Mary and child. And child.

Mary and child. And child.
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We've been back in Montreal a few days and it's too late for a last post, but I felt like some kind of formal leave-taking was in order. Montreal feels drizzly and green and secular after Jerusalem. We're back in the strange and familiar weave of the everyday. Last week in Jerusalem I spent a day in the old city, wandering between The Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. At the Western Wall a woman beside me took out her cell phone. "Yonatan," she yelled into it. "Yonatan, I'm at the Western Wall, Pray, Yonatan, pray!" Then she held up the phone to the warm stone.

In Arabic class we learned a phrase, "tomorrow, in Apricot season," which means, roughly, that it's never going to happen, because apricot season is fleeting, and over before it really begins. Anyway, we left Israel near the end of apricot season, and it's true, I'd no sooner noticed apricots in the stores than they were already gone.

Goodbye, inconstant readers! I think I'm done with this particular form of electronic exhibitionism, at least for now, but I'll keep posting some pictures on Flickr. And some of you I'll finally get to see in person now...

And doesn't it look like a pool cue leaning up against the virgin mary's cheek?

jerusalem pride 2009

jerusalem pride 2009
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

orientalizing

ibn tulun mosque from the gayer anderson museum
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I've been a bit delinquent posting...we're getting ready to go. I'll try to put up a few more thoughts about Cairo and our last days here before we leave.
And yes, this is an orientalist photograph. Because one of the women who worked at the Gayer-Anderson museum took a break and stood for a few minutes in the striped shadows of the trellis, looking at the minaret of the Ibn tulun mosque. I'm not sure if it was the disorientation caused by the heat and chaos of Cairo, or the effect of all the the symmetry of the mosques and palaces, but I had a terrible time shooting straight during our whole visit. I kept taking pictures that were slanted. Even all the straight lines in this picture served to confuse rather than guide me.
I like the Manichean lines on her Burka - the striping of the black. And the breeze, of course. That's agency.
I read somewhere that there have been a disproportionate number of photographs of the Iranian - do we get to call it a revolution yet? - rebellion - featuring pretty women. I've noticed that as well. The revolution will be televised, and it will be telegenic. In the last day or two, the close-ups of women have switched to pictures taken from a distance featuring men throwing rocks, or the massive crowd scenes shot from above.
We're off to Tel Aviv.

felucca

felucca
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Don't take the bus from Jerusalem to Cairo with a six year old.

But if you do, go with a six year old (seven today!) like Benjamin, who will read to himself in Hebrew for two hours and mid-way through the trip, tired and wan, will say "Thank you for taking me to Cairo - even though this is hard it's also already fun."

We arrived near midnight, and the streets were still quite busy. We took a cab over to our hotel (Hotel Osiris), on the twelfth floor of an office building and run by a French/ Egyptian couple. In the morning we had breakfast on the terrace overlooking the smoggy, multitudinous city. All the buildings have been stained the same dull brown of a smoker's teeth, so it's easy not to notice that some of them are glorious - laundry strung across elegant stone balconies. Our first day we walked over to the Egyptian museum. There is a glorious chaos to the collection, though it makes the visit impressionistic rather than educational. Dusty unpacked crates of antiquities still cluttered the corners. We saw two mummified crocodiles and several mummified kittens. A princess was buried with her pet baboon. The royal mummies had labels that identified the illnesses they suffered from in life: obesity, bad teeth, herniated scrotum, smallpox. On one mummy's leathery skin you could still see the marks of the pox. Ben sat on the floor and drew sarcophagi. King Tut's death-box still glitters.
And at night, we hired this felucca and drifted on the Nile, where we spotted "Nile Bowling." A reason to go back ,maybe?

pyramids

pyramids
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

More to come...

ben

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Jeremy took this picture; Benjamin has now lost his second tooth (swallowed like the first).

jerusalem

jerusalem
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This massive fabric mural of Jerusalem stretches around the construction site on King David street; the imagined, ideal city and the real, dusty skeleton behind it, in constant process of destruction and construction.

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

In the courtyard the mulberry fruit and the small, sour yellow plums are ripe though they're both hard to reach.

lev buttons up

lev buttons up
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We have been having all kinds of sartorial trouble with Lev, who has very definite ideas of what he will and will not wear. Sadly, his idea of dashing tends to be soft clothing with pockets that is at least a size too small (the new sandals I bought him today had him weeping with disappointment because his toes didn't curl over the fronts). When one adds to this his insistence on (mis)buttoning his own buttons, one is faced with a morning routine that is protracted, slow and uneven in its results. He was, though, thrilled this morning with the dark green sweatpants that Jeremy cut off into short shorts (Softy shorts with pockets! he crowed).

ovadiah

ovadiah
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Mr. Falafel.

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

samar and tutu

samar and tutu
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Note tutu's shoes.

doorman at the Y

doorman at the Y
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The most enthusiastic doorman at the Y, who is not content to wish everyone a "boker tov" (good morning) but instead wishes them a "boker nifla" (fantastic morning).

mimi

mimi
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Mimi Aboukhdair, from the class below Lev at the Y. Her mom is puerto-rican American/ Palestinian and her dad is Palestinian. She speaks Hebrew, English and Arabic in theory, but in practice doesn't speak much at all.

nidal

nidal
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I have been taking photographs of the people I encounter each day, in preparation for our departure at the end of June. This is Nidal. She is Lev's teacher in the gan at the YMCA and lives in Beit Safafa, an Arab neighborhood in South Jerusalem. She spent some time living in Saudi Arabia, and Jordan I think, but says she prefers it here. She is a wonderful teacher, and very patient when I try to practice Arabic. She is also going to bring me homemade za'atar to take back to Montreal.

libby

libby
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

My friend Julia's little girl Libby, who looks to me exactly like a Maurice Sendak character (I'm thinking not of Max but of the little boy and girl in "Some Swell Pup," a lesser known Sendak masterwork).

lev and his flower headband

lev and his flower headband
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Happy Shavuot, the holiday when cute Israeli children wear headbands made out of flowers.

self portrait

self portrait
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

menashe kadishman

menashe kadishman
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Also at entrance to the museum; these heavy circular icons, silent screams, by a former shepherd turned artist. His early work includes many many representations of sheep which reminds me of the dullest epic poem I ever read, John Dyer's "The Fleece" (1757).

olive trees will be our only borders

olive trees will be our only borders
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The neon sign at the entrance to museum on the seam - I should come back and photograph it at night.

many menachems and me

many menachems and me
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

J. Henry Fair photographs and M.

J. Henry Fair photographs and M.
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Menachem has been here for a little while, and when he hasn't been gallivanting - yes, gallivanting I say - we've had some time to hang out. We went to Museum on the Seam which is situated on the pre-1967 border between East Jerusalem, which was under Jordanian rule, and West Jerusalem, under Israeli governance. From 1948 to 1967 the area was no man's land, and this old Arab mansion was converted into an army base. The building bears the scars of its history still, bullet holes, a collapsed balcony, narrow windows shuttered in thick metal, but now it is a museum, with thematic and trendy-ish exhibitions. The current exhibition is called Nature/Nation and included this very uncanny and beautiful set of photographs of gorgeous industrial waste.

my new sunglasses

my new sunglasses
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I bought these downtown. Lev calls them "our glasses."

I was at the rabbinic court yesterday, with an old friend who had vanished for twelve years. I found her last week on facebook. Her last dozen years had involved increasing immersion in chasidic judaism, an arranged marriage (three dates; six weeks), five kids, and the slow but urgent realization that she needed to get a divorce. I found her the week before her appointment at the rabbinic court for the "get" (divorce). Under Jewish law, a woman needs the man's consent to get divorced and for a long time he had refused to grant it. All Jewish marriages and divorces in Israel are done by the rabbinate; you cannot have a secular marriage in this country. So the rabbinate is full of all kinds of "clients", from the ultra-orthodox to the entirely secular, and it is a strange mixture of the bureaucratic and rabbinic, with rabbis in long coats wandering the shabby hallways with file folders and bottles of scribal ink. There was no real waiting room, so I found myself sitting knee to knee with other couples waiting to get a divorce. Across from me was a sephardic couple who had been married 29 years; they gave the impression of still being a couple, as she checked over his divorce file to see if it was complete and he joked that they should hold off on the divorce another year so they could have a thirtieth anniversary party. He said, It's her decision and I respect it - we're still friends. But when he left the room she looked entirely different, suddenly frightened and angry. She leaned forward and hissed at me - he says we're friends? We're not friends. I feel like a sickness has been lifted out from me - I'm born again today.

Anyway, my friend got her divorce, though it almost didn't happen, but many women are still waiting. http://www.jofa.org/about.php/advocacy/whatyoucando

jer and ben and the Jordan

jer and ben and the Jordan
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

By Canadian standards, the Jordan is not a river. It's more of a muddy stream, especially in these years of drought. It's also a strange mix of the sacred and profane - a kibbutz has made a cottage industry of Jordan river baptisms, but alternately, down the road you can go to Abu Kayak and experience another kind of immersion. I love the name Abu Kayak. There was hardly any current but we still managed to lose an oar, so Jeremy got baptised after all.

lev and ben

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The boys loved wearing the binoculars although they didn't quite master looking through them.

flower

flower
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Some kind of thistle? Gloriously prickly and purple.

gamla

gamla
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

At Gamla you can rent binoculars at the entrance and watch the vultures. I wish I'd taken a picture of the sign warning people not to throw rocks in case they hit the vultures on their heads; it depicts a Seussian vulture looking rather discomposed at the rock that has fallen on his bald, long head. The blue in the distance is the kinneret. Gamla is the location of one of the last-stand cities against the Romans; it's the Masada of the North. And you can hike over to the ruined city, but it would have taken too long with the kids. It's tremendously picturesque but I'm a little uncomfortable with the cult-of-suicidal last stands around Masada and, to a lesser extent, Gamla. Soldiers often go to Masada to get sworn in, and a popular song has the chorus, "It's good to die for our country." I'm on the good to live for our country side of things myself. Dulce et decorum est - not.

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We decided on this trip that Lev is a puppy, on the basis of his desire to roll the car windows all the way down and exult in the air. Jeremy thinks I will never take a better picture of Lev than this one.
It's been a vertiginous week - I went to a memorial lecture for an old grad-school friend, who died of cancer two years ago, and another dear friend emerged after over a decade with a story so sad and strange she's going to have to write it one day herself.

lev and ben

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The chocolate on Lev's face is druze pita with nutella. The yellow on his nose is pollen, I think. The manic grin is all his own.

lev and ben

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The boys in the spray of the waterfalls.

waterfall

waterfall
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The waterfalls at the Banias. The Banias are named for the shrine to Pan found there, a deep cave with a natural spring that was used for animal sacrifices. If the blood of the sacrifice vanished into the depths of the water, it was successful, but if it washed back up the sacrifice had been rejected. We walked from the Pan cave to the waterfall - a walk of a little over an hour - and I was a little nervous because of the woods and the rushing water and the general dionysian context. There were other groups of hikers, some classes of teenagers and a large group of soldiers, and the boys handily beat the teens and almost kept pace with the soldiers.

lev and ben watching the hyrax

lev and ben watching the hyrax
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

If you click on this picture and enlarge it a bit you can see the hyrax at Nimrod Fortress- as curious about the boys as the boys were about them.
The whole city is shut down for the pope. This morning, school openings were delayed so he could get to Bethlehem and the whole of Hebron Road was blocked off for an hour. Hundreds of policemen, in orange safety vests and mirrored sunglasses, stood guard. Same thing when he comes back today at four. So we need to make sure to be on the right side of Hebron road, for the Pope's sake and our own.

nimrod fortress

nimrod fortress
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

In the Golan Heights. The fortress was built in the 13th century by Saladin's nephew, and switched hands between the crusaders and various muslim conquerers, including a group of hashishins. I was disappointed to learn that hashishins were not, in fact, hash smokers - scholars speculate that the term was derogatory, as in "those guys are so crazy they must be smoking hash." It does seem to be the origin of the word assassin, though, and they did practice what people now call "asymmetrical warfare" but then would probably have just been called "murder." That haze isn't mist, it's dust.

beit shean

beit shean
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Still Beit Shean. Lev is reading the map.

Happy late Mother's Day to all, happy late birthday to Avidan, and a happy early lag ba'omer. It's traditional to light a bonfire today and tonight the city is on fire. We can see one of the bonfires from our window - in the words of our neighbor Yafa Shira, they built a whole shantytown of dry wood and set it alight. And this is one of those moments when the cultural gulf between Canada and Israel seems just enormous, since everyone has been collecting scrap wood of all kids for weeks and have taken tonight as their invitation to arson. I saw one fire engine, lazily drifting around in the streets, and I'd be surprised if this wasn't the busiest night in the year for the ER. So many possibilities...tetanus from the rusty nails in the wood, salmonella from the hotdogs, blistered mouths from overcooked marshmallows, bruises and bangs from constructing the bonfires, burns of all degrees. I'll try to post a picture of the madness tomorrow, if the house doesn't burn down first.
And the pope is in the house.

benjamin beit shean

benjamin beit shean
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We're back from a week up North, split between a zimmer (cottage) in Amirim and our friends place in Pardes Chana. I took about a zillion pictures and instead of posting them all at once I think I'll do so over the next few days. The drive out from Jerusalem is strange and spectacular-we left the Jerusalem hills and entered into dead sea desert, bleached and barren, with occasional Beduin encampments along the side of the road. We first stopped at Beit Shean which was a canaanite/ Israelite / egyptian/ Greek/ Roman/ Byzantine/ Muslim city until an earthquake destroyed it in 749 CE. I kept thinking of Shelley's Ozymandius. The site has been under excavation for about a hundred years. The boys liked jumping on the fallen pillars - there is a vast pillar graveyard - and we found the top of a pottery flask but we left it there.

poppy

poppy
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

gone to seed

gone to seed
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev on Independence Day, defending the nation from poppies and wildflowers gone to seed. We went to a local celebration on Tuesday night, which featured Israel's Corey Hart - someone who was huge in the nineties but now is relegated to playing for rowdy six year old audiences. We managed to just miss the fireworks - I could hear them but not see them on the way home, which is such a tease. The next day we walked from Hadassah hospital to Ein Kerem, site of several picturesque churches, which were all closed, and a very good ice cream store, which was open.

ben with one less tooth

ben with one less tooth
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

For the record.
April 23, 2009.
After wiggling the thing grotesquely for over a week.
We had ice cream after school to celebrate.

poppies

poppies
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Jerusalem smells and looks so good like now. The jasmine and orange blossom and honeysuckle smells are so overwhelming, it's like being mugged by a perfume store when walking down the street.

Lev at his party

Lev at his party
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We had a birthday party on Monday for Lev at Gan Ha-Paamon - Liberty Bell park so named after a confusing replica of the cracked liberty bell in Philadelphia. Mostly I was focused on not losing any of the children who attended but I think everyone had a good time. We ordered pizza to the park and did a brief but highly acclaimed treasure hunt.

ben and lev

ben and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We had a slow morning on the boys last day off school (though they go back to school for only half a day before the weekend - that's just a tease). We spent some time reading children's poetry in honour of national poetry month -- a blog on children's literature has managed to get thirty different poets to contribute a new poem for each day in the month of April (http://gottabook.blogspot.com/). Later that day, Benjamin sat down, furrowed his brow.
And wrote a poem.

me and lev

me and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Happy birthday Lev!

benjamin and hat

ain yael 045
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

They had a storyteller at Ein Yael today and Benjamin was chosen to play the part of the advisor to the king, who has gone on a quest to find the milk of the "leviah". It would have helped if I knew what a Leviah was - my guess is, some kind of a monster.
There is more to tell...the shelves in the grocery stores are covered with newspapers and white plastic to hide all non-Passover products. I saw some Chinese guest workers trying to buy a bag of flour and being refused. They barely understood what was going on. And in the old city yesterday, Scottish bagpipers piped in Easter.

potter's wheel

ain yael 013
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev's finger in Jeremy's hand. He's turning four this week and is a deliciously random child.

mud

ain yael 006
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We had a really lovely day at Ein Yael in artland. Mosaic, woodwork, weaving, painting, wandering donkeys. I think Benjamin would have been glad to move in. When they aren't using these bins to stomp mud into clay they use them to stomp grapes into wine.

tree branches, sunspots, Passover eve

sun
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

white cosmo

white cosmo
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev's hair

lev's hair
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

So according to rabbinic tradition every 28 years the sun is in the same position as it was on the day of creation and people get up very early in the morning to say a special prayer. A lot of the yeshivas here have been having special sessions on the significance of the occasion, including one - a Rabbi Ganot - who claimed that although "many questions remain over the thesis of a certain Polish priest named Copernicus....anyone who believes in the new system is not considered a heretic." So after 500 years or so the Copernican heresy is still being debated in Meah Shearim. Ha'aretz interviewed a Prof. Ariel Cohen at Hebrew University who seemed irritated about the whole thing and said, "Birchat Hachama is an embarrassing tradition, testifying to a complete, blatant and intentional disconnect from modern science." Well, yes. But it was a beautiful morning. The sun rose - it always rises. Jeremy got up early and went over to the promenade. And Lev's hair caught the sunlight on the way back from our picnic a little later that day.

solidarity march um el fahm

solidarity march um el fahm
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Yesterday I went to a solidarity march in Umm-el-Fahm, which is one of the largest Arab cities in Israel. Almost all of the residents are Arab-Israeli citizens. A few weeks ago, a man named Baruch Marzel led a group of right-wing settlers through the city in a march designed to provoke and intimidate the residents - in the subsequent riots about 27 people were hurt and many more were arrested. The counter-demonstration could not have been more different - we gave out roses and they brought us water and sweets.
I am reading The Bostonians by Henry James which is, among other things, a critique of activism. One of the primary targets is a suffragette named Miss Birdseye who is described as "a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitarian zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify to the iniquity of most arrangements." This is in part a description of what keeps me distant from activism - a combination of the fuzziness of political idealism, the complexity of political situations and finally, fear of the law of unintended consequences. But right now I'm feeling like I need to be stand up and be counted for this very basic right - for citizens of a country to be treated equally and with respect.