Jerusalem Diary

Mary and child. And child.

2009-07-06T11:43:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-28T06:56:00.001-07:00

jerusalem pride 2009
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

orientalizing

2009-06-21T22:38:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-14T08:51:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-12T06:54:00.001-07:00

pyramids
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

More to come...

ben

2009-06-05T06:21:00.001-07:00

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

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

jerusalem

2009-06-05T06:20:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-05T06:16:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-05T06:15:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-05T05:50:00.003-07:00

ovadiah
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Mr. Falafel.

lev

2009-06-05T05:50:00.001-07:00

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

samar and tutu

2009-06-05T05:49:00.001-07:00

samar and tutu
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Note tutu's shoes.

doorman at the Y

2009-06-05T05:48:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-05T05:47:00.001-07:00

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

2009-06-05T05:44:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-31T11:07:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-31T11:06:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-31T11:05:00.001-07:00

self portrait
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

menashe kadishman

2009-05-31T11:04:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-31T11:02:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-31T11:00:00.003-07:00

many menachems and me
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

J. Henry Fair photographs and M.

2009-05-31T11:00:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-21T08:08:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-19T05:15:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-19T05:10:00.003-07:00

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

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

flower

2009-05-19T05:10:00.001-07:00

flower
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Some kind of thistle? Gloriously prickly and purple.

gamla

2009-05-19T05:09:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-17T06:55:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-14T04:27:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-14T04:26:00.001-07:00

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The boys in the spray of the waterfalls.

waterfall

2009-05-14T04:25:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-13T02:39:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-12T06:17:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-11T11:19:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-10T09:09:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-30T08:24:00.001-07:00

poppy
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

gone to seed

2009-04-30T08:23:00.003-07:00

gone to seed
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev

2009-04-30T08:23:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-23T08:31:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-23T08:29:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-23T08:28:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-16T10:28:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-14T06:09:00.001-07:00

me and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Happy birthday Lev!

benjamin and hat

2009-04-13T11:02:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-13T10:57:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-13T10:55:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-08T05:08:00.003-07:00

sun
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

white cosmo

2009-04-08T05:08:00.001-07:00

white cosmo
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev's hair

2009-04-08T05:07:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-06T00:02:00.001-07:00

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.

handstand split

2009-04-05T23:27:00.003-07:00

ben capoeira
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

ben capoeira

2009-04-05T23:27:00.001-07:00

ben capoeira
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Benjamin got his belt on Friday at a Capoiera festival that involved a three hour roda (the musical circle in which capoiera-ists spar, two at a time). The auditorium was too dark to get a good picture of him on the stage - besides, his five-minute sparring session with a senior teacher involved the teacher doing back flips and handstands around him while Benjamin ducked and wove like a boxer. But I did get some pictures in the hallway afterwards. Some people say capoeira was a stealth martial art practiced by African slaves in Brazil who were forbidden to learn to fight - there are even people who believe it was used to fend off slavers.

lev and ice cream at the crater

2009-04-05T23:17:00.001-07:00

lev and ice cream at the crater
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This worlds-end town has a long promenade on the crater, and a single bar/cafe with outdoor tables and really excellent cappucino which is an absolute prerequisite for fully enjoying the view. Or, in Lev's case, ice cream. In this picture he's already split his lip at the hostel but hasn't yet split his chin in the byzantine wine cave.

Apparently, Mitzpe Ramon was founded when the government dumped a group of Moroccan immigrants in the middle of the desert and told them they were an hour and a half from Tel-Aviv (ummm - two and a half hours, and that's without traffic). The setting is unreal and beautiful but the town is a little sad and run-down, and the major presence is an army base that fills the two restaurants (pizza and falafel/shwarma) with a steady stream of customers. And the ibex, who have no fear.

ramon crater

2009-04-05T23:10:00.001-07:00

ramon crater
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

It is difficult to get a sense of the scale of the crater. There is something flattening in the view from the promenade at the rim - even before I took a photograph it already seemed miniaturized, condensed. I only began to get a sense of the immenseness of the crater when I walked around inside it. The sand is all different colors - ashy lavender, black, spots of deep red like blood stains. In the fifties, lots of people came to mine the crater -that parti-colored sand suggested all kinds of treasures - but they never found much, so it's been relatively undisturbed. To which Ben said, like a character in a Disney special, "But the crater is the treasure."

We've been watching the films at all of these different attractions - the crater, the tower of David museum in Jerusalem, the observatory at Eilat. The one in Eilat had moving chairs, like an amusement ride, and a sentimental story about illegal whaling in Africa which featured a strategically multi-racial cast of pirates in torn t-shirts. The film at the visitor's centre at Mitzpe Ramon talked about the early settlement of the area in the Nabatean period, and then by the Romans and Byzantine empire. Then the silhouette of a rider on a horse crossed the screen and a deep voice-over said, "This period of civilization ended with the coming of the Arab invaders." Fast forward to the Jewish state. Honestly. At that point I would have welcomed the pirates.

ben and the pistachio tree

2009-04-05T22:49:00.001-07:00

ben and the pistachio tree
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

On the way to the crater, we also stopped at Ein Avdat, a nature park. Here Benjamin is sitting under the northernmost pistachio tree in Israel - well, not the actual single northernmost tree, but one of several in this latitude. We climbed a series of very steep stone steps up to the top of a ravine bordering the waterfall, and signs warned us to watch out for the abyss.

poppies

2009-04-05T22:45:00.001-07:00

jer lev poppies
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We went away last week, to Machtesh Ramon, which is the largest erosion crater in the world. On the way we passed this field of kalaniyot (poppies) and waded in.

ben

2009-03-30T21:43:00.001-07:00

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

ben

2009-03-30T21:42:00.001-07:00

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Ben prepares a face to meet the faces that he meets.

Passover break starts today...yes, today. And Benjamin is so excited. He woke up early and was dressed before I was awake - oh, if such early-morning rigor applied to school days. And he said, "We are finally free from Egypt!"

Lev

2009-03-25T08:08:00.001-07:00

Lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Happy Wednesday!

war is not cookies

2009-03-25T08:07:00.001-07:00

war is not cookies
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

A few weeks ago I saw some graffitti that said "Milchama Lo Chumus" - war is not houmus. I wasn't really convinced that I'd read the graffitti correctly until I saw this today, which must be part of the same series. "Chayalim ze lo Ugiyot" which means soldiers are not cookies. It must be part of a whole war/snack series. Make pastry, not war, that kind of thing.

other side of mechitza

2009-03-25T08:05:00.001-07:00

other side of mechitza
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I went to a brit this morning in North Jerusalem. They had separate staircases for men and women - I should have taken a picture of the signs. The ceremony was also separated by the "mechitza" - this picture is taken through the grid. The man on the left is definitely on his cell phone.

Azriel

2009-03-25T08:03:00.001-07:00

Azriel
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The newest Freedman - Elisha and Nechama's baby.

Ben

2009-03-25T07:57:00.001-07:00

Ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Crowned by the torah scroll, at his party earlier in the week.

lev

2009-03-18T10:04:00.001-07:00

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I went to a lecture last night and the speaker (Aviva Zornberg, an English PhD/Bible guru) talked about Keats and his idea of art as "diligent indolence". I have decided that will be the motto of my last few months of sabbatical. Diligent indolence begins now.

monkey mind

2009-03-13T01:39:00.001-07:00

IMG_9924
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

We've had a crazy few weeks, visitors and travel and sickness and adventure. It's been wonderful and chaotic and tiring. This picture sums it up, I think.
Here instead of throwing out their old books - or selling them, I guess - people leave them out on the street. Walking home last night in the mist I found a cardboard box of books, and a fellow reader shuffling through them. I took home a copy of Dr. Zhivago and a funny little book of English essays. The moon was full and every so often little explosions went off, firecrackers marking the very end of Purim.

happy (shushan) purim

2009-03-11T09:43:00.001-07:00

purim
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

the boys

2009-03-10T02:40:00.001-07:00

the boys
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

At our hotel there was a floating pier - you could go out on it and watch the fish. The first morning the water was full of purple jellyfish. They are so lovely - frilled, pulsing, big as a heart. I thought they were poisonous but when I went diving the guide had me stroke one - they felt like wet silk.

rainbow ramon crater

2009-03-10T01:44:00.001-07:00

rainbow ramon crater
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Near the bottom of the crater the rain finally stopped and we saw this rainbow. I couldn't get it all in this picture - it stretched from end to end of the canyon. For a few minutes there was a double rainbow, a fainter echo of this one behind it.

jeremy and lev small crater

2009-03-10T01:43:00.001-07:00

jeremy and lev small crater
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The scale in this picture is messed up - you have to look behind Lev and Jeremy and imagine vastness.

we're back

2009-03-10T01:41:00.001-07:00

beit guvrin
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I'm sorry for my long absence - we've had a few weeks of visitors, and have been away the last week, "rolodexing the fun" as my friend Debbie says. We left last Sunday to drive down South, through the centre of the country since the weather was downright tempestuous. We still ended up driving through vast puddles on the road that goes through Ramon Crater. We stopped at Beit Guvrin, site of a town from about the third century BC and known for its strange, double-cross shaped columbarian, with about two hundred niches where pigeons were kept for food and fertilizer and "ritual purposes." There are also majestic, bell-shaped caves formed by people quarrying limestone. Because of the rain, it was lushly green and very muddy. There were tiny flowers in the grass, and when we got back to the car we were completely filthy.

magic etrog juice

2009-02-20T02:18:00.001-08:00

magic etrog juice
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I decided to buy magic etrog juice on my birthday, after someone tried to sell me a bottle of absinthe from Czechoslovakia. Perhaps I should have bought them both? I said, what am I going to do with a whole bottle of absinthe, and the salesman said, "You give it to your guests, it is very classy." Apparently Marilyn Manson has his own brand of absinthe now, called "Mansinthe." And he paints - watercolours! He seems more and more like a late 19th century decadent to me in light of these details - as much green carnation as green fairy.

rooftops old city

2009-02-20T02:13:00.001-08:00

rooftops old city
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

In the Arab market, there are stairs that lead to the roofs of the old city. Behind the bicycles and antennae and broken furniture you can see the dome of the rock, and in the other direction (not pictured) the church of the holy sepulcher.

train tracks

2009-02-20T02:11:00.001-08:00

train tracks
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The city was thick with yellow smog yesterday - sand blowing in from the Judean desert. Drifts of sand collected on the windshields of cars, and there was a sullen, unstable quality to the air.

ben

2009-02-20T02:10:00.001-08:00

ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Is kicking his cold to the curb. He was sick most of the week and recovered in time for capoeira. This virus has made both the boys tremendously sweet - it's perhaps part of its evolutionary strategy, since they are such irresistible vectors of infection.

lev reading

2009-02-20T02:02:00.001-08:00

lev reading
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Lev now knows all his English letters, in caps. He's prostrate on the couch right now. The plague has struck our house. I think the viruses are bigger and badder here - sabra viruses. He woke up in the night, stuffed up, and said, Imma, I can't smell you! Imma, I can't smell myself!

old city

2009-02-20T02:00:00.001-08:00

old city
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This stall is run by a Bedouin with a shaved head who fakes a Texas accent and plays Charlie Armstrong.
It was my birthday yesterday. I've been reading Saki. "To have reached thirty, said Reginald, is to have failed at life."

Happy Valentine's!

2009-02-13T05:59:00.001-08:00

valentine
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

ben and ella

2009-02-13T05:58:00.001-08:00

ben and ella
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Ben and my friend's new baby. Because he loves their little hands...

crossroads of the world

2009-02-13T05:57:00.001-08:00

crossroads of the world
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This is the best crosswalk in Jerusalem. I stood there about a half hour today but couldn't quite get a photo depicting the multicultural madness of it- I'll try another time.

ben and lev

2009-02-13T05:31:00.001-08:00

ben and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

The batman cape is back in favor.
Here Ben and Lev are watching election results in great finger-biting suspense.

ben's ceremony

2009-02-13T05:26:00.001-08:00

ben's ceremony
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Ben at the siddur ceremony. I liked it that the boys got to do a little interpretive dance. You can't see the red paint that Ben got all over his new white shirt right before the ceremony.

lev

2009-02-13T05:24:00.001-08:00

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

On our long walk on Tuesday. The force is strong with this one.

waffles

2009-02-13T05:23:00.001-08:00

waffles
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

This was our election day in Jerusalem. If only the whole country had been voting for waffles with blueberries or waffles with strawberries.

2009-02-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

Some comments on the pictures below:

Spring has sprung. That means the almond trees are blossoming, like the song says. They lie like snow on the tree branches and make me think of Montreal. The days are also getting longer which means we can take the boys to the park after school. They are becoming such good co-conspirators - I like the picture on the bottom, where Lev is looking at Benjamin in disbelief, like Augustine looked at Ambrose of Milan when he saw the latter reading to himself - whoaaa - you mean you can do that?

It is a relief to have the war over for now, and the weather is guiltily delicious - guiltily since the country needs rain. But elections are here to provide daily doses of bathos and idiocy. Recently Barak accused his rival, Lieberman, of "never even shooting a man" - as if that was a necessary criterion for political office. And Lieberman himself wants to require all citizens to take a loyalty oath to the state or be stripped of their citizenship, and he's under trial for financial corruption, and has a criminal record including indictment for hitting the classmate of one of his sons. Because you have to show them who's boss....

lev and ben

2009-02-06T06:15:00.001-08:00

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Flickr doesn't seem to want to let me put comments on my posts anymore - let's see if this works.

almond blossoms

2009-02-06T06:13:00.001-08:00

almond blossoms
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev

2009-02-06T06:12:00.001-08:00

lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev and ben

2009-02-06T06:11:00.001-08:00

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

dance break

2009-02-06T06:09:00.001-08:00

dance break
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev and ben

2009-02-06T06:08:00.001-08:00

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

lev and ben

2009-02-06T06:06:00.001-08:00

lev and ben
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

nudes ascending a couch no. 2 (after Duchamp)

2009-01-30T06:47:00.001-08:00

nudes ascending a couch no. 2 (after Duchamp)
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I think I may need to retitle this picture - it is attracting the wrong kind of traffic to my Flickr account.
The boys, after the bath last night, running wild, like the futurist dream they are.
I watched Waltzing with Bashir last night. It is excellent - just excellent. And I read the graphic novel The Rabbi's Cat, by Joann Sfar, about a cat in a re-imagined early 20th century Algeria - self-described as "nocturnal, unpredictable, and deeply ethical." And I'm reading Alice Munro for my class. My student described the impact of her stories as a "maka yevesha" which means, roughly, a dry bruise - a harsh blow deliberately placed so it will not show a mark. The term comes from army interrogations.

ben in school

2009-01-30T06:41:00.001-08:00

ben in school
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I took pictures at Ben's school this week, at the teacher's request, in preparation for this big grade 1 bash where the kids all get their first prayerbooks. So they sent all the children out to me, one by one in the little courtyard under the palm tree, to be photographed, and then when Ben's class was done they kept on sending me more kids - the other grade 1 group, the special needs kids - until I had taken about 200 pictures (the girls were much better at posing). I took my memory card to the photo shop at Hebrew University the next day and it was empty. I was shocked - so shook up I wasn't even sure that I could teach. It wasn't only the waste of all this work, and the prospect of humiliating myself, it was the epistemological shock of something gone that I was certain was there. Kind of like what happened to the stock market this year.

But when I got home and put the photos in the camera they all reappeared. Now if only my stocks would do that.

ben and lev

2009-01-23T06:18:00.001-08:00

ben and lev
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Roadrunner before shabbat. On his way home Jeremy asked Benjamin if he'd like to play Magic with him and Benjamin said, yes, but I'd like to spend some time with Imma first, I didn't get much time with her yesterday.

chalil

2009-01-23T06:17:00.001-08:00

chalil
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

On the bus on the way from the market I sat across from a man who said his name was Chalil (flute). He took out his recorder and played a few notes - he said it was a shabbat song. Before he got off the bus he played it again and some people near the front applauded.

cider

2009-01-23T06:14:00.001-08:00

cider
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

In the market today the cheese store was having a tasting of cider from Normandy - two kinds made of apples and one of pears. I ate cheese off the grand knife and tried two of the ciders before stumbling around the rest of the market. It was ten in the morning. I bought a plate of cheeses, a bottle of the cider, jerusalem and potato kugels, passionfruit cheesecake and chocolate rugelach, black olives and olives with lemons, humus and pesto.

lev strawberry

2009-01-21T08:34:00.001-08:00

lev strawberry
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Strawberry season! We ate over a kilo yesterday, and I'm hoping to go back to the market for more. The strawberry merchants at the market have a song they sing to attract customers: Tut sadeh, tut sadeh, gam gadol vegam yafeh (strawberries, strawberries, large and lovely).
Other news: Jeremy had a birthday yesterday. We went to see a Scots antique dealer who claims to be descended from the khazars and has an incredible shop in meah shearim, heaps of second temple coins on the table, statues and vases everywhere. He showed us parchment that he claimed was from the Raibid (medieval Jewish scholar) and amuletic bowls and coins and fetishes. We walked into the old city, met a Bedouin who faked a Texan accent , and showed us the stairs up to the linked patchwork of the roofs of the old city (Jerusalem - divided in its people, united in its roofs). We went out for supper and walked home and then I watched the inaugural speech - so happy birthday Jeremy and happy Presidency Obama (for weeks Jer's been saying - I want a black president for my birthday.)

orit

2009-01-21T08:25:00.001-08:00

orit
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

Orit was here last week--we haven't had a chance to hang out, without children, for years.

ben's picture: milchama

2009-01-19T07:04:00.001-08:00

ben's picture: milchama
Originally uploaded by nostalgist

I haven't been posting much, mostly because of the war, which made the chronicling of everyday life here seem vulgar. The truth is that life in Jerusalem has been completely normal for us, except that it has been shadowed by this awful conflict. They had a child psychologist over at Ben's school to talk about the war - some of the fathers were called up on reserve duty - and they told the children to draw a picture of war. Benjamin has been mostly oblivious to it - we don't talk about it in front of him, and his limited Hebrew protects him too (though his Hebrew is getting much better). So instead of drawing something that spoke more specifically to the conflict he drew this giant mythic bird with two human passengers, one holding a giant Israeli flag - a picture more informed by Harry Potter than by Gaza. Then he erased the word "milchama" (war) though you can kind of still read it on top of the picture, since it isn't really a picture about the war. And this made me grateful that he is protected from knowing about war, and very sad for the children who have been learning about war, first-hand, the past few weeks.
So there is a ceasefire now, and perhaps it will hold, and perhaps it will not. Perhaps to children here war will one day be something abstract and mythic, like it is to Benjamin. I've been listening to a song version of Yehuda Amichai's poem - I want to die in my own bed - which is the deliberately anti-heroic cry of a poet and soldier who fought in WWII and in Israel's War of Independence, and I'm wishing people of the region ordinary joys and ordinary tragedies.

Lev shadow

2009-01-15T23:46:00.001-08:00

Lev shadow
Originally uploaded by nostalgist