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.