Bootiful! If I could only do accents

If I could count the number of people who've said the dress is bootiful.  No other words.  We're sitting here watching the wedding..listening to a man talking about the pain in his feet in participating in the royal wedding.  What a wonderful diverse country we are.

Love itv coverage.  Quote 'Kate will be the next Diana'  says scary woman in union jack dress.

We sit here enjoying the view in a blurred, kind of hazy sort of way.  Is it because we're Jewish?  or British from North London?

blurry photo and a glss of wine...apt for the occasion

Royal Wedding - a view from north London

As soon as I got back, I realised we really are now in royal wedding fever.  The regency square I work in has been decked out with red white and blue bunting, there's a holiday atmosphere everywhere with two four day weekends one after the other, and there's even spring in the air.

Day by day, gradually, you see union jacks appear on pubs, street corners, and there's even a takeaway pizza been advertised - the 'I dough' showing william and katherine's faces!

Amongst people I've talked to opinion is divided.  In my area, which has a very strong community but which is perhaps a bit too left wing for royalism, there is no street party (there are loads happening elsewhere).  In fact I've spoken to quite a few people who are going out of their way to ignore the whole thing and have either gone away, are weeding the garden or attending a dance class, or just sleeping through it all.

But I like mass psychology,  escapism and people watching so I'm having a few people round to watch it over brunch.  My friends say it will be an ironic look at the wedding, but I'm not so sure. I don't have any flags but I like the idea of all the pomp.   Perhaps secretly I will be buying a William and Katherine forever mug on ebay when the price goes down after the wedding...

Oh yes, and it will be a very British affair - it'll be raining.

Back Home In Crouch End

When I got back to England it was hot, and where I live everyone was outside, sitting on chairs outside the grocers, the little pub and the hairdresser.  It was a lot like Israel except that people were talking English with the odd smattering of Greek or Turkish.

I went to a gig of a friend of mine.  Lots of jews, playing their hearts out in a local bar.  It was lovely, but I was missing the loud chatter, the assertive way people asked for drinks, and the pleasure of speaking in another language (and of course, the bloody good coffee you could get in Israel).

I think I've settled back in now, but it's taken a while.  I've returned to my truly English persona, so much so that when I stood next to a woman with the biggest boobs I've ever seen in a packed tube train, I only smiled to myself and made no attempt to talk to her to quell the uncomfortableness of the situation.  It did occur to me to take a picture (my boob to her boob as it were...) but couldn't do it without her noticing.

the next day I took my niece and nephew out to crouch end.  It's a part of London where you get loads of mothers with state of the art prams, charity shops where designer clothes don't go above size 10 and full of coffee bars and restuarants.  It looked very quaint and so typically English in the afternoon light.  It's lovely but misses a little bit of grunginess that can be charming.

We walked on to Parkland Walk,  a wooded trail that used to be a railway line, now filled with families wearing dungarees and fathers who had long grey hair tied back.   About half way in, we saw a yellow ribbon tied to a tall tree.   Waiting for someone to come back perhaps. Or is it waiting for me to go back?

Departures

The turning into Ben Gurion airport terminal 1 is deceptive.  On the one side is terminal 3, with its gleaming spires of lipsticks, foreign chocolate and Scottish whisky.  On the other side, down a ramshackle slipway is the terminal where the likes of Easyjet passengers like me leave from.  It is also what used to be Lod Airport’s main terminal.  There are about 10 checkin desks, and one story.  It lounges somewhere in the 1970s, where airhostesses with fair hair (before the influx of oriental immigrants into prestige jobs like this..) used to smile from the billboards, and signs shone from the walls with open arms and a background of oranges saying welcome to Israel, welcome to the land of milk and honey.  

As we leave from here the departure hall does seem familiar.   I remember all of us, grandparents, parents, sister and enough watermelon and white cheese to last us a month, packed into my grandfather’s tiny white car, zooming down the road like we were in a cartoon.  I remember the tears on departure that I never really understood.  The hands held too long in unsaid embraces and the crowds of relatives on the other side of the barrier gradually getting smaller and smaller as I was flung in front of them to wave. I remember too the grey silence on the other side, where the state of the art walkways and large house couldn’t compete with the hum of traffic under a balcony in the evening, or grand slaps of old friends echoing in the dark stairways to loved ones' flats.

 

So today I am here again.  We’ve eaten the most excessive (but delicious) Israeli breakfast of white cheese, omelette, salad in a café by a freeway.  Around us sat cool young Israeli wrapped in red blankets because it’s windy.  Despite the machismo here, it feels like under the surface there's still abit of the jewish mother in the Israeli psyche.    

At the check in I struggle with my greengrocer Hebrew, but there are still smiles.  Perhaps in spring everyone is nicer.   

In my mind, two film reels are playing in the sunshine simultaneously.    Two lives.  Here, the warmth, the metach (stress) and the unforgiving blue skies.  There, Luton airport, young boys and girls with bleached hair holding tins of beer walk through the train, ready for a night out to London.  Perhaps later in the journey, in some cross cultural exchange, I’ll sit on the train, and 5 strangers around me will want to know my business, recommend me the best way to get home from Kings Cross, and while we chat they’ll ask me why I left England on holiday and that I should have gone to the lake district instead because it’s really lovely too and it's good to stay in Britain.  Perhaps not?  

But there's a charm to the chaos, the freedom to be who you are.  The sheer familiarity, realising that what you thought was different behaviour may have been a cultural difference.  

the coffee trail

I'm sitting in a tel aviv coffee house.  In Israel, it is coffee in the morning, coffee in the evening, and coffee interspersed several times during the day.  Coffee and chat, although at the moment I am not doing any cha t. I'm looking over a high ceilinged room with arched windows and antique lights hanging languidly from the ceiling.  Girls in dark glasses sit outside talking and gesticulating and a family next to me pick at salad and matzah (it's passover).
Yesterday we visited another, 'cooler' coffee house in Tel Aviv, where we literally bumped into Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister out for a power walk with his wife.  This guy is, right now, one of the most unpopular men in israeli politics, and we got about a foot away from him and his security entourage.  I didn't recognise him myself, but I must admit his security men looked a bit prattish.  It's a small place around here.

Tel aviv has all the chic coffee places and bat yam, well bat yam, well bat yam has the overcrowding made good, the great beach and the mafioso mayor who renovated the place.  And of course it has the block of flats where my grandparents used to serve us spinach and meat fritters, israeli salad, and a lot of love wrapped up in the small flat adorned with tapestries my grandmother had done.

We made our way up the staircase - we only saw the doorbell, and the rack where my grandmother used to hang the washing at the back but it was enough.  The cracks in the walls had grown, and it seemed as not much had changed except that the people we knew had gone.

On the beach we sat with my cousin's family laying back on easy chairs, watching the parasurfers on the beach.  I was, of course, the only mad Englishwoman to paddle in this cold weather (20 degrees centigrade).  Another coffee, another chat.

Then we went to see some other relatives, and again we were offered drinks, chocolate and cake.  They're bulgarian, so the tapestries were on the wall, and the cake was decorated with something white which I have yet to understand what it was, served on those brown pyrex plates that I think everyone over the age of 60 in this part of Israel owns.  Perhaps it was given out to them when they first came here. Nevertheless, it was nice to make their acquaintance again.  It made me feel good.

Songs and Supper - Pesach with Airconditioning

There are about 64 cauliflower fritters, a big pot of Persian rice, a bunch of flowers and two boxes of presents in the back of Talia's yellow car.  Leil haseder (Seder night-or Passover) is upon us, and like Christmas, the tension has been mounting.  Shops have been steaming up with clouds of focussed israelis dragging round overladen trolleys of food.  In the train stations young girls with sweet smiles give out chocolates, and skinny young teenagers in army uniform sleep exhausted on trains as they make their way home for the festival from their army service.  

Many people get a week off work.   Security guards at railway stations wish you 'Hag Sameach' (happy festival) after they check your bags, and women in buses still talk about which part of the family they're spending the festival with.  It's strange, for once, knowing that what you're doing in your own home is reflected in what is being done by many others. 

The meal itself, at my cousin Iris's, is very similar, but with a different cast of characters.  We follow the haggadah which is all in hebrew.  Despite everyone except me being a hebrew speaker,  people are still asking 'where is it', what bit do we do now? and 'when do we drink the second cup of wine?'  I seemed to think that the wonderful confusion that surrounds the ritual around Pesach the world over would be be eradicated, but no, we still don't quite know what we're up to, or the whole tune to all the songs.  But I love that.   It's a way where different family traditions bump gently next to each other, and somewhere, plied with wine, a new recipe for charoset and a hell of a lot of chicken, you meet and laugh about it.

The house is cool and airy, and feels like a home. Chaotic, busy but loving.  Jokes fly between some of the guests and I struggle to follow.  Dor, Iris' autistic son, stands up and whoops at odd intervals, and her five year old giggles shyly when he does the singing.   What strikes me most is the feeling here of acceptance of people.   Very much each to his own, in his own way.   Perhaps I'm being starry eyed.  But the vibe tonight was good.

After the meal, like families everywhere after a festival, we sit with slightly glazed eyes, bloated by good food and alcohol in a haze of satisfaction.  We sit outside on sofas which my cousin has decorated like a bedouin tent (kids trampoline making a great low table covered with scarves).  A few smoke cigars (unusual) and black muddy coffee is drunk.  My uncle with his new poet hat, looks abit like a nouvelle vague artiste from 1960s france, sat on the sofa in the garden covered with scarves.

We continue with songs from the book, and israeli songs that people sing while staring into pleasant memories.  For my benefit a few beatles hits are trooped out, although Moshe's teenage niece knows the words a lot better than me..

We've sung, we've eaten, we've remembered our freedom, and true to form we've video'd almost every minute of it.

It feels warm in all senses of the word.  I grew up loving pesach, it was a time for relaxing and letting go.  This time has been no different. 

    

Old stone and socialism

Hedva, a distant cousin of mine,  wasn't quite what I expected as she honked her horn in the car park at Binyamina station near Haifa.  Dressed in sunglasses, a tennis visor and sweatshirt, she reminded me of the sort of American tourist you try to avoid talking to at the London eye. Unlike Norma from New Jersey though, Hedva is a bit different. She had the sort of upbringing that might have come straight from the pages of a manual of socialist living.  Brought up as the responsibility of the commune, living in a children's house from a young age, little private property, communal dining room, laundry..etc it wasn't quite the same.  Now though, Hedva drives me to her large home, outside the kibbutz, filled with pictures of foreign trips, the electric piano, and view overlooking the Jezreel valley with it's squares of blue greenhouse covers that look like perfectly manicured pools of water.  Socialism isn't what it used to be but neither of us seem to worry about it.  Her husband works in Israel's version of silicon valley, and her son is the youngest of three boys who have just left the army.  Her relief shows.

On the way here, she drove through a small village made up of pale stone houses set on a hill overlooking the valley.  We stop at one overflowing with purple spring flowers and a date carved above the doorway '1889'.  This is where her parents in law live.  Where the family moved from the US in the 1890s.  Where they jumped from new york with its Carnegie and trams, to swamps, malaria, and a bunch of goats.  A bit like moving to the amazon now. 

Nowadays, predictably, the village is real estate heaven, with plots snapped up after funerals, and rows of jasmine and fig trees planted by new immigrant gardeners. The cypresses still grow in the same spots though. 

After black muddy coffee and dates, I’m driven over to her father’s place in Kibbutz Hazorea.  As soon as we enter it it's not just the smell of cows that hits me.  Or the silence.  There's a haze.  People call it 'shalva' tranquility.  Perhaps it's more in my mind, but to this city girl it's a long way from getting on the tube, running from the bus and finding a parking spot in crouch end. The whir of bicycle wheels greets us.  Perhaps it's memories of what things used to be.  (at this point I should mention that Kibbutzim are not what they were.  Communal ideals have become 'pay as you go living' with charges for all the kibbutz services, people with external jobs.  But it's still more shared than most of us.)

We walk in to the house of my father's cousin.  Like my father he has bright blue eyes and the same way of asking difficult questions.  He moves effortlessly from family feuds, how much people earn and what exactly your mother does during the day.  (we've already covered the why aren't you married thing..)

But it's a useful trip.  We talk of the clothes factory in Plovdiv my grandmother’s brothers used to run.  the one that switched from making underwear (very good underwear) to uniforms for the Bulgarian army.  It meant that unlike any other jew, the family was not subject to anti jewish curfew regulations. 

Of there's the story where the jews of Plovdiv were taken to the Jewish school, carrying their bags and told to wait.  Possibly for transportation to Auswizch.  So they waited.  Locked together in a big hall.  At the end of the day they were just sent back home. Lives saved by the protests of parliament members, the priests, the king.  

I take a few photos but no one likes to talk much about the war.  Who does.  On the way out we smell the apple blossom and look back as the rows of houses, looking up at the road ahead, the old bungalows superimposed on the brand new toll road above.  Life, death and saving lives.  Sometimes it all seems just so prosaic on the surface.  

Green Hills and Lebane - a tour near the lebanon border

As we rode further into the hills above nahariya, in the north of Israel, David kept saying at each corner that’s Lebanon! That’s Lebanon! Of course we had no idea whether it was or not, but we knew we were pretty close when we saw a ‘keep out – border’ sign down a little track.

It is spring in Israel, and while in a few months the land will be yellow and sour with want of water,  at the moment, in a hazy warm light, by the hills above the Jezrael valley you can almost mistake the vista for for the rolling hills in England.

But up here in the north it’s as far as you could get from England. We drove up a winding single track road, passing the odd herd of mountain goats.  It reminded me of driving in the north of Scotland, without perhaps the drama of the sweeping slopes and lochs.  Of course it’s a different type of drama here.  We saw a battered brown sign saying ‘Galleria/coffee’ and followed it.  Yet another dirt track road led us to yard filled with a few bits of scrap, a dilapidated fifties car, and a carefully wrought iron work bench looking over the hills.  Inside there was a long room full of tables made of tree trunks. 

The pretty young girl serving explained that they’d all moved there in the 80’s as chalutzim (pioneers) given incentives to build houses with the proviso that they build responsibly to the environment and that the beauty of the forest be preserved.  She described how the ketushas missed them during the last Lebanon war, aiming further.  It felt that all over the world there are the same types of people who run away to little communities like this to be reborn in the wild of nature.  She smiled when she described how they almost got snow this winter.

The view was spectacular.  Drier and more rocky than Italy, rougher, interspersed with patches of multishaded green trees and course grasses.

I felt sad though.  Sad at all the litter for a start when we stopped off to walk later.  But also sad after visiting the arab village, where headscarfed women sat working in their balconies, and berber like dressed men, with black robes and white caps walked the pavements throwing the odd salaam Aleichem to the each other to hear it rebound with common greeting.  I felt sad that I felt so alien, just because this was an arab village and I am a jew.  I felt sad that there is so much bloody love in this land, for this land, that that the passion cancels itself out.  It loses itself in the politics.  I felt sad that there was the drama in the hills doesn't come from the scenery.

In the village we ate at a bar which proudly showed off its best restaurant credentials over the last 4 years. We chomped at fresh baked arab bread folded over a combination of lebane (yoghurt cheese) and zaatar (hissop and other spices).  The taste of these green hills.

We left and looked back over the hills, passing by the stained glass windows of some of the houses, perched on the mountains.  We drove back to the crowded schunot (residential areas) of Naharayi where everywhere, families, arab and jew, sat round tables on the balconies, eating the same cucumber and tomato salad, humus and pitta for the evening meal. 

the story of a miracle

Today I go to a big barmitzvah party.  Mission if I choose to accept it, is to link up with all sorts of people who can tell me more about my parents and what it was like growing up in Bulgaria during the second world war as Jews.

You see few people know that almost all of Bulgaria's 50,000 jews survived the war despite living in a country which was an ally of Hitler.  That was thanks to a few members of parliament, the orthodox priesthood, and the Bulgarian people.  So my aim is to question a few of the older generation and ask them a bit more.  The miracle is that I'm here really.    It might also be a bit of a miracle to get through the day without being asked why don't I get a husband, but that's another story.  here go the canapes and wine...

sleepless nights and poet's hats

wow. can't write long, it's 6.30am and I haven't been to sleep.
today we sat in my uncle's flat, in the not so cool, pretty down at heel part of Jaffa, reading his three poems recently published in a magazine, and admiring the new hats sent lovingly by my mother from England so he would have a poet's hat.  You see, I don't know if it's my uncle's quirk or not, but I understand that it's obligatory for any creative, including this poet Yakov Aladjem, to have a suitably bohemian hat when he walks past the stone coloured blocks of flats dressed with graffiti, past the bus stop facing the sea and travels to a little room in a cafe where other poets meet.  My uncle is 70 years old and for the past 20 years has really started to live his life as a living breathing human through this lark, so a hat, of course, is a must.

So we sat in a long narrow room, predominated by brown sofa covers, pictures of grandfathers and grandchildren, and of course books, each wearing new black hats, laughing for photos, and reading poetry that I don't quite understand in hebrew (with a smattering of ted hughes).

Classic. heartwarming.  it filled me with hope, loss for those are not here with us, and the beginnings of a link.

and all that topped off with the most incredible heart to heart catch up on life with my cousin.  Someone whom you thought you had little in common with because you have different mother tongues, and then, realise that blood really is thicker than water.  You realise that the same giggle, and of course the same love of swearing, may just be something to do with inherited genes (or is it to do with the chilli chocolate).

who knows. but I'm getting a poet hat of my own..

seven year itch

I'm finally here.  Seven years is a long time to stay away from your roots.  But it still keeps drawing you in.  Sitting here on the Terrass, listening to israeli music, thinking, another life.

I'm staying with my cousin, Talia, who is from what I understand, a pretty good writer.
I haven't seen much of the place yet, it's been enough to drink the coffee, watch the gangly ants ranging over the deck and let the memories creak open the door and float me back to israeli salad on the balcony with my grandparents, shakshouka and bottles of orange coloured soda.  But this isn't the same, it's quiet, it's relatively cool and I am not part of it.  Aside and watching but soon to dive in and let it cover me.

Last night we talked and I want to talk some more, but let it happen.  We talked about similarities of families, and underneath the cultural differences slipped to the side like it was water on a tray poured out leaving it all clear and free to take whatever it holds.

I wanted to record a few thoughts on the off.  I feel already as if I'm learning.  My cousin talked about coming here to the country to confront her fears.  there's a little of that here for me.

Nothing compares to you

Day 1 – a man’s belly is pressed against my ear, I know I am going to Israel again.   He is asking for money for an institute in Jerusalem and has targeted all the men wearing skullcaps on the plane and is walking amongst them offering to take credit cards.  He has long sidecurls, a long white beard and little shame.  Two Israelis look at videos of a pop concert and a few people clap as we land.  This clapping thing only ever happens on flights to Israel and instead of making me smile.  People really do care about this place they'll even clap the pilot for taking us there.  


As I enter the airport the shininess of it all hits me.  A great curved departure hall below that looks like any other European city lounge.  But this is Tel Aviv, and I soon realize it's different when the chaos of passport control means that foreign nationals are waiting over an hour to get through, and I am asked why I don’t have an Israeli passport even though I lived here only until I was four.

Outside my relatives have been waiting for an hour, and it all feels a shambles.

First impressions – there’s a confidence about the place that I don’t remember.  There’s also a friendliness I don’t remember.  People help me with directions when I don’t even ask ‘what do you need?’ they say.

I’m reminded of the words of the song ‘it’s been seven hours and fifteen years since you took your love away’.  Instead I think seven years.  It's been seven years since I've been here.  But for better or worse, nothing really does compare to this place.