ben and lev

ben and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We're finally in winter, Jerusalem style, which means grey skies and rain and the need to wear a jacket. But I'm heading to Eilat in two days for some sunnier weather. Happy Holidays (eid sa-id) to all!

shrine of the book

shrine of the rock
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This is where the dead sea scrolls are kept.

israel museum

israel museum
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I took the boys to the Israel museum - kind of crowded and expensive, and most of the museum is closed for shipuzim (renovations). There were lots of crafts workshops, though, and a semi-engaging puppet show with a pretty controlling puppeteer - but I suppose if you spend all day dealing with puppets you do tend to get kind of bossy.

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev and his fabulous bedhead. It's early Duran Duran or Jon Bon Jovi style.

new pyjamas

new pyjamas
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

These are not Christmas pj's though the colors and general style could have fooled me. My mother bought them for the boys just in time for the cooler weather.

ben and safta

ben and safta
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

My mom is here and the boys are in heaven. Here they are lost in the world of Harry Potter. We're on chanuka vacation - latkes and sufganiyot (donuts) and lots of books and playing. I'd like to take the boys to the old city this morning for a camel hunt (toy, stuffed) in the souk, but they're happy playing and I may just let them be.

first night chanuka

first night chanuka
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Happy Chanuka! Y'all are invited for latkes, sufganiyot and red wine later. Enjoy the light; we're almost at solstice.

checkpoint bethlehem

checkpoint bethlehem
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We went out of Bethlehem today through the checkpoint. You walk through a long enclosed path - it feels like you're being led to slaughter. Then you're in a big bright shack where you need to get buzzed through one gate to go through the metal detector and then through another to get your papers checked. The soldier on duty was in a bad mood and kept yelling at everyone - she called one Arab women an idiot because she didn't understand her Hebrew instructions. It's pretty nasty, and this is apparently one of the nicer checkpoints - and it wasn't all that busy, and there were no real delays.

wall graffiti

wall graffiti
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This little section of the security wall has been heavily graffitied by Banksy and other artists. I visited a Christian family in Bethlehem whose lives have been pretty devastated by the security wall - good people, who I would like to have as my neighbors. And except for the wall they are almost my neighbors - I could walk to Bethlehem in about forty minutes. I can visit them but they can't visit me.

wall graffiti/seafood menu

wall graffiti/seafood menu
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The menu belongs to a restaurant right cross the street from the security wall. The mural is Banksy I think.

wall graffiti

wall graffiti
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

wall graffiti

wall graffiti
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I love this too.

wall graffiti

wall graffiti
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I think this is also Banksy or some Banksy affiliate. It is right beside a house that has three sides surrounded by the security fence.

wall graffiti faces

wall graffiti faces
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I'm not sure what the point of these huge distorted faces is, but they're pretty cool.

I want my ball back

I want my ball back
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This is definitely my favorite piece of security wall graffiti though Banksy is pretty amazing. You can probably read it but just in case: it says "I want my ball back. Thanks."

church of the nativity

church of the nativity
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

It was a pretty quiet Sunday before Christmas in Bethlehem today. I got to practice my Arabic a little bit. People were really friendly and not at all pushy - we went into a shop and the owner served us coffee then actively discouraged us from buying anything - we were going to visit some friends Jeremy made and we asked if he had anything for a local in the sea of olive wood sculptures and he said, "There's no point. Buy them a bottle of wine in the supermarket instead". Jeremy's friends are lovely - a few have permits to come visit us in Jerusalem during the holiday season, but their eighty year old grandmother was denied a permit. She was extremely sweet, and kept telling us stories of what it was like before the country was divided - she'd had many Israeli friends - but she kept saying, shrugging her shoulders in her plush blue housecoat, embroidered at the neck with little white flowers "But now I am terrorist."

framed

framed
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I took this at David and Ronnie's house in Pardes Chanah and I'm still not sure what this is doing around Benjamin's neck.

lev and stalactite cave

lev and stalactite cave
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

In the 60's some workers were blasting into a limestone quarry near Jerusalem and found this massive stalactite cave. It looks like some cross between the hideout of the seven dwarves and an alien civilization; the guide shines his flashlight on various formations that look like wedding cakes, famous politicians, giant's legs etc. It's pretty dramatic, but the most personally dramatic moment for me came right after the guide announced we were sixty meters underground and Lev announced he needed to poop.

chocolate fugue state

chocolate fugue state
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev looks how I feel when eating a chocolate ice cream cone. He wears it well.

nahal soreq

nahal soreq delilah country
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

So we went to Delilah country over the weekend, switchbacking over mountain roads through the Jerusalem forest. Jeremy told Benjamin and Lev the Samson story as we took this little hike. Their favorite part was fording this river. Lev kept saying, and then Samson went like this, right, and then doing his approximation of a ninja kick.

ben and lev

ben and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev and Ben at breakfast, sharing a chair and a propensity for funny faces.

ben tree

ben tree
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We went to a field trip today in the valley of the cross with Ben's class. We had a picnic and picked olives and then pressed them to make a very minute amount of oil. The land there has been left wild and looks much as it did hundreds of years ago; the teacher talked about the environment and also about Hanuka but didn't mention how the valley of the cross got its name. There is an eleventh century monastery right down the hill, and it may as well have been invisible. And yes, they are only six and it was a Hanuka field trip - but it amazes me how people here seem to filter out all of the evidence of other settlements, other religions, other encounters and monuments of holiness. I am willing to bet that fewer than five of the 35 or so parents have ever gone inside the monastery - none of the ones I talked to have. Oh, and this picture is Benjamin up a tree.

yerus

yerus
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This is Benjamin's friend Yerus. I'm not sure how you spell it or what it means though I assume it is related to Yerushalayim. Her mom came from Ethiopia six years ago. Is the sepia a cheap trick? I've been dying to take her picture for a while; she's pretty fabulous.

olive press

olive press
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Here is Ben pretending to move the olive press. Normally, it would be turned by donkey. Three of the dads on the field trip put their backs into it and managed to get it to move.

ben's alphabet (ICE)

ben's alphabet (ICE)
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Benjamin made up this alphabet for the creature on the bottom, who is, contrary to appearances, a good guy. His name is Ice and Ben has his name in his language on the lower left hand side. The bottom is the English alphabet and the top is the creature alphabet. In the middle, various monsters and imps.

lev as harry potter

lev as harry potter
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We are almost through the third book. Benjamin is enraptured and Lev...well, it's hard to tell what Lev gets. He has moments of revelation that seem belated and incredibly obvious - Oh - so Voldemort IS a BAD GUY! He is only three. But he likes it enough to want a scar (drawn with MAC eyeliner in stubborn brown). You can barely see it in this picture but the expression on his face is all wizard.

ben and lev

ben and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Some of you have found this picture on my Flickr page but I'm posting it anyway. This was breakfast, last week, and the boys were sitting together in one chair and reading. Charming rogues, aren't they?

lev car home

lev car home
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev was interested in the water, but not in being inside of it. I'd heard that the dead sea can be too harsh for children but benjamin really liked it (except when he swallowed water - and then got some in his eyes). So I swam or waded in three kinds of water today - the fresh water pools of ein tzurim, the dead sea, and the sulphur hot tub at mineral beach which smelled exactly as you would expect.

dead sea

dead sea
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We went to a private beach on the dead sea called Mineral Beach, where the dominant language seemed to be Russian. It must have been 24-25 degrees. I saw a man caked in mud talking on his cell phone in a beach chair.

dead sea

dead sea
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The drive down to the dead sea is glorious and strange. Jordan is so close you could almost swim over. You can see the Jordanian mountains even from a number of vantage points in Jerusalem, shimmering like a hallucination in the distance.

jeremy

jeremy
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

jeremy and ben

jeremy and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The boys were far too prudent to cover themselves in mud but me and Jeremy lathered up. There was a pit of mud that had a warm strong suck that could pull you right underground. I went over to look at the mud and some man was coming out, covered in the stuff and already baking - he said to me, in accented english "Once you go black, you never go back!"

me

me
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Ilana said, you are nowhere to be found in your blog. So here I am in the side-view mirror of our little red car from budget, in the Judean desert on the way down to the dead sea.

ben

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

ben

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

At Ein Tzurim they had fresh-water pools which were cooooold but just the right depth for Benjamin to wade through. Usually there's beach access but it was closed because of the danger caused by "slippery mud"?

ein tzurim

ein tzurim
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

ben's picture

ben's picture
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Benjamin is still pretty serious about drawing and he came home with this picture today. His pictures are getting more and more compositionally interesting - he really uses the space of the page, and this is perhaps the most elaborate frame he's made for himself. It's a joy to watch him; he's so serious and devoted and takes such a pure pleasure in it. I wish all my creative pursuits were as focused and unambivalent and lovely.

ben

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

You may have noticed Ben's been a little absent from this blog lately. There are two reasons; he's going to school most days, so I don't have him with me until the afternoon when the light is almost gone. Also, he is camera shy, or maybe just teasing me - he tends to jump up and down when I pull out the camera, or to hide. But I know my audience (hi Imma - Amy - Les and Em) and I know I have to post more pictures of him. So this morning he posed over his pancakes and I'll try to put more pictures of him up over the next few days. We had parent teacher meetings this week and he got a wonderful report. We're reading Harry Potter to him - we just finished Book 2. And he's practicing his english reading with us every day, though it's hard to find a kid's book in our house he hasn't already memorized.

Jeremy

Jeremy
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

And here is Jeremy astride the old city like a conquistador.

old city ramparts 4

old city ramparts 4
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This is a view from the ramparts - the dome of the rock but also antennas, laundry, satellite dishes, the mundane mixed up holiness of the old city.

old city from the ramparts 3

old city from the ramparts 3
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Me and Jeremy walked on the ramparts yesterday morning. It is an incredible walk - history and religion and aesthetics and voyeurism all at once. This view of the rooftops makes me think of the very end of Speak Memory, when Nabokov sees the city as an optical puzzle. In the distance, those grey domes belong to the church of the holy sepulcher.

grafitti wall jerusalem

grafitti wall jerusalem
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

And here is the security wall and all its multilingual graffitti. It is such an ugly thing - even from the glorious promenade you can see it, snaking across the landscape. For all it may or may not have done to improve security inside Israel, it has divided people from their work and their families - Jeremy said the hope and flowers school in bethlehem, devoted to co-existence and teaching values of peace, has seen its enrollment drop to a quarter of what it once was because the wall has made it so difficult for so many former students to get there. Samar said when the wall was built here (where the photograph is taken) the Arab residents of the neighborhood on the Jerusalem side were happy because their property values went up - until then, they'd been considered not inside Israel since their neighborhood was outside the 67 borders but the wall has redrawn the borders in some flagrant ways.

niqab

niqab
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I took this picture a few days ago in East Jerusalem. It is another city there - you can see the mountain of garbage behind this woman. Parts of the city are glittering and glorious and parts are squalid and run-down. Even the roads are haphazard and unsafe. I saw this woman standing on a corner in her niqab and a ten minutes later when we turned around she was stilling standing in that same spot. Waiting for someone, maybe? Waiting for something? In Arabic class our teacher taught us a saying that means basically never - "Tomorrow, in Apricot season." Because apricot season is so fleeting. In apricot season, I'll know what this woman is thinking in her niqab on this hot corner of East Jerusalem.

lev haircut

lev haircut
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I took Lev for a haircut despite my hesitance, because he had started complaining that his hair got in his eyes. I keep looking at him - he looks older, but younger somehow too, because he looks so new. Jeremy thinks he looks more like Benjamin now.

view office window

view office window
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I have an office - finally - shared with two colleagues I have not met. There is an old computer that doesn't work and two desks and a lot of good books that don't belong to me. Someone has left tea and coffeee and a kettle on a shelf and someone else has put up printouts of poetry on the wall. Oh and there is the window and this view. Unreal.

leaves

leaves
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Fall in Jerusalem, though today it must have been eighty degrees. I smelled woodsmoke walking home this evening. I took this picture in the botanic gardens at the University. Not much is blooming right now, but the trees are lovely and loud with birds crashing through the leaves.

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I spent the morning with Lev - so I have all these portraits. And all the children at the daycare are, of course, lovely, but they're not my lovely.

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist