You've Seen One City, You've Seen Them All

O my hometown, I love you and I failed you. I betrayed you by leaving home for the day without my camera. There was still time to turn back when I hit Yeffet street. There, breaking my stride, was the Greek-Orthodox boy and girl scouts' easter march, complete with a bagpipe band. I chose to use my cellphone cam.


Then, when I met Daiva for a Sudanese lunch at the refugee quarter, it was already too late. No way to properly depict the impromptu decor of the restaurant's terrace. No way to capture the tangy aroma of the lamb and injera. The photo of the roll of toilet paper served to us as a napkin failed completely.


We then went to Daiva's place to break bread with salt for the holiday. She decorated eggs and we cracked them against each other in her own Lithuanian tradition. (notice the matza peeking from behind. That matza was blessed in a church.)

Armed with more decorated eggs, we walked to Jaffa and cracked a few with Itka, drank Lithuanian honey snapps in a little alleyway, scaled the fences of the old port's shipyards and met the mediterranean waters on both sides of the great jetty. O my city, How could I do this to you, snapping you with the cellphone cam as if you were a mere yishuv kehilati?

As the sun set, we went looking for a mimouna party. That evening marked the beginning of festivities for Morrocan Jews. They mark the birth of great scholar Mimonedes with a table full of sweets and dances in colorful garb. As you can see, we found a proper one. Seen dancing are Daiva, Kochavit and Itka, perfect partners with whom to expore Tel-Aviv-Yaffo-Glasgow-Khartoum-Vilnius-Casablanca on yet another typical day. O my city, it's anyway so impossible to frame you and shrink you into a snapshot, I might as well no worry and focus on the sweets.

A Voice from Ajami

For three years now I've been living in a neighborhood that gave its name to a cinematic sensation (technically across the street from it, but not in any more glorious surroundings). Itka moved here a year ago from another, equally interesting part of Jaffa. She one-upped me as an Ajamite, though: She actually watched the film.

So today, when my friend and hard-working journalist Anna Kemper wrote from Berlin, it was Itka she needed. Since Copti and Shani's "Ajami" got its Oscar nomination, Interest around it grew in Europe. Anna was looking for an insider's perspective and got perhaps more than she bargained for. I remember Itka returning from the cinema ill at ease after watching Ajami. Amidst the white noise of appreciation, she voiced reservation, having sensed a whiff of exploitation.

What she wrote today begs to be featured here as a guest text. Here it is, accompanied by photos both of us have taken over the past two years.

Dear Anna,

Had the film "Ajami" been given a different, fictional name and featured professional actors, I would say it's a good action movie, but "Ajami" is named after a real neighborhood in which I live, and features real people, whom I know. For this reason I felt a great discomfort watching it. I found the reality of Ajami to be distorted in the film in several ways.

There are many problems of violence in Ajami, but they are portrayed as being similar to those of any big city slum. The story here is different. The problems stem from the government's racist policies which define Israeli Arabs as 2nd degree citizens, and have contibuted to turning West Bank and Gaza Palestinians into the victims of human rights violations.

When the makers of Ajami reveal, they reveal partially. When they keep an issue hidden, it's hidden entirely. The biggest problem in Ajami today is the housing. This problem is not even mentioned in the film! during the war of 1948, many Arabs fled from their houses. Israel took possession of those houses. In most of them the government settled Jews and in some neighborhoods, such as Ajami and the old city of Acco, Arabs.

Since then, most of the houses in ajami belong to the state and the tenants are paying rent even if they used to own the house before the war. Today, the real estate sharks are discovering the nice, old beachfront neighborhood and are promoting a fast, cruel gentrification process in which a lot of the tenents are kicked out with no housing solution. the houses in north Ajami are now all gated mansions worth millions of dollars.

There's always been a Jewish minority in Ajami, living for the most part in peace with its neighbors. "Ajami" the film focuses on confrontations and tensions that exist between Jews and Arabs in Israel, But I find most relationships between the two groups in this specific neighborhood to be good and warm.

Yes, there's a crime issue here, and the usual baggage, but politically driven murders such as the one described in the film are exceedingly rare. Compared with mixed neighborhoods in such towns as Ramle and Lod, Ajami fares well. It is actually a good example of Arab/Jewish coexistance, if you rule out the yuppies that come to live in their palaces up north.

The main story, that of a teenage shot by mistake, is real. But Ajami has so many good things going for it. Good community life, solidarity, beautiful spots and a unique energy. Almost none of this is present in the film. The hardship of Ajami is caused by a political reason, and that isn't present in the film either. The filmmakers present real problems, but don't reveal their significant source. If they can't deal with these issues, they should have named the film "Faaadlu" and set it in some imaginary land.

Best,

Osnat Ita Skoblinski

Smoke on the Water

There was a double rainbow over Jaffa today, it's raining intermittenly and the air is fresh. This makes me want to write about smoke.

Like salmon and salami, wintery cities are best consumed smoked. I remember Prague in the 1990s. What was it the burned in the fireplaces? It smelled great, anyway. The same odor met me on the wooden allyways of Istanbul's run down Fatih quarter, a decade later. I watched an old woman chopping wood in her doorway, but this wasn't the smell of burning wood, or peat, it was the smell of a city hiding from it's own skies, sowing a down comforter of mysterious smog to shield itself from brutal February.

February isn't brutal around here, and the only smoke on the street is that of apple-sweetened tobacco. shisha smoke, nargila smoke, or hookah pipe, as you will. This is the smell of winter for me. When I first put the foreign, forbidden nozzle into my mouth it was in Bethlehem, on New years' eve of 1999. It rained so hard over the nativity square that my friends and I had to escape into a cloister. A bunch of Palestinian highschool kids were smooking their "tufah" there, beating on a tin pot and singing.

I took enough puffs to learn what I would later know too well, that nargila is hard stuff, that one head of it is equivelent to two packs of cigarettes, that after smoking one by onerself, the contour of one's lungs is clearly felt within one's ribs and that it's nonetheless a delight.

Then there was Cairo in January, the scent attacking you as soon as you stepped out of the building. Not that wintery a city, you would think, and be very wrong. A grim sky over the Nile at sunset welcomed us into a freezing dining experience on a blufftop overlooking the town. The restaurant consisted of a nothing but a terrace. Only a hot porridge called "Oum Ally" could save us, that and the blessed little charcoals, crackling over the bubbling pot.

And there was Berlin, just recently, walking up the Karl Marx Strasse in the snow for a puff of home, with Marieke and Julian and Kike from Cuba. The hooka bar was full of ageing Palestinians who may or may not have welcomed me had they known where I was from. The smoke was the same smoke, it went well with the queit of the street afterwards, with the murmur of the fresh snow pressed under our feet, with the mix of German and spanish and the odd line of a Hebrew song.

Sometimes, when I want this place to just go up in smoke, I remember that it is billowing smoke, much more so than Berlin, in the least. I then go down to Hamouda and Abed's place by the sea and inhale a few carcenogens, just a few, in the good quiet company of Ajami's card players. Today, with the streets neatly washed as to mirror double rainbows, Jaffa doesn't seem too cruel. It certainly doesn't seem helpless. The heating is scarce which lets us all show off our scarves, so rarely used. The waves, a few hundred yards away, are grey and cruel like clouds over London's chimnies. No cannons are firing, it's a good time to light the peace pipe.

Beagle

I've never owned a dog. I've never even owned a goldfish. I grew up in a blissfully tailless household, under the impression that dogs are smelly, drooly creatures (which they are, let's face it.) Don't get me wrong. I love dogs. I think they are super cute, I just never wanted to call one my own.

You marry a woman - you marry her family, so goes the old saying. When you enter a relationship with a girl who owns a dog, you enter a relationship with whatever dog she fancied before you were around to consult. In the case of Itka, it's Misha: a rather massive, black Amstaf and Labrador combination. Misha is one of the kindest creatures on the face of this planet (second only to her owner) but she's a little dumb and definitely drooly. Moreover, having spent her youth as a stray dog, she's way fond of trash. A good way to break the current speed record for a living creature would be to take her miles away from the nearest pile of trash, then set her free. She will dash like a bullet to that pile of trash and start feasting, afraid as ever that this is her last supper.

Now picture me, fagile urban bastard that I am, pulling her out of the trash. I never even pulled a goldfish out of the trash. However, dear readers, I am excited about the owner of this dog and the things that have been hapenning to us. Our shift from best friends to lovers is one of the most moving things that have ever happened to me. If I want it to last, I must become more of a Doolitle. I'm putting my heart into it.

Then last night Itka went out with Misha for a stroll and failed to come back. An hour passed, the dishes were done, and I headed out to look for her. Jaffa at night shouldn't be dangerous for a girl accompanied by an Amstaf, but what do you know.

The danger came from an unexpected direction. As Itka approached me down lamppost lit Lamartin St. I saw that she's accompanied by another dog. "It took me an hour to make him follow me" she complained, "look at him! he's a puppy, three months old, maybe four."

This puppy is about half the size of Misha, which is much, but he's indeed a puppy, a scared puppy. A handsome mutt, he's blessed with a patch of sharpei squeezy wrinkled fur on his forhead, which makes him look both contemplative and extra adorable. His eyes are super-sad, perhaps partially due to an eye infection, I wouldn't know. He squeeks every once in a while when the new company intimidates him, he's to die for, but hold it a minute. "Look," I tell Itka, "I may have to stay at my place tonight until he gets shots and stuff. I don't know if I'm capable of sleeping in the same house with a stray dog." I've only just gotten used to waking up with Misha slumped over me. I know my limits.

Itka promised to spray him gainst ticks and fleas and lock him for the night on the balcony. She's not intending to keep him. A Jaffa apartment can hold up to one canine. "There are lots of stray dogs in jaffa," she explained to me, "but this one has a chance, he's young, good looking, someone will take care of him, so it doesn't make sense to leave him for the neighborhood kids to torment." Later that night, outside a bar coincidentally named "the Cat and the Dog," we met our beloved friend Y. the spy and decided that she would make a wonderful owner.

"I do want a dog," Y. the spy admitted, "But I want a beagle. I've literally been having dreams of owning a beagle."

This clashed with Itka's worldview, "You mean you're intending to buy a dog?"

"What can I do, I'm dying for a beagle."

"You can name him Beagle," I suggested. Y the spy said she'll think about it. Meanwhile Itka and I returned to a house with two dogs. I slept only too well (though you'd be naive to think Beagle stayed on the balcony), then spent breakfast staring transfixed at how they played some kind of a pretend-biting game with each other. Misha was at her finest, perfectly hospitable and kind. She seemed determined to make little Mr. Beagle feel at home. Itka was doing a wonderful job juggling two dogs and a caninophobic boyfriend. There was special harmony at the apartment this morning, smelly, drooly harmony, the best kind.

I'll conclude with a passage from a children's book by the inimitable Yoram Kaniuk. Sometime in the seventies, when living on a relatively rural area outsied Tel-Aviv, his home became a literal zoo, complete with a donkey. In his book "The House in which Cockroaches Reach Ripe Old Age" he describes a girl and her mother who keep adopting animals to the horror of the father. At one point he exclaims: "That's enough! There are fish here, there are cockroaches and mosquitoes, there's Vered the dog, there's Tanchoum the cat with her kitties and grandkitties, to say nothing of the donkey and the hedgehogs and the turtle. Not another dog!"

But later on he's being interviewed on television as the head of the most colorful household in Israel and suddenly the whole menagerie makes him very proud. At the very end he even cries when one of the cockroaches dies.

Beagle found a loving home in Jerusalem and is renamed Che. Thanks to all who offered to adopt him.

Tarweea

In the pocket of my late grandfather's leather jacket, my favorite hand-me-down/heirloom, I find a wrapped chocolate cube. It was served by the coffee at Ramallah cafe "Tarweea" and bears its logo. Tarweea, if I am not mistaken, is Arabic for "peace of mind".

I take the wrapped chocolate out and put it under the glass of my living room coffee table, along with the stone from Lebanon, the old book of Lenny Bruce routines, the cork of a champagne bottle that flew on some good night, over a year ago, and the small weaved memento of Baku, given to me by an Azeri friend in a place that is neither here nor Baku. I put on my grandfather's jacket and go out for a walk with Itka and Efros.

The sea is a deep cobalt, gushing underneath suspended concrete slabs of the new Ajami boardwalk. Above are the tiled pyramid rooftops of old ottoman buildings and a lighthouse painted with red and white stripes. Crumbling fishing vessles float calmly in a basin used continually for 4000 years, surrounded the smell of cooking squid and the exclamations of Asian tourists, awed by the sunset. I've never loved my friends like this, never been through difficult times with such a sense of calm, and yet rarely been so happy to be gently stepping out of them. This evening it's happening. If life is a journey in the pursuit of Tarweea, I have somehow docked at a safe harbour.

Beautiful, like Prophecies

When I moved into my Jaffa home, I bought myself a mezuzah: that little box that is attached to the door frame at the entry to every Jewish home. My neighbors in the building and around are mostly Muslim and Christian. I came to live in peace among them and hence felt fully comfortable in showing some cultural uniqueness.

The neighbors treated the mezuzah with full respect, but the neighborhood kids acted as kids would, removed it somehow from the door frame, and vanished with its content. Inside each mezuzah is rolled a tiny scroll bearing a biblical inscription commending Jews to love God. Since loving is not an act that can be willingly performed, but rather a feeling that stems from the heart, Judaism developed the mezuzah - a little box of love - as a symbolic form of observing the commandment.

I went to town and bought a new ceramic mezuzah for 12 sheqels, then felt conflicted. Should I really put 90 sheqels more into the scroll? these scrolls are made by special traditional scribes, they can't be gotten for any less than that, and what if the kids tear it off again? will I just spend the rest of my Jaffa days Sysiphically traveling to Allenby to buy more and more tiny scrolls, investing all my money and time in something I don't honestly believe in except as some pretty tradition?

Then I had an idea. The previous day I found and purchased a used copy of Yehuda Amichai's book of poetry "Behind all of This, Great Happiness is Hiding". In it was my single favorite poem in the Hebrew language, the one caled "Royal Love song". It begins thus:

You are beautiful, like prophecies,
And sad, like those that are fulfilled.
Silent with the silence of the aftermath
Black in the white solitude of Jasmine
Sharp fangs in the mouth: a she-wolf and a queen.

It's really not much of a sacred text, unless you believe, as I do, that sex is truly holy, and that no beauty is complete without darkness. Here's another bit:

You are beautiful like prophecies that are not fulfilled,
and this is the royal scar:
With the tongue, to pass over it, with the sharpened hand
Over the sweet roughness.

With hard shoes you knock
back and forth bars over me
Your wild rings
Are sacred leprosy of your fingers.

I ripped out the page, rolled it into the mezuza, then glued it to the wall with the toughest industrial glue I could find.

Since them, whenever I became a bit unlucky, I'd always wonder whether that was a good idea. a Jewish superstition has it that if things go wrong around the house, the mezuzahs should be examined with a magnifying glass for flaws. perhaps the scribe slightly misspelled something and thus inflicted the house's dwellers with cancer, financial collapse, etc.

Thankfully, I suffer from neither, but the past few weeks have been difficult, especially financially. this Sunday morning I woke up dreading the morrow: the first day of the month, when both my credit card bill is charged to my account and my rent is due. I was dealing with several difficult matters, worried about myself and others, feeling rather out of love and lonely, in short, distressed.

This is just when the best day of my year began. I got an offer to write regularly for the nation's most powerful newspaper, saved a book deal that was about to tank and successfully fought against a bad deal that was to scam me out of royalties for another book. miraculously fixed an annoying flaw in my bike, realizing while doing so that I have lost weight: my pants kept slipping off at I bent, threatening a plumber's exposure to passersby on Salame St.

I got everything fixed just in time for a casual lunch with a profoundly attractive, intelligent and unique acquaintance of mine. It turned into a truly romantic date that lasted well into the night. We went to watch "Four Minutes", a random German film, picked by name. somehow it turned out to deal with everything we were talking about beforehand and be a monumental piece of cinema neither of us will ever forget.

On arriving home I found, on the mat before my door (there my neighbors bring my mail from the box as neighborly courtesy), an envelope containing a check some publication owed me. It was for 2425 sheqels. My rent, due on that same date, stands at 2300.

On the envelope lay the mezuzah. It fell from the doorframe despite the heavy duty glue. When I picked it up, "Royal Love Song" fell out of it. I read a verse:

Out of the ground emerges
all that I wished never to see again
column and windowframe, portico and jar, shatters of wine.

Make of my tale what you will, but this is not going back in.

A is

A is for art

A pile of cobblestones on the floor of a museum, each imprinted with the words: "weapon of the proletariat".

B is for birds

A huge flock of geese forms the contour of a clipper ship in the evening sky above Jerusalem's Mouristan square. The fountain is working once more, kids kick a football against an old stone wall.

C is for cancer

My friend G. stands by his macchinetta, making both of us ridiculously strong coffee that is to keep me awake for much of the night. "Mann tracht on gott lacht," he says in Yiddish. "man plans and god laughs."

He has a long scar along his throat from the removal of his thyroid gland. At first I don't know how to relate to his experience, then I remember that I have gone through a divorce. "Not really comparable, but I guess we're both going through the things that make up life."

"Yeah, grown up stuff," he says.

D is for Downtown Lover

Back in my life? maybe yes, maybe no. The other day she was in a taxi, about to get off. The driver saw a guy hailing a cab by the corner and asked if she would mind him picking that guy up. She didn't mind, nor look to see who it was.

E is for eventide

"The night, it has a thousend eyes / the day has only one," quoth the poet. The sexy time of day is not a time of day, and it is crawling into the streets outside my window as I write.

F is for freedom

Walking up Ben-Yehuda St. after two days of hard work, bumping into an aquiantance and pulling him into the Mersend for a cuppa. The afternoon is vast. Roni rolls in on roller blades, posting posters for a poetry event. Kamer pops in, wearing one of his grandpa swaters. I want to interview him on radio Tuesday night, when I'll be studio commentator on the U.S. elections (late late on Galatz Radio). Omer appears with a copy of Haaretz and an easy smile. Obama this, Obama that, Then we all fly away to other places.

G is for gusts of wind

More of those are soon to come.

H is for Mitch Hedberg

"I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too."

I is for the Indigo Girls

Dorky though it is, I've had "Mystery", "Ghost" and "Galileo" playing in my head for a month now.

J is for Jewification of Jaffa

A major issue I have with the current mayor's policies (at least with his crew's), and especially now before the municipal elections. In Israel the term Jewification is considered legitimate. The idea: populating areas that have Arab majorities with as many Jews as possible, in order to "claim" them.

When looking for apartments in Jaffa you will often hear the agent saying: "currently there are many Arabs here, but we're working hard to Jewify the neighborhood and there have already been positive developements aplenty."

K is for kites

The Kite vendor at Charles Clore Park is tying a few samples of his merchendise to a metal railing. There's something both gloomy and hip about watching an elderly, disheveld man flying numerous jolly dragons at once.

L is for love

M is for McCain

Not a bad chap, it seems, but not the sharpest POW in the pencilbox either.

N is for new book project

Still confidential.

O is for Obama

I was there when it started: Democratic national convention, Boston 2004. The Illinois delegation, right by my booth, was going crazy. Obama gave the famous "thin boy with a funny name" speech. Only clinton spoke better.

P is for Park Slope

Where my Friend Erika is sitting and chatting with me right now, making me miss the world once again.

Q is for queers

For a while I knew no one in Tel Aviv who was gay. This is changing, to my delight. There's a sense of humor and an approach to the world that only gay people have. Lose sight of the their society and you lose more then one color in the day to day existance.

R is for Lou Reed

Who is in the city tonight, performing before luckier people that I.

S is for scarves

Girls in autumn look so lovely.

T is for Togo

I'm showing a group of Togolese visitors around the country these days. Took them to the "Jerusalem Hotel" in Sheikh Jarah, had coffee and a cigarette, listened to their chat, realized the Togolese are the cutest people in the world.

U is for Unicum

This liquor I brought from Hungary has to be the nastiest tasting thing on earth, yet I'm finishing the bottle at high speed. Things that taste like medicine are highly marketable early in the flu season.

V is for Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I've been told it's fantastic. If anyone wants to join me for it, let me know.

W is for bad memories

Such bad memories.

X is for xi

I miss scrabble. This Downtown Lover thing had better work out.

Y is for Yad Vashem

Walking out of the long corridor of the Jerusalem Holocaust Museum, I have to wait by the railing of a balcony, overlooking a cluster of forested hills, for a member of our party still inside. Consequently, I spend ten minutes looking at the faces of the people coming out. Each one of them has learned something new and it shows in their eyes. I can't help but admire the corridor and those responsible for filling it with life and with death.

They even kept the whole "everything's fine now that we have our own country" bit in the end distinctly subdued and minimal. It's there, but not so badly. I hate when the Holocaust is presented as nothing more than a sad prologue to the heroic Zionist story. Yad Vashem remains dignified.

Z is for ZZZZZZ

Gotta take a nap now. There's so much life going on, it's tiring, and the Unicum doesn't help perk me up (turns out it's no medicine). See y'all in morning light.

International Salad Day

International Salad Day is an ancient rite that was first celebrated in 1999, when I lived in Neve Tzedek. Lin and I later developed it into a proper holiday to rival christmas. It takes place the day after the first autumnal rain falls in Jerusalem.

That was yesterday, and that rain washed out a couple of great residents of Jerusalem through the wadis and down to my place on the coast. Some of these are old friends, some new, none is a native of the city: Ora is from Nottingham, Elisabeth from Toronto, Lev is from Ljubliana. Naomi from New York, and Juanpa from Santiago de Chile. We began the festivities by playing the holiday's traditional game: "the name game", a pleasent way of humiliating oneself.

Everyone stayed over.

The morning was rainier than the one before. Religious festivals aside, there is something about the first rains of the season that stirs the profound spiritual core of an Israeli. We become all nostrils, all moistened scalp, all dialing fingers,

all chopping hands,

The festive breakfast went beyond salad (we are not that deeply observant), there was Black Forest schinken from Germany (Elisabeth gave up keeping kosher in order to try it!) coffee from "Paul's" and smoked salmon from "Rusky Delikates", my favorite Jaffoite salami and kvas emporium. The conversation went places where only rainy day conversations go. We ate enough to keep us going till November, when "International day of the Returner" (time of returning things that were borrowed and borrowing new stuff) will be celebrated in great pomp.

Women

There were about thirty guys at Hamooda's Nargila place tonight, all cheering for Turkey, which played beautifully against the invincibly determined Germans. In Palestinian-Israeli Jaffa it's typical to side with the team wearing red, be it Hapo'el Tel-Aviv, associated with left leaning (i.e. pro-Palestinian) Israel, or B'nei Sachnin, which is Palestinian-Israeli to begin with. Tonight too I felt that the support stemmed from a sense of cultural connection. The Arabs of Jaffa look more like the Turks then like the Germans, they share the Turks' cuisine and follow the same religion.

What most of them don't realize is that there's a deep gap in culture between them and the Turks, one that displayed itself strongly tonight. I've been to Nargila joints in turkey and they were full of women. There were religious girls wearing Hijabs exhaling white, apple scented smoke next to modern girls in jeans. In Hamooda's place girls are welcome. I've sat there with Efros, with Osnat, with downtown lover and with several feminine out-of-town guests, but I've never seen a woman there that I did not know and tonight there were indeed none.

There's no shortage of female football fans. The cameras in Basel showed bleachers full of ladies wearing both white and red, waving the German tricolor and the Turkish crescent. Angela Merkel jumped up in joy when Klose opened a 2:1 advantage on the 79th minute. At her parents home near Jerusalem, downtown lover was meanwhile biting her nails in hope for the Turks to get even. When the game ended at 3:2 for Germany, my only condolance was the notion that the biggest football fan I know, Anna Kemper, is rejoicing somewhere in Berlin.

So why was the Jaffa crowd so homogenous? Arab society in Israel and Palestine is just too patriarchal. Living so much within this society, this is one thing I find difficult to come to terms with. I remember being envious when seeing how sexually diverse Istanbul's cafes are. Though I'm sure things are far from perfect for Turkey's women, It turns out it's possible for a Middle Eastern, muslim nation to be more open towards the place of women in society. In Turkey this can't be blamed on occidental, colonialist influence. There's some form of homegrown acceptence of women being out and about there and too little of it at Hamooda's tonight. This may or may not change eventually. In the meantime it's Germany 3, Turkey 2, Jaffa 0.

Well Fed

I get to eat terribly well these days, and I mean terribly well. First there's my gig as restaurant critic for the Haaretz website. They make me do such things as compare brands of raw tahini, but also send me to places like Orca, a gourmet restaurant on Nachalat Binyamin Street, in Tel-Aviv.

A lunch for two in that seriously designed environment cost 400 shekels (about 130 US$) and featured small crustini topped with a sublime truffle spread. Actually, anything that comes with truffle is sublime, you put it in your mouth and just can't believe it's happening to you. I once attended a bachelors' party of a beloved friend who happens to be quite affleunt. It began at another high end culinary institute: Yoezer Bar Ya'yin in Jaffa, where each dish of the dinner contained truffles. I danced hard that night.

Yesterday it was another one of my many occupations that landed me in a posh local dining room. I was guiding a group of Austrian tourists, friends of a dear friend who gradually became new friends of my own. They know Tel-Aviv well enough from past visits and wanted to see it's deep end, its undiscovered corners. I took them to Florentine and to the spice market on Levinsky Street, then later to the A'jami district in Jaffa. They all dealt quite well with the hardcore grit that marks the south side, but preffered to eat their lunch uptown, at famed, seafront Raphael.

It was there, enjoying a cured veal tongue and roasted blue squid, that I came to muse about Israeli haute cuisine and suddendly truly appreciate it. Of the three restaurants mentioned here, Raphael is the most profoundly Israeli. In the past it offered French baresserie fair with touches of the meditteranean, of North African (especially Lybian) Jewish diaspora cooking and other flavours simmering in Israel's melting pot. Its new menu shows of a coming of age. The dishes are simply local but they are Raphael local, sophisticated local, beautiful local. They don't even need truffles to be imported from the Italian Piemonte, and nor, so it seems, would many of the meals served in this country in years to come. I just hope to be asked out to taste these meals because as it is I'm best equipped to be fed on the other end of Israeli cuisine, featuring our most original and poetic manifestation of east meets west: the famed schnizel in a pita.

What it looks like

It looks like summer and summer feels like an hallucinogen. It looks like Efros coming in from the desrt or from the Sinai (deeper desert, further south), bangles and all, and we go to smoke a Nargila at Fadi's cafe. Efros teaches me a phrase in Arabic: "You won't be a moon unless you vanish."

We vanish from the cafe with Ita who just returned from L.A. and with Fadi himself, a 6'6" collosus. Fadi begs of Ita to avoid repeating her fond Hollywood party experience of snorting cocain. "I know what I'm talking about. I've been there for ten years, I took, I traded, I did everything."

We drive to the greengrocer's and shop for stir fry ingredients.

It's always late at night except when it's rough, punishing day. Fadi takes Efros to pick up his girlfriend who's going through rehab at a Jaffa facility and take her to the beach. Two women lean against the wall, their mouths agape, they're experiencing withdrawl. "Look how feeble the human being can be" he tells her, then adds "We should bring Ita here".

I was down too, punished by the days, taking in too much whisky, coffee and tobacco. Downtown lover left her job for all the good reasons. 500 Palestinian families in Jaffa are being kicked out of their homes because they failed to register their ownership of properties in Turkish times (i.e. pre 1917) and now the land is coveted by real estate sharks who have friends in appropriate places. The walls are full of wrathful posters. I take a genral in the Togolese army for a tour of Jerusalem. I take international conceptual artists for a tour of Jerusalem, I MC an event dealing with contemporary Israeli comics and graphic novels.

Keeping a spare shirt in the backpack.

What does it look like? It looks like headlines. Don't look at the headlines, not at the mess on the desk, nor at the floors. No matter how often I wipe them, they're filthy, no matter how well I do the dishes, they're just filthy, and the tiny little flies, I don't know where they come from. I clean this kitchen constantly and kill all the spiders with my copy of Agi Mishol's "collected poems". It's perfect for that. perfect size: not too heavy, not too light, enough surface, hardcover.

And somehow it's always a festival: week of the hebrew book, Jerusalem performing arts festival, a nocturnal flea market event. Oh, that we can't miss. Ita opens a stand of literary reviews and underground literature. We bring the guitar and the booze. Then it's off to Zika for grilled beef tonsils (delicious, I swear), with Chicky and flashki, Efros and downtown lover. It looks like summer, the right kind of summer, until I get a stomach ache and have to go to bed.

Charles Clore Park Embankment Haiku #4

I've been writing less recently. nothing the matter, I've simply been writing more recently - working on a literary project, that is. So far, this one works like it should: it drains me to the bone. I empty myself on the page (okay, file) each day, and so there's relatively little left to bring here.

However, since I love my blog readers and they are always on my mind, here's the full set of Charles Clore Park embnakment haikus, including the latest addition: springtime.

Looking over dark,
Warm waves at two in the morn -
One sad pious Jew.

Migrating sparrows,
a sliver moon and a kite
look down at the sun.

Wearing long, dark coats
A disharmonic choir of
Drunk Palestinians.

Walking back at morn
From my lover's downtown flat
To Jaffa's poppies.

I'll soon return to full form with more astounding tales, irreversible exposures of my political nature, musings on disposable pieces of 18th century recorder music and the occasional photographed mountain. See ya'll!

My Horrible Job

My horrible job demanded that I compare different international makes of beer for an article.


Thankfully, I had help,


and time for a smoke break.

Intense beer tasting creates appetite. In fact, alcohol makes us oblivious to how unhungry we are after consuming tons of carbs. Beer munchies are a prime cause of beer bellies, but how can we fight them when Zika's wonderful Kebab house is down the street?


Stuffed and content we head home through sleepy, dirty jaffa, for one last sip of the winner: the rare and delightful Leff Triple.

City Poetics

On Yeffet Street, an ambulance is caught in a traffic jam. It is on its way to a car crash site, the same crash that caused the traffic jam.

Up the street, a kiosk offers cheap Mexican Tecate beer. I never saw it on sale in Israel before.

The Weekend in Review

It kicked off with our evening of erotic poetry (pictured: master of the genre Aaron Shabtai)


Then a bunch of us went and squatted at the back of the Prince.


Near the Riffraf bar there was a party and it poured out into the street.


Adam joined me the following day for lunch. He is seen here with the famous Abu Hassan queue in the background.


Then it was time to buy pickles and cheese at the delis on Jerusalem Ave.


A lazy efternoon of newspapers followed.


Saturday Jaffa was a motorist's hell


And a paradise for all who love the smell of roasting meat.


Italian soda was served at Paul's Cafe


And at home: halved petrucian sausages done in wine, mint, portabellos and yams. Peace and a great new week to all.

Four Happy Moments

1.

At 4:00 AM Vizan calls to ask me something about his new novella. "Just a second" I say, "I need to pay."

"Where are you?"

"At the AM:PM on Sheinkin. I'm buying a bag of Doritos."

He knows about my recent romance and needs not ask me what I'm doing downtown at this time, which is a pity because I would have loved to poeticize in his ears about the evening. "Why don't you come over?" he asks instead, "Haddas is here, and Sivan."

"No thanks, I really need to sleep. I'm working tomorrow."

Still, I decide to skip the cab option and walk home through the quiet streets, my mind full of soft music by Moustaki. At the entrence to the market a buxom older woman in a ragged sweatshirt pushes in front of me a supermarket cart full of large, freshly baked, hyssop topped Palestinian bagels. "So good to see you!" she exclaims, "You will kickoff my day."

I reply that I don't want a bagel, to which she responds vehemently that I have to give her a little money to supply her with luck for the day ahead and that the bagels are all from Abu Al-Afiya and what's 12 sheqels for two bagels. I barter her down to one for six (not a barter at all, I know) and head down the silent market with its closed stalls.

A bakery is open, smelling just fine. Elsewhere, a vendor of greens is arranging his stall. The night is surprisingly warm, the sea is black and full of promise of journeys to come. I make it on foot all the way to Jaffa, blissful.

2.

Daniella comes to Jaffa to interview George Hinnawi, Israel's most famous butcher. He tells her a bit about the lives of local gourmands, then lets her taste raw lamb and she loves it. When all is done she calls me to let me know she's in the neighborhood.

When she arrives with the best ground lamb the local currency can buy, I try and coax her to cook it, but we end up cooking an omelet with spinach and mushrooms and good Danish cheese and having artichoke and salad and red wine and black coffee (that she did buy) and tea with Thai condensed milk (great stuff).

At one point our mutual friend Jeff calls and invites us to go Boar hunting. He's producing a film on the pork industry in Israel and wants to join hunters in the Galilee to complete his research.

"What will we do with the boar?" Daniella asks.

"We'll skin it and eat it," I presume.

Daniella is obviously not vegetarian and she doesn't keep kosher, but she doesn't eat pork. She's a true environmentalist who cares for this world for a living. nonetheless, she will join the hunt. How cool is that?

I appreciate cool people and especially people who are fun to eat with (though Daniella will remain dear to me even if we had to fast on a desert island). She keeps saying how much she loves the city and especially its Fridays. that's funny because when you cook at home you don't know anything of what's going on in the city on Friday. On the other hand, it's spread out in its entirely outside the window and beyond the soft screen of rain.

3.

My neighbor Hamada owns a nargila joint (a "hookah dive"? what would such a thing be called in English?) just off Jerusalem Boulevard in Jaffa. I hit it tonight past midnight for some social lonelyness, planning to sit a bit like the old Palestinians do: smoking and musing innertly and silently.

The place is full of people, most of whom know me from the neighborhood. they're all doing exaclty that. There's a big T.V. screen showing a tournement of some new mix between boxing ans wrestling. I prefer traditional boxing if only for the flexible ring. When a guy gets knocked into that kind of ring it extends into the crowd and there's always a fear\hope that he would sault over it and land on someone's face. Here the ring is solid and the fighters only land on each other's faces, but they do so very passionately.

Somehow this is the perfect thing to stare at while blowing smoke in perfect peace. Maybe because there's really nothing to comments about. Every few minutes a new fight begins and some other guy gets demolished by the other. The only bit of conversation I exchange is the following dialogue with Hamada:

Me: So who do you root for?

Hamada: Only Hapoel.

Hapoel Tel-Aviv is every Jaffoite's favorite football club. To me this means that nothing matters except what you love most simply. I, for one, love sitting quietly in warm company. remembering my Irish friend Tom, who was a boxer in Boston, and how he knocked a guy out before my eyes in the second round at a U.S. Army faciliy in Dorchester, remembering friendly nargila places in Alexandria, Aqaba, Nazareth and New York, remembering that life can be as calm as apple flavored smoke.

4.

I have an extra ticket to a concert of Haydn's "The Creation". Alon the photographer "picks the glove" and joins me outside the concert hall.

Since my invitation cought him on his scooter, doing errends around town and dressed quite casually, he actually passed on the way at a shop and bought himself a sharp new shirt.

We get fifth row seats. This is great because all three soloists take a very mild and gentle approach to the singing and the acoustics hit us just right. Haydn is Haydn, completely graceful. The piece may be lithurgical but the Libretto (sung in the original English - Haydn used a German translation) is infused with values of the enlightment and somehow doesn't feel altogether religious.

Hell, it ends with a love duet, between Adam and Eve, of course.

"...But, without thee, what is to me
The morning dew, the breath of e'vn,
The Sav'ry fruit, the fragrant bloom?
With thee is every joy enhanced,
With thee delight is ever new."

"With thee is every joy enhanced," No kidding. How can I not think now of everybody who appears in this post: Vizan who casually calls me so late at night, Haddas and Sivan, though I didn't get to see them, even the bagel bandit, who ended up keeping me fed on my long walk, Daniella with her appreciation of Fridays, Jeff with his boar adventure, quiet Hamada and broken nosed Tom, Alon in his new garments and my downtown lover, who's waiting for me out in the night, making sure I'll have more material for this happy post than it can contain.

P.S.

Don't forget my show tomorrow: Saturday the 9th at 9:00 PM, Cafe Lin, Ben-Yehuda 104, Tel-Aviv. I don't promise bliss, since I never got to test the sound system there, but that should also be kinda fun.

The Balcony

Still under the weather in every sense, I spent the day at home. By now boredom has driven me to shoot details of the world as seen from my balcony. This is what the boy in the bubble must feel like.

Here's a cute architectural detail across the street.

Here's an Orthodox church in Abu-Kabir.

Here's the lawn, overgrown with wildflowers

and here's yours truly, as reflected in the neighbors' window.

As evening neared, my dear friends Osnat and Flash came over with Osnat's dog Misha, and brought me some chicken soup. The balcony turned from a place of lonelyness to one of togetherness, and the photographer's hat moved to Osnat.

I served them tea with spearmint,

played them a new song I wrote on the guitar (it's about Jerusalem)

ate the soup they brought

and fell in love.

Finally it turned too cold and we moved inside. My friends did me a lot more good than all the medicine has done so far, though the camera and the balcony deserve some credit too.