sean to the airport, already sad about saying goodbye, already fighting a stubborn sense of loss (yes, yes, I know it’s only seven weeks, but this is me, the queen of fear of abandonment,) and when the custom agent who questioned Sean asked for my ID, I realized I can’t find my wallet. I waved goodbye to Sean at the gate and shed a tear. A penniless, driving-licenseless woman with no identity. Loss was like poison released through the air conditioning system at the airport. A melancholic background music playing through the announcement speakers.
Ahem. Excuse the melodrama and the peculiar similes. It’s only been a couple hours and I’m still grieving. The thing is – I’ve been losing lots of things since I came to Israel. Actually, I’d lost my first item a couple days before flying to Israel. My cell phone disappeared at Mona’s rocking staff party. Once I realized it was really gone, I started thinking maybe it was a good thing. Maybe I should let it go, cancel my number, go cell free. There is something liberating about not owning a cell phone. Then I had a scary thought. Maybe if I didn’t have my cell phone number – the one I’ve had for the past four years, the one many people know as my only number – then I wouldn’t be so easy to find. And maybe if I couldn’t be found, I would cease to exist. (Yeah, yeah, there’s facebook and e-mail and I’m at Continental drinking coffee almost every day, but we’ve established my tendency for melodrama in the previous paragraph.) The thought was disturbing and exciting at the same time.
Next I lost my thin red frame eye glasses. I’ve had my glasses for the past 8 years. My prescription had changed, the lenses were scratched and the frame faded but I’ve been too lazy to replace them. Now I’m confined to my contacts, which isn’t very convenient, especially when you wake up in the middle of the night to go pee and have to find your way in the blur. When you’re as blind as I am, living without eye glasses can be very intimidating. You feel exposed and vulnerable.
Next were my sun glasses. My precious Ralph Lauren that Sean had bought for me last time we were in Israel. They were my first expensive pair. I was always so careful with them.
Then I lost my favourite black tank top. I had just bought it before my trip, but it was love at a first sight. It was the perfect black tank, with a lacy neckline that showed just the right amount of cleavage and long enough to be perfect for layering. It was a staple item, and I had needed one just like that for ages.
Next was my green thin sparkly scarf. I bought it at Salt Spring Island last year for $5. It was nothing I can’t live without but still – it sucked to lose it.
I reacted quite well to all these losses. Really. I haven’t been whining as much as I could or was entitled to. But losing my wallet (on the same day I escorted my boyfriend to the airport!) was the last straw. This one wins, and not only because it is frustrating to no end – canceling cards, calling Canada to stop monthly visa payments, paying for a new Israeli driver’s license. It pisses me off because my wallet was full of sentimental items – my father’s photo for example. In addition, losing a wallet adds to the feeling of loss of self. If I have no cell phone and no ID, no visa card, bank card, driving license, library card…. Do I still exist?
But more than anything, this streak of losses freaks me out. Somehow I feel that it’s not so much that I lost these things as they have gone missing. I know it sounds like a way out, a lame excuse to avoid taking responsibility for my carelessness. But I’m really not that careless. I don’t usually lose things, and all of these things disappeared in a mysterious manner. I threw my tank top at the laundry and it never returned. One day my glasses just weren’t there anymore. I don’t know when or how. Can’t trace my steps.
I've always prided myself on not being too materialistic. “It’s like a gift,” I used to babble to innocent victims at parties, “I’ve just never been easily attached to stuff. That’s why I own so little.” Of course, it’s probably the other way around. Maybe I’ve never been too materialistic because I owned so few things I could get attached to. Besides, I may not get attached to material stuff, but I’m awfully sentimental and can attach sentimental value to the most trivial things. Like my visa card. I was upset to lose an essential item, but I was also just sad to see it go. I mean, it was a gold card!!! And it was so pretty. And it was my first card since my early twenties (the financially-responsible-successful-journalist phase, before India happened.) For years they wouldn’t even give me a card! It meant so much to me to finally get approved for one. At 34, I was finally an adult. I was no longer marginal. I could casually pull out my card and pay for things, and pretend I was somebody with money.
Is it all a test? A way to remind me to not get too attached? Does it mirror the sense of loss that I feel here? Something about being of two nationalities, about being home but feeling like a tourist, about watching my family as I know it change, watch friends age. Watch me age.
Maybe it means I need to let go of something. Maybe I shouldn’t be defining myself through ID cards or cell phones, through stuff. Maybe I need a fresh start. Maybe I’ve been too careless, too cocky. Maybe I don’t appreciate what I have.
“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” my sister says. “Maybe it’s just an annoying coincidence.”
Maybe.
p.s. Good News! Since I wrote this, a couple days ago, they found my wallet with everything in it. Yay!!! I still miss that shirt, though.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Babyless in the Holy Land
Lately, I started to suspect that there are more babies per capita in this country that there are in Canada. Maybe it’s something about the wars (history showed that people procreate more in wartime and Israel is in a state of constant wartime,) maybe it’s the subconscious fear of being outnumbered by the enemy. Whatever the reason may be, it can make life for a 34 year old babyless woman a living hell.
Ok, to be fair, it could be also because most of my close friends in Canada are younger than me, and that I live away from my huge family (‘a family the size of a small European country’, I wrote once) and their many children. Also, even in Vancouver the trend is beginning to shift, and right now I have three friends (not in my closest circle still!) that are pregnant.
But in Israel it is a sweeping epidemic. Babies are everywhere, and of course they are adorable and so much fun to have around. I have 7 incredible nieces and nephews and one on the way.My many cousins have been having babies for years now, (I think – scary thought – that I’m the oldest female cousin at this moment who still hasn’t bred!!) My friend Tal is expecting a second, my friend Doron has a 6 month old baby, my friend Tsachi just got married and isn’t wasting any time. Every time I meet someone from the past I discover that they have offspring. I have only three friends without babies. One of them just turned 30 so she doesn’t count, the other is a lesbian who recently announced that she intends on marrying at 50 and having babies at 70 (to her girlfriend’s dismay) and the third is my childhood friend, Michal, who just like me, is simply not ready yet. Thank god for her.
But I think the main difference is that in Canada, I get most of my harassment (yes, let’s call it by its name: harassment) from the Indian staff at Yogi’s kitchen, and annoying as it may be, it doesn't happen often enough to make me mad. But in Israel, let me tell you, it is not harassment. It is a crusade.
I made the mistake, while visiting some family on a Saturday morning, of getting myself into a trap I should have recognized from miles away. It started innocently enough, with questions about my boyfriend (should have seen the flashing DANGER signs) and then one of the women asks: “So when are the bells going to ring?”
I instantly tense. “I don’t know,” I say, avoiding eye contact.
“Whatever,” my cousin who’s 45 and has 5 children, interferes. “Who cares about that? Just have a child. You don’t have to get married.”
Now that’s new. I’ve only been hearing it for the past couple years. Suddenly tradition is no longer a priority. Not in comparison to baby making, anyways. You gotta choose your battles. And especially in a case like mine, when a Jewish wedding is out of the question (so why bother?) and my clock is rapidly ticking (oh, how they love to talk about that clock,) wasting precious time on wedding preparation would just be foolish. Better get down to business! Start popping them before it’s too late! What, you think you’re so special that you can just go about life without fulfilling your role as a woman? You think you’re better than us? That your calling is different than ours? And what the hell is wrong with you anyways? What kind of woman your age doesn’t want babies? Why exactly do you need convincing?
“Later,” I say, like I’m declining an offer for lunch because I have previous engagements. “I’m really busy right now. I’m writing a book.”
“So???” my cousin yells, clearly not impressed with my literary aspiration. “You think you can’t write with a belly?”
Actually, it’s not the belly I worry about, I want to say. It’s the screaming helpless child who’d need my full love and attention. Yes, I think that might interfere with my writing time. But I say nothing and start rubbing an imaginary stain on my pants.
“How old are you?” My other cousin’s wife asks the dreadful question.
“34,” I say. I give her my age the way we do it in Canada, staying 34 until the minute I turn 35, even though I know that according to Israelis I’m pretty much 35 now, because my birthday is in two and half months.
She looks me up and down, but instead of saying: “Wow, you don’t look a day over 30!” she says: “So, it’s about time. You’re not a kid anymore.”
Now I’m offended. What did I ever do to her? That’s not a very nice thing to say! Sure I’m still a kid! Yes, I know my mom had 5 children at 34, but none of my siblings had children at my age. They were all late bloomers. In fact, my sister, who just had her first baby, is going to be 42 this summer, and by the way, at her heart she’s still a kid too! Ask anybody who ever played pillow fights with her!
I’m starting to look for an escape route. Did it just get hot in the room? My cousin’s daughter, who is in the room watching TV, looks up at me and smiles. Is it pity?
My cousin suddenly softens and laughs. “Look at her,” she says, “all she thinks is: shutupshutupshutupshutup.”
I smile tightly. She’s bang on, of course.
“Yes,” my aunt says, “I have a friend whose daughter a bit older and she stopped coming to family dinners because they harass her so much.”
“How old is she?” I ask.
“30,” my aunt says.
“That’s older???”
“Well, you know,” my aunt spit a list of clichés that should be outlawed. The clock is ticking. When I’d want to have one I wouldn’t be able to. I find myself imagining committing horrible crimes against those women I love dearly. Suddenly they’re the enemy. I see it in their eyes. There’s a new look in there. It’s as if they don’t like me as much as they used to. Because I’m a horrible daughter to my mother who wants nothing but grandchildren. Because I’m too indulgent, selfish, lazy. Because they no longer understand me.
This happens to me a lot in Israel. A lot more than I care to admit to Sean. And there’s milder harassment, coming from girlfriends (both in Israel and in Canada) who tell me they don’t really believe that I don’t want children right now. They think I secretly want a child but for some weird reason deny it from myself. ‘When you’ll see your sister’s daughter,’ they say, ‘you’d want one for yourself.’ They are probably just projecting but still, it’s slightly insulting - because do they think I am that out of touch with myself? - and really tiring. When did my uterus become a public domain? A topic of discussion?
You want the awful truth? Are you ready for it? I don’t want children right now. I just don’t. I saw my sister’s daughter and I love her like only an aunt can, and she’s wonderful and amazing and still – she didn’t make me want one of my own. I love the children around me. It’s a joy to have them around. I just don’t want my own yet. I never dream about babies. I’ve never had a pregnant dreams. When I think about having a baby, I actually cringe a little bit.
I’m not saying I’d never want children. I might want them next year. I think about that a lot. At my age it would be stupid to not think about it. And I’m clearly aware of the fucking clock. It ticks loud and clear it’s kind’a hard to miss. And my friends and siblings have nothing but wonderful things to say about having children. It changed their lives. They are happy. It seems like it would be a shame not to experience that. But that’s not much of a reason to have babies. It would also be a shame to not go skydiving, and don’t get me wrong - of course I’m not comparing the two. I’m just pointing out the way my mind works right now. I’m pointing out the lack of deep yearning that most new mothers talk about.
I can’t help feeling the way I feel. I don’t think that makes me a bad person. I know I’m a minority amongst my age group, but just like every minority, I don’t deserve being harassed simply because I’m different.
Ok, to be fair, it could be also because most of my close friends in Canada are younger than me, and that I live away from my huge family (‘a family the size of a small European country’, I wrote once) and their many children. Also, even in Vancouver the trend is beginning to shift, and right now I have three friends (not in my closest circle still!) that are pregnant.
But in Israel it is a sweeping epidemic. Babies are everywhere, and of course they are adorable and so much fun to have around. I have 7 incredible nieces and nephews and one on the way.My many cousins have been having babies for years now, (I think – scary thought – that I’m the oldest female cousin at this moment who still hasn’t bred!!) My friend Tal is expecting a second, my friend Doron has a 6 month old baby, my friend Tsachi just got married and isn’t wasting any time. Every time I meet someone from the past I discover that they have offspring. I have only three friends without babies. One of them just turned 30 so she doesn’t count, the other is a lesbian who recently announced that she intends on marrying at 50 and having babies at 70 (to her girlfriend’s dismay) and the third is my childhood friend, Michal, who just like me, is simply not ready yet. Thank god for her.
But I think the main difference is that in Canada, I get most of my harassment (yes, let’s call it by its name: harassment) from the Indian staff at Yogi’s kitchen, and annoying as it may be, it doesn't happen often enough to make me mad. But in Israel, let me tell you, it is not harassment. It is a crusade.
I made the mistake, while visiting some family on a Saturday morning, of getting myself into a trap I should have recognized from miles away. It started innocently enough, with questions about my boyfriend (should have seen the flashing DANGER signs) and then one of the women asks: “So when are the bells going to ring?”
I instantly tense. “I don’t know,” I say, avoiding eye contact.
“Whatever,” my cousin who’s 45 and has 5 children, interferes. “Who cares about that? Just have a child. You don’t have to get married.”
Now that’s new. I’ve only been hearing it for the past couple years. Suddenly tradition is no longer a priority. Not in comparison to baby making, anyways. You gotta choose your battles. And especially in a case like mine, when a Jewish wedding is out of the question (so why bother?) and my clock is rapidly ticking (oh, how they love to talk about that clock,) wasting precious time on wedding preparation would just be foolish. Better get down to business! Start popping them before it’s too late! What, you think you’re so special that you can just go about life without fulfilling your role as a woman? You think you’re better than us? That your calling is different than ours? And what the hell is wrong with you anyways? What kind of woman your age doesn’t want babies? Why exactly do you need convincing?
“Later,” I say, like I’m declining an offer for lunch because I have previous engagements. “I’m really busy right now. I’m writing a book.”
“So???” my cousin yells, clearly not impressed with my literary aspiration. “You think you can’t write with a belly?”
Actually, it’s not the belly I worry about, I want to say. It’s the screaming helpless child who’d need my full love and attention. Yes, I think that might interfere with my writing time. But I say nothing and start rubbing an imaginary stain on my pants.
“How old are you?” My other cousin’s wife asks the dreadful question.
“34,” I say. I give her my age the way we do it in Canada, staying 34 until the minute I turn 35, even though I know that according to Israelis I’m pretty much 35 now, because my birthday is in two and half months.
She looks me up and down, but instead of saying: “Wow, you don’t look a day over 30!” she says: “So, it’s about time. You’re not a kid anymore.”
Now I’m offended. What did I ever do to her? That’s not a very nice thing to say! Sure I’m still a kid! Yes, I know my mom had 5 children at 34, but none of my siblings had children at my age. They were all late bloomers. In fact, my sister, who just had her first baby, is going to be 42 this summer, and by the way, at her heart she’s still a kid too! Ask anybody who ever played pillow fights with her!
I’m starting to look for an escape route. Did it just get hot in the room? My cousin’s daughter, who is in the room watching TV, looks up at me and smiles. Is it pity?
My cousin suddenly softens and laughs. “Look at her,” she says, “all she thinks is: shutupshutupshutupshutup.”
I smile tightly. She’s bang on, of course.
“Yes,” my aunt says, “I have a friend whose daughter a bit older and she stopped coming to family dinners because they harass her so much.”
“How old is she?” I ask.
“30,” my aunt says.
“That’s older???”
“Well, you know,” my aunt spit a list of clichés that should be outlawed. The clock is ticking. When I’d want to have one I wouldn’t be able to. I find myself imagining committing horrible crimes against those women I love dearly. Suddenly they’re the enemy. I see it in their eyes. There’s a new look in there. It’s as if they don’t like me as much as they used to. Because I’m a horrible daughter to my mother who wants nothing but grandchildren. Because I’m too indulgent, selfish, lazy. Because they no longer understand me.
This happens to me a lot in Israel. A lot more than I care to admit to Sean. And there’s milder harassment, coming from girlfriends (both in Israel and in Canada) who tell me they don’t really believe that I don’t want children right now. They think I secretly want a child but for some weird reason deny it from myself. ‘When you’ll see your sister’s daughter,’ they say, ‘you’d want one for yourself.’ They are probably just projecting but still, it’s slightly insulting - because do they think I am that out of touch with myself? - and really tiring. When did my uterus become a public domain? A topic of discussion?
You want the awful truth? Are you ready for it? I don’t want children right now. I just don’t. I saw my sister’s daughter and I love her like only an aunt can, and she’s wonderful and amazing and still – she didn’t make me want one of my own. I love the children around me. It’s a joy to have them around. I just don’t want my own yet. I never dream about babies. I’ve never had a pregnant dreams. When I think about having a baby, I actually cringe a little bit.
I’m not saying I’d never want children. I might want them next year. I think about that a lot. At my age it would be stupid to not think about it. And I’m clearly aware of the fucking clock. It ticks loud and clear it’s kind’a hard to miss. And my friends and siblings have nothing but wonderful things to say about having children. It changed their lives. They are happy. It seems like it would be a shame not to experience that. But that’s not much of a reason to have babies. It would also be a shame to not go skydiving, and don’t get me wrong - of course I’m not comparing the two. I’m just pointing out the way my mind works right now. I’m pointing out the lack of deep yearning that most new mothers talk about.
I can’t help feeling the way I feel. I don’t think that makes me a bad person. I know I’m a minority amongst my age group, but just like every minority, I don’t deserve being harassed simply because I’m different.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
That's NOT how it happened!
Yesterday I decided I need to get back to writing every day. This blog has been a great motivator, but I haven’t written anything related to my book since getting to Israel and I’m scared. I’m scared it will slip away from me. I’m scared it would never happen. Sometimes I wish I chose a different topic, that didn’t require so much study, that didn’t incorporate two genres, that didn’t pose a risk to my relationships.
The research was supposed to kick start my writing but in reality the more I research the less I feel I know. And every day I discover more versions of the truth, some that I never even heard before. If I had a penny for every ‘That’s not how it happened!’ and ‘Who told you that?’ I could have made a hefty donation to the Yemeni Jews Museum in Rosh Hayin, because God knows – they need it.
“I’m writing fiction,” I tell everyone I interview now. “It’s just based on the family history.” “I’m writing fiction,” I tell myself on the way there. “FICTION!” I think as I wake up. It’s my new mantra. It’s what keeps me going. It doesn’t matter that I’m writing about something that happened 90 years ago in Yemen and who ever knew the truth is long gone. It’s still a hot topic; still loaded with emotions. I’m writing fiction. Because otherwise, once the book is out I’ll to have to deal with a mob of family members, all running after me and screaming: “That’s not how it happened!!!” and “Who told you that?”
Maybe it would be easier for me to write this book in Canada, where I don’t have to see my family. Maybe I should concentrate on my research and not worry about the writing until then. When I’m back at my desk in Vancouver facing the Burnaby hills, sitting on my ergonomic chair and sipping a cup of Continental coffee I’ll write this story without being so concerned with people’s feelings, without battling guilt and fear – those nasty censors. I’d be able to write this story without feeling as if I’m carrying an entire community of people on my shoulders, and since I haven’t been practicing my yoga – I doubt my shoulders can carry that much weight.
The research was supposed to kick start my writing but in reality the more I research the less I feel I know. And every day I discover more versions of the truth, some that I never even heard before. If I had a penny for every ‘That’s not how it happened!’ and ‘Who told you that?’ I could have made a hefty donation to the Yemeni Jews Museum in Rosh Hayin, because God knows – they need it.
“I’m writing fiction,” I tell everyone I interview now. “It’s just based on the family history.” “I’m writing fiction,” I tell myself on the way there. “FICTION!” I think as I wake up. It’s my new mantra. It’s what keeps me going. It doesn’t matter that I’m writing about something that happened 90 years ago in Yemen and who ever knew the truth is long gone. It’s still a hot topic; still loaded with emotions. I’m writing fiction. Because otherwise, once the book is out I’ll to have to deal with a mob of family members, all running after me and screaming: “That’s not how it happened!!!” and “Who told you that?”
Maybe it would be easier for me to write this book in Canada, where I don’t have to see my family. Maybe I should concentrate on my research and not worry about the writing until then. When I’m back at my desk in Vancouver facing the Burnaby hills, sitting on my ergonomic chair and sipping a cup of Continental coffee I’ll write this story without being so concerned with people’s feelings, without battling guilt and fear – those nasty censors. I’d be able to write this story without feeling as if I’m carrying an entire community of people on my shoulders, and since I haven’t been practicing my yoga – I doubt my shoulders can carry that much weight.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The Iraqi
Avram Hairaqi died yesterday. Hairaqi was not his last name, but that’s the name everyone knew him by. For many years I didn’t even know he had a family name. Hairaqi means The Iraqi. Israelis of that generation did that a lot, name people by their place of origin. And in my mom’s ‘hevre’ (a Hebrew word describing a group of friends, and in this case a regular group of friends who meet at least once a week to play cards, crack nuts and seeds, eat fresh watermelon with salted cheese, drink black coffee or beer and chat) he was an anomaly. Most of my mom’s friends growing up were Yemenis or her siblings – who were, obviously, also Yemenis. And there was Avram Hairaqi, often just called ‘Hairaqi’. His wife, Shosi was known as ‘hairaqit,’ and together they were ‘haIraqim.’ When he called, my mom’s cell phone read: ‘The Iraqi’. It was also a way to distinguish him from another Avram, my mom’s brother.
Avram Hairaqi was born in Baghdad 68 years ago, and came to Israel as at 14 with his family. He met my mother in Sharia – the Yemeni neighbourhood where she grew up – and fell madly in love with her. She was two years younger than him and loved singing and playing the flute. Her father owned the first radio in the neighbourhood. She was beautiful, had almond shaped eyes and olive skin. “He wrote me such lovely letters.” My mom said, “But he was so shy! For the longest time he wouldn’t speak to me!” The teen crush had eventually fizzled and they became best friends. They stayed best friends for the next fifty years, as they both married their sweethearts – my mom a Yemeni and Avram an Iraqi – and raised families.
In a country where men are often loud and short tempered and like to call it passion and blame it on geography, Avram Hairaqi stood out in his serene and peaceful demeanor. He was a sweet man, soft spoken and good natured. Sometimes, when my mom hosted the card game in our living room, I could hear heated arguments erupt and men in the ‘hevre’ raising voices, but never Avram Hairaqi. He would smile forgivingly when he saw me peeking from the top of the stairs. He always showed in interest in my siblings and me and was a good friend to my parents. The Iraqim were also a great support to my family after my father’s death.
I wasn’t at the funeral. He died at 2 and by 7 they already buried him. Jews don’t waste time bringing a soul closer to home. It’s considered disrespectful to the dead to keep him in limbo. I was working at the time and had to miss it. I want to pay him my respects, and if I could say something to him I’d thank him for being the one person in my teenage years to keep telling me that I was beautiful. Correction: he never told me that to my face, just to my mom while I was in the room, as if it was a compliment to her, more than it was to me. I was in that awkward phase, long limbed and with a permanent miserable expression. I hated my looks with great passion. I didn’t have a boyfriend, rarely dated and made a habit of developing ridiculous crushes on boys who didn’t know I existed. My taste evolved from blond-prom-king surfer-types in junior high to brown-skinned-skateboarder-hippy-bad-boys by the time I reached high school. Both types always ended up going for girls who were much prettier than I was. I remember writing in my diary that the only person apart from my mom and my two best friends who think I’m beautiful (all clearly biased) is Avram Hairaqi. ‘He must be out of his mind,’ I concluded. The thing is: I could tell he really meant it. He saw through the slouched gate and clumsiness, the bad skin and chewed down nails.
It’s not much of a eulogy, I know. I could probably be accused of being self centred at a time of such grief. It might not seem like much, but this is what I remember, and for an insecure 16 year old girl this was a matter of top priority. That sweet man made a huge difference to my self esteem. I think he would have liked to know that.
Avram Hairaqi was born in Baghdad 68 years ago, and came to Israel as at 14 with his family. He met my mother in Sharia – the Yemeni neighbourhood where she grew up – and fell madly in love with her. She was two years younger than him and loved singing and playing the flute. Her father owned the first radio in the neighbourhood. She was beautiful, had almond shaped eyes and olive skin. “He wrote me such lovely letters.” My mom said, “But he was so shy! For the longest time he wouldn’t speak to me!” The teen crush had eventually fizzled and they became best friends. They stayed best friends for the next fifty years, as they both married their sweethearts – my mom a Yemeni and Avram an Iraqi – and raised families.
In a country where men are often loud and short tempered and like to call it passion and blame it on geography, Avram Hairaqi stood out in his serene and peaceful demeanor. He was a sweet man, soft spoken and good natured. Sometimes, when my mom hosted the card game in our living room, I could hear heated arguments erupt and men in the ‘hevre’ raising voices, but never Avram Hairaqi. He would smile forgivingly when he saw me peeking from the top of the stairs. He always showed in interest in my siblings and me and was a good friend to my parents. The Iraqim were also a great support to my family after my father’s death.
I wasn’t at the funeral. He died at 2 and by 7 they already buried him. Jews don’t waste time bringing a soul closer to home. It’s considered disrespectful to the dead to keep him in limbo. I was working at the time and had to miss it. I want to pay him my respects, and if I could say something to him I’d thank him for being the one person in my teenage years to keep telling me that I was beautiful. Correction: he never told me that to my face, just to my mom while I was in the room, as if it was a compliment to her, more than it was to me. I was in that awkward phase, long limbed and with a permanent miserable expression. I hated my looks with great passion. I didn’t have a boyfriend, rarely dated and made a habit of developing ridiculous crushes on boys who didn’t know I existed. My taste evolved from blond-prom-king surfer-types in junior high to brown-skinned-skateboarder-hippy-bad-boys by the time I reached high school. Both types always ended up going for girls who were much prettier than I was. I remember writing in my diary that the only person apart from my mom and my two best friends who think I’m beautiful (all clearly biased) is Avram Hairaqi. ‘He must be out of his mind,’ I concluded. The thing is: I could tell he really meant it. He saw through the slouched gate and clumsiness, the bad skin and chewed down nails.
It’s not much of a eulogy, I know. I could probably be accused of being self centred at a time of such grief. It might not seem like much, but this is what I remember, and for an insecure 16 year old girl this was a matter of top priority. That sweet man made a huge difference to my self esteem. I think he would have liked to know that.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Desert Living
I know, I know. I’m a rotten blogger. I keep my audience (read: Sean, my sister and two of my closest friends) hanging for days. I’m gonna have to steal my dear friend Eufemia’s excuse (not only do I neglect my readers but now I steal from other bloggers!) for not writing her blog from India: “a cow ate my blog!” She claimed. What would be an Israeli equivalent to that? 
Hmmm. A street cat tore it to pieces? (they’re arguably more common in Tel Aviv than cows in India.)
Screw it.
I’m gonna tell the truth.
I’ve been really busy. There is simply not enough time in the day to read all the books and essays about Yemeni Jews, visit all the libraries and museums I must visit, interview everyone I need to interview, make some cash (cleaning houses and working at my brother’s office once a week) and still have time to enjoy a night out with friends, a family dinner, write, travel the country, exercise. I’m totally overwhelmed.
Then a few days ago rare heat wave came our way, all the way from Libya, or Algiers, or some other North African country who doesn’t talk to us, crossing impassable borders, seas and mountains and settling on the country like a heavy blanket. It’s not even spring yet and suddenly the temperatures rose up to 34 degrees in Tel Aviv. One day we were wearing jackets, the next flip flops and t-shirts.
So we figured it was too hot to do anything, packed the car and headed to Eilat.
Eilat is the southernmost city in Israel, bordering Egypt and Jordan. A desert city by the red sea, it’s a world class tourist destination, known for its marine park and coral reefs which makes it a scuba divers’ paradise. Red mountains soar around it, a striking contrast to the clear blue sea and the white sand beaches. Back when I lived in Israel, Eilat’s beaches were filled with topless Scandinavian tourists and dark skinned local boys who preyed on them. Today, for some reason, it’s packed with French and Russian tourists and they usually keep their tops on.
Eilat is Israel’s very own Vegas, minus the slot machines and with beaches, and like Vegas it is a manmade oasis in the desert, a strip lined with luxurious hotels and flashing neon.
I’ve always loved the drive to Eilat. Growing up, our small country felt like an island, surrounded with countries we weren’t allowed to enter. Eilat was as close as going abroad as you could get. It was four and half hours away from Tel Aviv, and in a country you could cross in two hours going east to west, and seven from north to south, it felt really far.
The landscape changed quickly, leaving green and moist Tel Aviv to the dry and arid desert. The cities we crossed, Beer Sheva, Dimona, were sand castles in the horizon, even their trees appeared yellow, covered with the wandering sand. Past those cities, the desert grew mountainous, canyons and cliffs rose and fell, and the view from my window turned from yellow to blushing red. Eventually, at the end of a long dusty road along the Jordanian border, we could see Eilat, a little sparkling blue stain, surrounded with big hotels, monsters of concrete that are the stepchildren of the desert.
I have a soft spot for Eilat, a city that young hip Israelis love to hate because it’s overrun by ugly hotels and gaudy neon signs. I secretly like Eilat, and not just because of the gorgeous beaches and the beautiful Red Sea. I have a soft spot for it because once, when I was a teenager, it was my home away from home. When I was in high school, before I could travel outside of the country, I discovered that four and half hours on a night bus from Tel Aviv took me to a different land, with a different climate, where no one knew me, where I could reinvent myself. First I went with some girlfriends, slept in a sleeping bag on the beach and partied at night. Then the summer before twelfth grade, Tal – my best friend and also a teen journalist – and I were sent to write about a scuba diving course in Eilat. The diving club was on Coral Beach, a short bus ride away from the busy strip, and we spent all our days diving and sun tanning and all of our nights hanging out on the beach with our diving buddies.
The beach was overlooking the lit shore of Aqaba, Jordan’s Eilat. Local Eilati once told me how they used to see King Hussein’s boat sailing from Aqaba, approaching the territorial sea border between Jordan and Israel. The king would wave at the Israeli boats with his charming smile and then sail away. Tal and I sat there at night and looked at the water, hoping to see the King’s boat. It was a few years before Israel and Jordan signed a peace agreement. Today, Israelis can visit Aqaba, and look at the lit shore of Eilat from the other side.
I loved the diving club and I loved Eilat. I was intoxicated by the freedom, surrounded with tourists from around the world I could pretend to be a traveler myself, a tourist in my own country. I came back almost every holiday, and always stayed in the youth hostel by the diving school. I often went alone, because everybody already knew me. Handsome sun kissed diving instructors would flirt with me and buy me drinks. Sometimes I’d even miss school and go there for a couple days.
I used to love coming here in winters, when Tel Aviv’s streets were littered with puddles and the Mediterranean Sea was dreary and grey. Sean, who spent a winter here once, working on a boat, says that a typical winter in Eilat is generally better than a Vancouver summer. He also has a soft spot for Eilat. He lived here for an entire winter and it was the first time he worked on a boat. When we drive around Eilat we actually argue about directions and he has a say!
I have a soft spot for Eilat because I have many good memories from here. It was on a beach in Eilat, on a warm winter night, where I had my first kiss.
I was here with Tal the day the first gulf war officially began. We came for a scuba diving conference, accompanied by our gas masks, which we were ordered to take everywhere with us in case of a chemical attack by Iraq. I made mine into a collage because the ugly brown box didn’t go with my style. It was a good time to be in Eilat. An attack on Eilat was highly unlikely, since it was so far from Israel’s centre. The atmosphere at the diving club was almost high spirited. “Eat, drink and make love because tomorrow we’ll die!” The young instructors announced with a chilled beer in hand. Others said that if a chemical missile was to hit Eilat they would go underwater with a tank full of air. No need for gas masks or shelters! It was so relaxed that I didn’t want to go back; such a contrast to Tel Aviv where you breathed panic and fear. And sure enough, a day after our return, the first missile fell on our city. I pulled the straps on my gas mask so tightly that I had bruises on my chin the next day. I really wished I stayed in Eilat.
We arrived at Eilat before sunset. The red mountains bled onto the city. Lights dotted the hotels, and lined the seawall and the air smelled like cocoa butter. Red-faced tourists filled the bars, beer was poured and live music played on the sidewalks.
As soon as we stopped by a motel, hawkers surrounded our car like vultures, trying to get us to rent their suites. After seeing a couple of unappealing suites we took one that seemed decent. Only to discover as the hours passed, that the light in the bathroom is flickering erratically (“I’m gonna get a seizure!” I cried,) the door to the balcony doesn’t lock (“It’s like any other hotel,” the guy told me when I called, “you shouldn’t be leaving valuables in your room.”) The electric kettle didn’t work, the fridge was filthy, the remote didn’t work, and everything was covered in a layer of dust. None of it was apparent at a first look. You really shouldn’t judge by appearance.
We moved the next day to a nicer place and our vacation finally began.
Even though it’s been 18 years (how is that even possible??? I must have been a baby then) since my diving course I still always go back to the Coral Beach, to the same diving club. I don’t know where else to go. Located on the road to Egypt, it is far enough from the main strip and its tourist attractions to keep me sane. I’m always scared that next time I’ll come the place would be different. Of course it changed over the years: a nice hotel and a coffee shop with a terrace were built across the street, and the diving club now has a bar on the beach with wooden stools surrounding it, where they pour tap beer and make espressos. Still it remains a better alternative to Eilat’s hotel strip, especially since they built that huge mall at the entrance (which I admit, is a great air conditioned bubble for these insane summer days when the temperature reaches 45 degrees and you’d rather die than walk the streets. In fact, you might actually die if you did. I’ve only ever felt that feeling in Montreal, when the temperature went down to minus 40 and I realized that being out might actually kill me. That kind of danger in the air is something we rarely feel in temperate Vancouver, where the weather is always agreeable, never a silent killer.)
There’s only one diving instructor from my days who still teaches in the club and he always says hello to me when he sees me. I’m sure he has no idea who I am, but still, it makes me feel good about myself. We also know the owners (but only from our visit two years ago,) Craig, a Canadian man from Vancouver (!) who followed his Israeli British wife to Eilat. They’re a cool couple and have been living in Eilat for the past 16 years, raised a family here and everything.
On Friday night, after sipping some beer on the beach with Craig, we went to have a Shabbat dinner at my cousin Ratsi, who’d been living in Eilat for the past 14 years with his Norwegian wife Lisa and their three beautiful children. Their eldest, 14 year old Naomi, a champion wind surfer, was off to a competition she surely won. Next door, in a place called ‘the shelter’, Sudanese refugees from Darfur were playing music and singing praises to Jesus. It was nice background music to a traditional Jewish dinner. Ratsi and Lisa’s last apartment had a view of Aqaba, and to get there you had to tell the taxi driver ‘Block A, above the dentist.’ Eilat is such a small town (apart from the hotel strip area) that it has very few street names. Most houses are numbered, or in that case, known by a certain attribute.
“Why Eilat?” I asked Ratsi after dinner, as we sipped black coffee and cracked nuts.
“When I was living in Norway,” Ratsi said, “I used to look at the white plains, covered in snow, and it kind’a looked like a desert. And I fantasize that it was desert. And it was hot. And I decided that when I get back to Israel I want to live in the desert. Have a place that is relaxing, slow paced.”
I suddenly remembered how I had the same fantasy. I loved the desert when I was a teenager, I imagined myself living in a big house with huge windows facing red mountains. I thought it was the most beautiful view in the world. I remembered how being in the desert was the only thing that relaxed me, that made me happy. It was my escape.
Somehow, I ended up in Vancouver instead. It’s funny, because my sister who always liked cool temperate climates ended up living in the desert, in Arizona.
I look at Craig and Dafna, Ratsi and Lisa, all of them not native to this weather. They seem happy and relaxed here. Their kids seem happy, running around on the beach in the middle of winter, wind surfing and scuba diving. I wonder if I could live in the desert. If I could take the heat, the dust, they dry air. Maybe I was on to something back then?
One great benefit of desert living is that the dry air always makes for no frizz. My hair never looked better! “Why do you think I moved to Arizona?” My sister said when I commented on that. “Everyday in the desert is a great hair day…”
Hmmm. A street cat tore it to pieces? (they’re arguably more common in Tel Aviv than cows in India.)Screw it.
I’m gonna tell the truth.
I’ve been really busy. There is simply not enough time in the day to read all the books and essays about Yemeni Jews, visit all the libraries and museums I must visit, interview everyone I need to interview, make some cash (cleaning houses and working at my brother’s office once a week) and still have time to enjoy a night out with friends, a family dinner, write, travel the country, exercise. I’m totally overwhelmed.
Then a few days ago rare heat wave came our way, all the way from Libya, or Algiers, or some other North African country who doesn’t talk to us, crossing impassable borders, seas and mountains and settling on the country like a heavy blanket. It’s not even spring yet and suddenly the temperatures rose up to 34 degrees in Tel Aviv. One day we were wearing jackets, the next flip flops and t-shirts.
So we figured it was too hot to do anything, packed the car and headed to Eilat.
Eilat is the southernmost city in Israel, bordering Egypt and Jordan. A desert city by the red sea, it’s a world class tourist destination, known for its marine park and coral reefs which makes it a scuba divers’ paradise. Red mountains soar around it, a striking contrast to the clear blue sea and the white sand beaches. Back when I lived in Israel, Eilat’s beaches were filled with topless Scandinavian tourists and dark skinned local boys who preyed on them. Today, for some reason, it’s packed with French and Russian tourists and they usually keep their tops on.
Eilat is Israel’s very own Vegas, minus the slot machines and with beaches, and like Vegas it is a manmade oasis in the desert, a strip lined with luxurious hotels and flashing neon.
I’ve always loved the drive to Eilat. Growing up, our small country felt like an island, surrounded with countries we weren’t allowed to enter. Eilat was as close as going abroad as you could get. It was four and half hours away from Tel Aviv, and in a country you could cross in two hours going east to west, and seven from north to south, it felt really far.
The landscape changed quickly, leaving green and moist Tel Aviv to the dry and arid desert. The cities we crossed, Beer Sheva, Dimona, were sand castles in the horizon, even their trees appeared yellow, covered with the wandering sand. Past those cities, the desert grew mountainous, canyons and cliffs rose and fell, and the view from my window turned from yellow to blushing red. Eventually, at the end of a long dusty road along the Jordanian border, we could see Eilat, a little sparkling blue stain, surrounded with big hotels, monsters of concrete that are the stepchildren of the desert.I have a soft spot for Eilat, a city that young hip Israelis love to hate because it’s overrun by ugly hotels and gaudy neon signs. I secretly like Eilat, and not just because of the gorgeous beaches and the beautiful Red Sea. I have a soft spot for it because once, when I was a teenager, it was my home away from home. When I was in high school, before I could travel outside of the country, I discovered that four and half hours on a night bus from Tel Aviv took me to a different land, with a different climate, where no one knew me, where I could reinvent myself. First I went with some girlfriends, slept in a sleeping bag on the beach and partied at night. Then the summer before twelfth grade, Tal – my best friend and also a teen journalist – and I were sent to write about a scuba diving course in Eilat. The diving club was on Coral Beach, a short bus ride away from the busy strip, and we spent all our days diving and sun tanning and all of our nights hanging out on the beach with our diving buddies.
The beach was overlooking the lit shore of Aqaba, Jordan’s Eilat. Local Eilati once told me how they used to see King Hussein’s boat sailing from Aqaba, approaching the territorial sea border between Jordan and Israel. The king would wave at the Israeli boats with his charming smile and then sail away. Tal and I sat there at night and looked at the water, hoping to see the King’s boat. It was a few years before Israel and Jordan signed a peace agreement. Today, Israelis can visit Aqaba, and look at the lit shore of Eilat from the other side.
I loved the diving club and I loved Eilat. I was intoxicated by the freedom, surrounded with tourists from around the world I could pretend to be a traveler myself, a tourist in my own country. I came back almost every holiday, and always stayed in the youth hostel by the diving school. I often went alone, because everybody already knew me. Handsome sun kissed diving instructors would flirt with me and buy me drinks. Sometimes I’d even miss school and go there for a couple days.
I used to love coming here in winters, when Tel Aviv’s streets were littered with puddles and the Mediterranean Sea was dreary and grey. Sean, who spent a winter here once, working on a boat, says that a typical winter in Eilat is generally better than a Vancouver summer. He also has a soft spot for Eilat. He lived here for an entire winter and it was the first time he worked on a boat. When we drive around Eilat we actually argue about directions and he has a say!
I have a soft spot for Eilat because I have many good memories from here. It was on a beach in Eilat, on a warm winter night, where I had my first kiss.
I was here with Tal the day the first gulf war officially began. We came for a scuba diving conference, accompanied by our gas masks, which we were ordered to take everywhere with us in case of a chemical attack by Iraq. I made mine into a collage because the ugly brown box didn’t go with my style. It was a good time to be in Eilat. An attack on Eilat was highly unlikely, since it was so far from Israel’s centre. The atmosphere at the diving club was almost high spirited. “Eat, drink and make love because tomorrow we’ll die!” The young instructors announced with a chilled beer in hand. Others said that if a chemical missile was to hit Eilat they would go underwater with a tank full of air. No need for gas masks or shelters! It was so relaxed that I didn’t want to go back; such a contrast to Tel Aviv where you breathed panic and fear. And sure enough, a day after our return, the first missile fell on our city. I pulled the straps on my gas mask so tightly that I had bruises on my chin the next day. I really wished I stayed in Eilat.
We arrived at Eilat before sunset. The red mountains bled onto the city. Lights dotted the hotels, and lined the seawall and the air smelled like cocoa butter. Red-faced tourists filled the bars, beer was poured and live music played on the sidewalks.
As soon as we stopped by a motel, hawkers surrounded our car like vultures, trying to get us to rent their suites. After seeing a couple of unappealing suites we took one that seemed decent. Only to discover as the hours passed, that the light in the bathroom is flickering erratically (“I’m gonna get a seizure!” I cried,) the door to the balcony doesn’t lock (“It’s like any other hotel,” the guy told me when I called, “you shouldn’t be leaving valuables in your room.”) The electric kettle didn’t work, the fridge was filthy, the remote didn’t work, and everything was covered in a layer of dust. None of it was apparent at a first look. You really shouldn’t judge by appearance.
We moved the next day to a nicer place and our vacation finally began.
Even though it’s been 18 years (how is that even possible??? I must have been a baby then) since my diving course I still always go back to the Coral Beach, to the same diving club. I don’t know where else to go. Located on the road to Egypt, it is far enough from the main strip and its tourist attractions to keep me sane. I’m always scared that next time I’ll come the place would be different. Of course it changed over the years: a nice hotel and a coffee shop with a terrace were built across the street, and the diving club now has a bar on the beach with wooden stools surrounding it, where they pour tap beer and make espressos. Still it remains a better alternative to Eilat’s hotel strip, especially since they built that huge mall at the entrance (which I admit, is a great air conditioned bubble for these insane summer days when the temperature reaches 45 degrees and you’d rather die than walk the streets. In fact, you might actually die if you did. I’ve only ever felt that feeling in Montreal, when the temperature went down to minus 40 and I realized that being out might actually kill me. That kind of danger in the air is something we rarely feel in temperate Vancouver, where the weather is always agreeable, never a silent killer.)
There’s only one diving instructor from my days who still teaches in the club and he always says hello to me when he sees me. I’m sure he has no idea who I am, but still, it makes me feel good about myself. We also know the owners (but only from our visit two years ago,) Craig, a Canadian man from Vancouver (!) who followed his Israeli British wife to Eilat. They’re a cool couple and have been living in Eilat for the past 16 years, raised a family here and everything.
On Friday night, after sipping some beer on the beach with Craig, we went to have a Shabbat dinner at my cousin Ratsi, who’d been living in Eilat for the past 14 years with his Norwegian wife Lisa and their three beautiful children. Their eldest, 14 year old Naomi, a champion wind surfer, was off to a competition she surely won. Next door, in a place called ‘the shelter’, Sudanese refugees from Darfur were playing music and singing praises to Jesus. It was nice background music to a traditional Jewish dinner. Ratsi and Lisa’s last apartment had a view of Aqaba, and to get there you had to tell the taxi driver ‘Block A, above the dentist.’ Eilat is such a small town (apart from the hotel strip area) that it has very few street names. Most houses are numbered, or in that case, known by a certain attribute.“Why Eilat?” I asked Ratsi after dinner, as we sipped black coffee and cracked nuts.
“When I was living in Norway,” Ratsi said, “I used to look at the white plains, covered in snow, and it kind’a looked like a desert. And I fantasize that it was desert. And it was hot. And I decided that when I get back to Israel I want to live in the desert. Have a place that is relaxing, slow paced.”
I suddenly remembered how I had the same fantasy. I loved the desert when I was a teenager, I imagined myself living in a big house with huge windows facing red mountains. I thought it was the most beautiful view in the world. I remembered how being in the desert was the only thing that relaxed me, that made me happy. It was my escape.
Somehow, I ended up in Vancouver instead. It’s funny, because my sister who always liked cool temperate climates ended up living in the desert, in Arizona.
I look at Craig and Dafna, Ratsi and Lisa, all of them not native to this weather. They seem happy and relaxed here. Their kids seem happy, running around on the beach in the middle of winter, wind surfing and scuba diving. I wonder if I could live in the desert. If I could take the heat, the dust, they dry air. Maybe I was on to something back then?
One great benefit of desert living is that the dry air always makes for no frizz. My hair never looked better! “Why do you think I moved to Arizona?” My sister said when I commented on that. “Everyday in the desert is a great hair day…”
Friday, February 29, 2008
Change is Good
It is with great sadness and annoyance that I announce the untimely change of my blog’s name from Ayelet Metayelet (traveling Ayelet) to Tales of a Wandering Jew. I recently found out that I am no longer the only Ayelet Metayelet. Over the 10 years I’ve been living away, some other Ayelet (clearly a lesser Ayelet) stole what I thought to be my very own clever rhyme, (surely no one has thought of it before me!) started traveling Israel and wrote books titled Ayelet Metayelet. Can you believe the nerve of some people? Now she’s Ayelet Metayelet and me? I’m just another wandering Jew.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Dog's Life (Or My week in 5 Chapters)
Chapter 1- a Chance Meeting at the Museum
Back when I was serious about researching (…) I went to see what the Museum of Diaspora in Tel Aviv could tell me abut the Jewish community in Yemen. Turns out – not much. But really, I wasn’t paying too much attention because when I got there I ran into an old old friend who I haven’t seen (not even once!) since I was 15! It was bizarre, looking at this grown man’s face and recognizing the awkward teen features that started it all. He is now a handsome confident man, and a translator for the museum. We reminisced about the good old days. He remembered some of my pen pals from back then: Bridgette from Germany, Pavel from Poland. Apparently I used to dump those I couldn’t manage by passing them on to him, which he enjoyed because it helped him practice foreign languages. It worked well from him because he now speaks fluent German and Dutch and Danish…
Growing up, I had about a 100 pen pals from all over the world. No one knows how I managed to write them all, keep a journal, write short stories and poems, articles for the magazine, and do my homework. (Oh wait a second, that’s right. I didn’t do my homework. Like, never.) Apparently even when I came to visit him all I wanted to do was write. I had an alter ego, he told me, her name was Monique and she wrote prank letters to people in the personals ads. Shameless! Of course I had no recollection of any of that. I think the most interesting thing he told me was that he remembered me as happy and energetic, “always with a smile,” while I remember myself as a dark and depressed teen. By the end of the visit I didn’t care so much about the poor representation of my people in a museum that is supposed to document ALL Jewish communities. Later on I found that we were actually better off than others. Moroccans or Ethiopian Jews had no representation at all!
Since running into him I’ve been running into people from my past on a regular basis, so much that it started to scare me. I always have to look my best because I never know who I might run into.
A side note: so far, this has been the extent of my research and I’m admitting it aloud in the hope that it will give me a very much needed kick in the butt.
Chapter 2 - a Chance Meeting with a Man in Black
Two days later I’m strolling Dizzengof Street (a very popular street in Tel Aviv, packed with restaurants and cafes and shopping) looking for a sunny patio to drink coffee at, when I notice a religious man standing on the corner and offering Tefillin for passersby (Tefillin, also called phylacteries, are leather objects used in Jewish prayer, containing Biblical verses. They are an essential part of Morning Prayer services, and are worn on a daily basis by many Jews).
I look at him, his red haired beard and his little sparkly eyes and gasp: “E***?” And he says, like he’s not surprised at all: “Ayelet!”
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I say. “It’s been… what… like, 4, 5 years?”
“Something like that.” His smile hasn’t changed. Still sunny and childlike.
“Sean, this is E,” I say. “You heard about him.”
And E says: “Really? You heard about me?” The two of them shake hands. Of course, I can’t even shake his hand because I’m a woman.
“Of course he heard about you!” I say. “It’s good to finally meet you,” Sean says. Truth is over the years I told lots of people about E. He had a huge influence on my life at the time. I met him on a beach in Thailand just before turning thirty and we became inseparable. I was single and broke, barefoot (Literally. I lost my flip flops and decided footwear wasn’t so important after all) and had shells woven in my messed up hair. I had shells everywhere, shell necklaces, anklets and bracelets. I was reliving my early twenties hippy days all over again. E and I were on two opposite spectrums of a decade, but somehow he was the wise one. I thought for a minute there that I was in love with him, because he was extremely bright and happy and full of light and insight and every minute with him was an adventure. He was a joy to be around. Soon enough everybody on the beach was in love with him. People talked about him. They said he was enlightened. “Aren’t you with E?” a British guy asked me once when I asked him for an advice about something. “Ask him! He’s a little crazy but he knows things.” “He is a truly great man,” said my friend Axel, a 50 something year old German man. I felt really lucky to have met him and special because he chose to share a hut with me and spend all his time with me. It’s possible that he chose me because I was more lost than anybody else, but at the time that didn’t occur to me. I was too happy. Everything was magic.
I missed him so much afterwards and for a while we e-mailed lots and lots. Then he was suddenly studying Judaism, and then it was yeshiva. I was a little disappointed when I heard he turned religious. I liked him better climbing trees like a monkey, cracking coconut for our breakfast with his pocket knife, taking me for rides on his motorbike. I liked him when he was a secular prophet, unassociated with organized religion.
And now there he is, dressed in black, with the hat and the beard. The whole thing.
“You want candles?” he says. For Shabbat he means.
“Sure,” I say.
“One? Two?”
“Sure,” I say and he gives me two. Only later I realize that a single woman is supposed to light one and a married woman lights two. Was that his way to ask?
“You want to put tefillin?” He asks Sean in English and then turns to me in Hebrew: “Is he Jewish?”
“No,” I say.
“What’s that? A belt?” Sean says, picking up the tefillin and studying them, “You Israelis are obsessed with belts.”
E looks up at Sean and laughs and I’m so glad to see he still has his sense of humour.
“You seem happy,” I say. “God bless,” he says. It’s weird. Why can’t I even hug him? It doesn’t seem fair. I remember the moment when we said goodbye, on ko-phangan dock. He gave me one of the world’s best hugs and told me he loved me. I was heading to Israel. He stayed.
We talk about friends from the beach; he gives me a phone number of somebody. Then I say: “you know, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Don’t say that!” he says and then smiles big. “You know. We’re all gonna meet soon! Redemption day is coming!”
And to that I smile speechless and I’m suddenly sad and the moment is gone awkward. Some guy comes and asks to use the tefillin and I quickly say goodbye and walk away.
Afterwards I wish I stayed, I wish I spoke to him more. I waited to run into him for years, and now I have and I had nothing to say. We were so close once, best friends. Surely I could have invited him for a cup of coffee. Now I secretly wish I’d run into him again.
Chapter 3 – a Chance Meeting with a Baby
I made some money cleaning my cousin’s house the other day. (I’ve got a couple more offers since.) While I was at it, Sean took off to a nice café nearby. It wasn’t a neighbourhood of Tel Aviv we frequent often. When he calls me from the café I hear him talking to someone. “Who are you talking to?” I say. He tries to keep it a surprise but finally caves in. He apparently ran into my friend Doron and his new baby boy. Doron doesn’t even live in Tel Aviv anymore and since I came home we didn’t manage to get together yet. “It’s cosmic!” Doron announces, “I was just thinking of how we must get together!”
He has an incredible baby. Tfu tfu tfu, bli ayin hara. (against the evil eye, knock on wood and all of that.)
We had a great afternoon.
And a great wedding the next day. My friend Tsachi and his beautiful bride Orli.
I danced, I drank, I was happy.
I managed to AVOID running into an old boyfriend who was in the wedding. Funny how these things work.
Chapter 4 – Oh, the Haircut.
I’ve been thinking about cutting my hair but have been discouraged by cost and the difficulty (in Vancouver) of finding a good hairdresser that specializes in curls. Except now, in Israel, everybody is an expert about curls.
So I went with my mom to Ziona, her hair dresser who works from her basement in Sharia, a working class Yemeni neighbourhood on the outskirts of my town.
When we get there, Ima has to knock on the door to wake Ziona up from her afternoon nap. She opens the basement door to us and leads us down the stairs to a little room with a sink, a mirror, a towel hanger with bleached towels drying and that’s it. Ziona is about 55 and beautiful. Her hair is hidden under a scarf and she’s dressed modestly, as expected from a god fearing woman. She’s in slippers. She looks a million light years away from any hair dresser in Tel Aviv.
She cuts my hair, orders me to put my head down and goes to town on the diffuser. My hair is huge by the time I leave. A few more minutes and I would have had an afro.
I love my new hair cut. It’s fresh, it’s bouncy. It's totally hot.
Ima pulls a 100 shekel bill from her wallet and Ziona pushes it away. “I don’t take money from Ayelet,” she insists. Ima tries to argue and push the bill into her hands. I protest as well but eventually we give in.
On the way out kids are playing ball and street cats are eying us suspiciously. “In what fancy hair salon they would do that for you?” ima says.
Chapter 5 – the Hotel
As if the kindness I’ve been receiving is not already overwhelming, the day after the wedding I wake up early to a text message from a friend. “I got you a room in a hotel for tonight.” The details aren’t important, let’s just say that it’s a ‘combina’ (a great Hebrew word describing an action that is kind’a sneaky, always relying on inside connection of sorts, something grey, though not illegal.) The room was available, booked and paid for by a company for an employee that didn’t need it, and through our friend passed on the key. Who cares about the details? It’s fantastic! And the weather is unreal. We’ve been sitting on the beach a lot, consume too many cappuccinos and too much food, look at the waves, the surfers, the dogs. Sean decided he wants to come back as a dog in Tel Aviv, with a cool owner who would take him to the beach every day and not keep him on a leash. “A male dog,” he added quickly. We all know how specific you gotta be with requests from god. We spent the morning at a beach café looking at them run free, chase other dogs, dig holes in the sand, and surf waves. They looked as happy as can be, those lucky bastards. But on a second thought, we already have it pretty good as it is, sitting in the sun in our fluffy robes on a 5 star hotel room’s balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. Maybe, just maybe, we’re the lucky bastards...
Next – the Research
So yes. I haven’t done much. But I’m on vacation, right??? I’ll start tomorrow. Promise.
Back when I was serious about researching (…) I went to see what the Museum of Diaspora in Tel Aviv could tell me abut the Jewish community in Yemen. Turns out – not much. But really, I wasn’t paying too much attention because when I got there I ran into an old old friend who I haven’t seen (not even once!) since I was 15! It was bizarre, looking at this grown man’s face and recognizing the awkward teen features that started it all. He is now a handsome confident man, and a translator for the museum. We reminisced about the good old days. He remembered some of my pen pals from back then: Bridgette from Germany, Pavel from Poland. Apparently I used to dump those I couldn’t manage by passing them on to him, which he enjoyed because it helped him practice foreign languages. It worked well from him because he now speaks fluent German and Dutch and Danish…
Growing up, I had about a 100 pen pals from all over the world. No one knows how I managed to write them all, keep a journal, write short stories and poems, articles for the magazine, and do my homework. (Oh wait a second, that’s right. I didn’t do my homework. Like, never.) Apparently even when I came to visit him all I wanted to do was write. I had an alter ego, he told me, her name was Monique and she wrote prank letters to people in the personals ads. Shameless! Of course I had no recollection of any of that. I think the most interesting thing he told me was that he remembered me as happy and energetic, “always with a smile,” while I remember myself as a dark and depressed teen. By the end of the visit I didn’t care so much about the poor representation of my people in a museum that is supposed to document ALL Jewish communities. Later on I found that we were actually better off than others. Moroccans or Ethiopian Jews had no representation at all!
Since running into him I’ve been running into people from my past on a regular basis, so much that it started to scare me. I always have to look my best because I never know who I might run into.
A side note: so far, this has been the extent of my research and I’m admitting it aloud in the hope that it will give me a very much needed kick in the butt.
Chapter 2 - a Chance Meeting with a Man in Black
Two days later I’m strolling Dizzengof Street (a very popular street in Tel Aviv, packed with restaurants and cafes and shopping) looking for a sunny patio to drink coffee at, when I notice a religious man standing on the corner and offering Tefillin for passersby (Tefillin, also called phylacteries, are leather objects used in Jewish prayer, containing Biblical verses. They are an essential part of Morning Prayer services, and are worn on a daily basis by many Jews).
I look at him, his red haired beard and his little sparkly eyes and gasp: “E***?” And he says, like he’s not surprised at all: “Ayelet!”
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I say. “It’s been… what… like, 4, 5 years?”
“Something like that.” His smile hasn’t changed. Still sunny and childlike.
“Sean, this is E,” I say. “You heard about him.”
And E says: “Really? You heard about me?” The two of them shake hands. Of course, I can’t even shake his hand because I’m a woman.
“Of course he heard about you!” I say. “It’s good to finally meet you,” Sean says. Truth is over the years I told lots of people about E. He had a huge influence on my life at the time. I met him on a beach in Thailand just before turning thirty and we became inseparable. I was single and broke, barefoot (Literally. I lost my flip flops and decided footwear wasn’t so important after all) and had shells woven in my messed up hair. I had shells everywhere, shell necklaces, anklets and bracelets. I was reliving my early twenties hippy days all over again. E and I were on two opposite spectrums of a decade, but somehow he was the wise one. I thought for a minute there that I was in love with him, because he was extremely bright and happy and full of light and insight and every minute with him was an adventure. He was a joy to be around. Soon enough everybody on the beach was in love with him. People talked about him. They said he was enlightened. “Aren’t you with E?” a British guy asked me once when I asked him for an advice about something. “Ask him! He’s a little crazy but he knows things.” “He is a truly great man,” said my friend Axel, a 50 something year old German man. I felt really lucky to have met him and special because he chose to share a hut with me and spend all his time with me. It’s possible that he chose me because I was more lost than anybody else, but at the time that didn’t occur to me. I was too happy. Everything was magic.
I missed him so much afterwards and for a while we e-mailed lots and lots. Then he was suddenly studying Judaism, and then it was yeshiva. I was a little disappointed when I heard he turned religious. I liked him better climbing trees like a monkey, cracking coconut for our breakfast with his pocket knife, taking me for rides on his motorbike. I liked him when he was a secular prophet, unassociated with organized religion.
And now there he is, dressed in black, with the hat and the beard. The whole thing.
“You want candles?” he says. For Shabbat he means.
“Sure,” I say.
“One? Two?”
“Sure,” I say and he gives me two. Only later I realize that a single woman is supposed to light one and a married woman lights two. Was that his way to ask?
“You want to put tefillin?” He asks Sean in English and then turns to me in Hebrew: “Is he Jewish?”
“No,” I say.
“What’s that? A belt?” Sean says, picking up the tefillin and studying them, “You Israelis are obsessed with belts.”
E looks up at Sean and laughs and I’m so glad to see he still has his sense of humour.
“You seem happy,” I say. “God bless,” he says. It’s weird. Why can’t I even hug him? It doesn’t seem fair. I remember the moment when we said goodbye, on ko-phangan dock. He gave me one of the world’s best hugs and told me he loved me. I was heading to Israel. He stayed.
We talk about friends from the beach; he gives me a phone number of somebody. Then I say: “you know, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Don’t say that!” he says and then smiles big. “You know. We’re all gonna meet soon! Redemption day is coming!”
And to that I smile speechless and I’m suddenly sad and the moment is gone awkward. Some guy comes and asks to use the tefillin and I quickly say goodbye and walk away.
Afterwards I wish I stayed, I wish I spoke to him more. I waited to run into him for years, and now I have and I had nothing to say. We were so close once, best friends. Surely I could have invited him for a cup of coffee. Now I secretly wish I’d run into him again.
Chapter 3 – a Chance Meeting with a Baby
I made some money cleaning my cousin’s house the other day. (I’ve got a couple more offers since.) While I was at it, Sean took off to a nice café nearby. It wasn’t a neighbourhood of Tel Aviv we frequent often. When he calls me from the café I hear him talking to someone. “Who are you talking to?” I say. He tries to keep it a surprise but finally caves in. He apparently ran into my friend Doron and his new baby boy. Doron doesn’t even live in Tel Aviv anymore and since I came home we didn’t manage to get together yet. “It’s cosmic!” Doron announces, “I was just thinking of how we must get together!”
He has an incredible baby. Tfu tfu tfu, bli ayin hara. (against the evil eye, knock on wood and all of that.)
We had a great afternoon.
And a great wedding the next day. My friend Tsachi and his beautiful bride Orli.
I danced, I drank, I was happy.
I managed to AVOID running into an old boyfriend who was in the wedding. Funny how these things work.
Chapter 4 – Oh, the Haircut.
I’ve been thinking about cutting my hair but have been discouraged by cost and the difficulty (in Vancouver) of finding a good hairdresser that specializes in curls. Except now, in Israel, everybody is an expert about curls.
So I went with my mom to Ziona, her hair dresser who works from her basement in Sharia, a working class Yemeni neighbourhood on the outskirts of my town.
When we get there, Ima has to knock on the door to wake Ziona up from her afternoon nap. She opens the basement door to us and leads us down the stairs to a little room with a sink, a mirror, a towel hanger with bleached towels drying and that’s it. Ziona is about 55 and beautiful. Her hair is hidden under a scarf and she’s dressed modestly, as expected from a god fearing woman. She’s in slippers. She looks a million light years away from any hair dresser in Tel Aviv.
She cuts my hair, orders me to put my head down and goes to town on the diffuser. My hair is huge by the time I leave. A few more minutes and I would have had an afro.
I love my new hair cut. It’s fresh, it’s bouncy. It's totally hot.
Ima pulls a 100 shekel bill from her wallet and Ziona pushes it away. “I don’t take money from Ayelet,” she insists. Ima tries to argue and push the bill into her hands. I protest as well but eventually we give in.
On the way out kids are playing ball and street cats are eying us suspiciously. “In what fancy hair salon they would do that for you?” ima says.
Chapter 5 – the Hotel
As if the kindness I’ve been receiving is not already overwhelming, the day after the wedding I wake up early to a text message from a friend. “I got you a room in a hotel for tonight.” The details aren’t important, let’s just say that it’s a ‘combina’ (a great Hebrew word describing an action that is kind’a sneaky, always relying on inside connection of sorts, something grey, though not illegal.) The room was available, booked and paid for by a company for an employee that didn’t need it, and through our friend passed on the key. Who cares about the details? It’s fantastic! And the weather is unreal. We’ve been sitting on the beach a lot, consume too many cappuccinos and too much food, look at the waves, the surfers, the dogs. Sean decided he wants to come back as a dog in Tel Aviv, with a cool owner who would take him to the beach every day and not keep him on a leash. “A male dog,” he added quickly. We all know how specific you gotta be with requests from god. We spent the morning at a beach café looking at them run free, chase other dogs, dig holes in the sand, and surf waves. They looked as happy as can be, those lucky bastards. But on a second thought, we already have it pretty good as it is, sitting in the sun in our fluffy robes on a 5 star hotel room’s balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. Maybe, just maybe, we’re the lucky bastards...
Next – the Research
So yes. I haven’t done much. But I’m on vacation, right??? I’ll start tomorrow. Promise.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Here Comes Winter
To be fair to my friends from Canada – my other, colder home – I must confess. The weather has been less than perfect. Remember those photos of sunny beaches and blue skies? Long gone. Winter is back and it is nasty! But at least it’s never dull. It rains for a while, hard and violent, coming from every possible direction, making your umbrella useless (why do I even bother?) and soaking you to the bone, then it stops. A hole of blue sky forms in the big fat clouds and the sun shines warm through it, only to change moments later into an extreme wind storm, the kind that has pine trees bowing and palm trees dangerously swaying, their branches all brushed to one side in a fashionable do. The other day a lightening struck our house, enveloping the house in an eerie bluish burst of light, causing the heater to spark and followed with the most deafening thunder you ever heard, right there, outside our window. The weather forecast for the next 48 hours predicts hale, snow in the mountains, wind and floods. Already today, on the way home we drove through roads that suspiciously resembled small rivers. At Sean’s request, we took a drive by Tel Aviv’s seawall. The beach was covered in haze, the waves were massive and the water dark. Nobody was swimming, not even the Russian immigrants. I’m pretty sure it would be suicidal.
I talked about it with my friend Tal who had recently moved back here from New York, after living there for many years and whining constantly about New York’s cold and long winters. “Now I’m here and I’m still complaining!” she said, “the tile floors are too cold, the houses never get warm enough.” “It’s simple,” I said, “we must move to Thailand. Now there’s a winter we can endure.”
Talking about enduring – Israelis become raging maniacs when they’re behind the wheel.. It must be in the blood, because I find myself on edge whenever we’re in the car. I don’t even have to drive. I put the classical music station on to calm me down, do breathing exercise to try and not scream. Still on occasion I explode: “What the **** is your ****ing problem? Would it kill you to let me in your *** lane???” Sometimes I honk the horn while Sean is driving. Honking is a popular way of communicating here. People honk when you try and park, because, well, you’re in their way. This is always accompanied with large hand gestures and glaring stares. Yesterday we spend an hour an a half in traffic and by the end of it I hated everybody and everything about my country.
But then it’s 22 degrees and sunny again and Ima is making me special food (I do nothing but eat here. Research? What research? I’m eating now. Leave me alone) and my nieces and nephews come to visit and I forget I ever hated it and fall in love with it all over again.
I talked about it with my friend Tal who had recently moved back here from New York, after living there for many years and whining constantly about New York’s cold and long winters. “Now I’m here and I’m still complaining!” she said, “the tile floors are too cold, the houses never get warm enough.” “It’s simple,” I said, “we must move to Thailand. Now there’s a winter we can endure.”
Talking about enduring – Israelis become raging maniacs when they’re behind the wheel.. It must be in the blood, because I find myself on edge whenever we’re in the car. I don’t even have to drive. I put the classical music station on to calm me down, do breathing exercise to try and not scream. Still on occasion I explode: “What the **** is your ****ing problem? Would it kill you to let me in your *** lane???” Sometimes I honk the horn while Sean is driving. Honking is a popular way of communicating here. People honk when you try and park, because, well, you’re in their way. This is always accompanied with large hand gestures and glaring stares. Yesterday we spend an hour an a half in traffic and by the end of it I hated everybody and everything about my country.
But then it’s 22 degrees and sunny again and Ima is making me special food (I do nothing but eat here. Research? What research? I’m eating now. Leave me alone) and my nieces and nephews come to visit and I forget I ever hated it and fall in love with it all over again.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
On Beaches and Homes
So I decided we must do a little traveling. We rented a car for the day and drove north on the coastal highway. The Mediterranean accompanied us all the way, glistening to our left. After Haifa we drove north through the suburbs and passed the kibbutz I used to live at when I was 20, the magazine offices I wrote for. (I had such balls back then, I told Sean nostalgically, walking in there, fresh out of the army service and new to the area and telling them they must hire me!)Eventually we made it to Akhziv beach, maybe half an hour south of the Lebanese border. I recently heard they opened a Banana Beach there and thought it would be the perfect place to sit and have a beer, eat some hummus and watch the sunset.
A few words about Banana Beach. When I was 22, after coming home from my first big trip, one year through India, Nepal and North America, I found a job at a new restaurant-bar-café on the beach in Tel Aviv. I never waited tables before but I thought I’d give it a try. I was back to working as a journalist at various magazines, but I needed more money to cover my debt from the trip AND save for my next one… my goal was to do it in six months and I didn’t care if I had to work day and night to accomplish it. My very first table tipped me 20 shekels on a 15 shekel bill. It was
ridiculous. I decided I like waitressing.Banana Beach was the perfect place for me. It was easy going, casual and the staff was young and hip. When summer came the place filled up and started opening 24 hours. We had regulars coming there every day and staying for hours, sometimes buying nothing but gallons of mint tea. The tables were placed on the sand, so I worked barefoot. I got to watch sunsets and sunrises, full moons and black moons (I mostly worked at nights until 7 or 8 AM but did have some day shifts). Airplanes flew above us from everywhere on their way to Ben Guryon Airport. I took breaks to go swimming, especially before dawn when the water was like dark blue velvet and warm like the air. I sat with customers, drank and smoked and played backgammon with them, flirted with cute boys, met some celebrities, some childhood idols: poets and writers and musicians. I ate lots of fresh watermelons and hummus, drank beer and cappuccinos and tequila. Every morning I watched the elderly Tel Avivis do their morning gymnastics on the beach, when the water was still calm and the sky blue and the air fresh and salty, untainted by car exhausts and smog. I loved every minute of it. It was the best summer of my life.
At the end of that summer, on the evening of Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year,) I stood with three other waiters and watched the sunset. It was common for us to stop everything and watch the sky or the sea. Sometimes the sky would get so crazy after sunsets, with strokes of purple or pink or orange and the clouds would arrange themselves in ways you didn’t know possible, or the moon would be especially big and glowing, and word would quickly spread between the staff and finally reach the boss who was trapped in the little booth that operated as a bar slash kitchen slash office. “You gotta see the sky!” somebody would say and he’d drop everything, a half made cappuccino or shake or whatever, and rush outside to admire it for a few minutes. The customers could wait. “I didn’t realize you were in a hurry,” he once said to a customer that complained about the slow service. Another time he recommended a restaurant more suited to the customers’ needs.
That evening, we all stood and watched the sunset. The boss treated us to a new year’s beer. We sipped the beer, basked in the warm glow of dusk and then one of us said: “I am so happy right now.” We looked at each other, we were all smiling and we all looked beautiful in that forgiving light and soft breeze. I was so happy I wanted to cry. It was a moment of pure joy. At work. In the service industry.
At the end of that summer Tel Aviv’s local magazine published a little review about Banana Beach. The city’s best kept secret – they called it. “The service is not great, the food is not amazing, but it’s the best place to hang out in the city, and now that the summer is over – we decided to let you in on the secret.”
Banana Beach changed after that first summer. It became immensely popular, then turned into an empire. The owners are not as lenient as they used to be and I’m pretty sure you can no longer drink with the customers or eat free ice cream from the freezer. We were their trial run. They learned from the mistakes they made with us. It is now a smoothly operated machine, which is probably why the following summer when I returned from India they didn’t hire me again. I thought my charm and my popularity amongst the customers would outweigh my waitressing skills and tendency to slack. It didn’t.
In recent years, Banana Beach opened a few more locations. I figured Akhziv would be perfect. Akzhiv beach is one of the most beautiful beaches in Israel, a favourite location for weddings, ideal for wedding photographs, with its wet rocks and little islands and lagoons. It also has some ancient ruins and more recent ruins you can visit. It holds all kind of fun festivals in the summer. Back when I was a teenager it was home to a bohemian artists, long haired hippies and runaway teens.
But when Sean and I made it there, on a Monday afternoon in mid February, the place was closed and abandoned. I peeked from the gate and learned that they expanded their operation and had some wicker bungalows for rent. But the whole beach was fenced and deserted.
Now if you know me at all you’d know that soon enoug
h we were jumping the fence. After all, I’m a known trespasser. If you hang out with me long enough you’re bound to end up at a fancy hotel’s swimming pool (a hobby of mine,) crash a party (last time I scored free shots and free lobster while at it). I figured we’ll get in and take some photos so by the time the guards come we’ll be gone.It was paradise, just what I needed to clear my head. White long sandy beach with no footsteps except for birds and dogs. And the water was not as cold as I remembered. I touched it with my hand and found myself wondering why Israelis avoid swimming in the winter! It was warmer than Vancouver’s water in the summer and I swim in that! (Sure, I’m a big baby about it, and take 30 minutes to immerse myself completely but still!) “My baby is Canadian,” Sean said proudly when I commented on that. I realized he was right. When I lived here, I used to walk the seawall in the winter and look at the crazy tourists and Russian immigrants in the water in awe. Now I’m thinking of joining them!
We finished our journey taking a scenic road up mount Avtalion. Back when I was living in the north, I happened to visit the villages scattered on this mountain several times to do interviews with artists, healers and entrepreneurs who lived in them. It became one of my favourite places in the Galilee. We got there just as the sun was setting over the fertile Bikat Bet Netofa. A patchwork quilt in shades of green and brown was spread from one side of the valley to the other. It was magnificent.
It seems like every time I travel in my country I travel in time, revisiting my old self. No wonder it can be emotional at times. My friend Carlin once said that whenever she goes home it feels like everything is her, the place is her. The smell, the sights, the air in Israel. It’s all me. It’s like I’m a part of the place as much as the place is a part of me. Everywhere we went I saw me, we passed a bus stop in Haifa where I once stood there and cried over my relationship, another bus stop where I hitchhiked as a soldier, surprising my boyfriend at his army base. Had coffee at a mall where I had my first job in the north, selling some product in a booth (I was a complete failure.) We drove under a bridge where I once kissed someone I thought I loved.
I’m trying to not be so sentimental. It is foolish, I know. And tiring to read. My mom is talking about selling our house. Once she does it they’re going to demolish it and build an apartment building on its ruins. “I can’t keep all this stuff for you,” she says, “I won’t have space.” So I spent today going through my things and purging mercilessly, practicing letting go. No more holding on to my second grade cut hair, the skirt I once really liked, the dozens of belly shirts I bought at the Goa flea market and would never wear, broken pieces of jewelry that once meant something, the hundreds of notes, letters, memorabilia from traveling. I have to let go.
Sometimes I wish you could do that with memories. Give them away, free some space. Maybe that’s what writing your memories does. Once it’s on paper, you’re letting it go.
I’m lying a little bit. I don’t think I really want to see them go. I just don’t want the ache that comes with them, that pinch, like hunger. I want my memories to be like favourite movies, something I can revisit and enjoy, then let go without a thought.
I might be asking for too much.
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