חידלון

In a pleasent room filled with family and overlooking orange groves, lies a woman who wants to die. She's been lonely for too long, ill for too long, alive for too long. Yesterday a psychiatrist came to see her in her hospital bed. "I want to die," my grandmother told him, out of her constant slight daze and from across a complex web of plastic tubes that are stuck in various parts of her body.

"How will you die?" he asked.

"I'll jump out the window. No wait, if I jump from here I'll just wound myself. I'll climb up to the roof and jump from there."

The psychiatrist hurried and instructed the nurses to move her bed away from the window, which my family found hilarious. My grandmother suffers from fractures in several major bones and cancer in almost every internal organ. She can't get out of bed, never mind "jump" in any sense of the word. It doesn't take intimate knowledge of her wry sense of humor to figure out that what she really needed was a stroke of her hair and the words: "I understand".

Today, however, she was not in a humorous mood. "I feel that the end is near," she told my father, out of a deeper daze than usual.

"How do you know?" he asked, "What do you feel that makes you say that?"

"A sense of khidalon," she replied.

Neither my Hebrew-English nor my Hebrew-French dictionaries even bother to translate "khidalon". It is a derivative of the root "khadal" - to cease, most neatly translatad as nothingness. In this context it conveys a powerful nihilistic void, a feeling that the force of life doesn't drive you anywhere anymore and that you ceased to have a future.

My grandmother Shulamit was born in Romania and brought up speaking Romanian and French. While a genius at crossword puzzles, she's not ever been a poet. I'm awed by how she used a single rare Hebrew word to answer such a difficult question, and how perfectly it worked. Too bad she later used similarly high vocabulary (the word "Mish'i") to express her hope that I trim my beard more neatly. I love her so much and I wish for her whatever she truly needs.

1918, 2004, 2007

It can happen twice in a decade or twice in a day for all I care. When the Red Sox win the world series - that's history.

Last time it happened was right after Israeli hip-hop suit Hadag Nahash performed in Boston's theater district. The only way I could convey to the band the magnitude of what just happened was to say: "The world has just come to an end." I invited them to go out with me and hug random strangers in what might be the most impersonal city in America.

In honor of that city, the one that taught me dedication and perseverance, that introduced me to the ninth inning stretch and to the true meaning of obsession, here's an on-point piece from "The Onion", published a couple of days before the current win.

Mystery

I made a mistake, rather then rest and recover after the surgery, I decided to write an article for Time Out Tel-Aviv, and uncover a mystery.

The project was to tell the story of a lie and if possible find out the truth behind it. A mysterious female poet named Tze'ela Katz was responsible for several biting poems published in the cult magazine "Ma'ayan", for an active website and for hundreds of Internet comments and emails, many of them subversive and insulting.

New's of Katz's death were first given two weeks ago on the blog of Ma'ayan's editor, Roy "Chicky" Arad. The rumor soon spread that she was fiction - a nom de plume of a man, perhaps several men. could this be so?

Trying to dig into the story involved getting in touch with a lot of interesting figures in the Tel-Avivian literary and artistic underground. It also cost me my health. Someone started stalking me under a false name, threatening me via email, mocking my temporary inability to speak, discrediting me before my editors and sending cryptic phone messages.

When the article got published, with a fair bit of praise to the artistic endeavor and only a hint to the mystery's solution, he called to apologize.

I figure that this man, a talented and sharp high tech professional, is responsible for at least the majority of Tze'ela Katz's texts. He was afraid of being uncovered, worried that all journalists are there to trash people, and spun into what appeared to me as some sort of a paranoid episode.

I respect his needs and won't publish his name here. I will say, however, that whimsical musician A.B. Dan, who was named as Katz on her website one day after publication, wasn't the primary figure in the project.

The full story features a nocturnal journey into a basement in Tel-Aviv's dead suburb of Nes Tziona, where a memorial service to Katz was held. It includes several emotional late night exchanges and a climax involving Time Out's editor in chief and publisher. Rather than go into all that, I'd like to present you with a translation of a Tze'ela Katz poem. It is the art, after all, that matters.

(Notes for the foreign reader: "Superpharm" is an Israeli chain of drug stores, where perfumes and make-up products are available along with pharmaceutical goods. "Burger-Ranch" is a chain of fast food restaurants. the word "overdraft" is used in Hebrew as is, to imply a checking account minus.)


Superpharm / Tze'ela Katz

1.
Don't drip sun on me
Take me to the Superpharm

2.
The word Superpharm has a young sound,
Like Burger-Ranch or Overdraft

3.
I'd like for you to shave your chest hairs
Before we go into the Superpharm
I'm mad at all the women of the world
How is it possible to enter the Superpharm in peace?

4.
You remind me of the days
When I can hardly fall asleep
Afterwards my sense of smell sharpens
And entering the superpharm becomes a nightmare

5.
All girls go to the souk and to the Superpharm
The superpharm's design says beautification
The souk's design says discrimination

Actually
The souk's design says: "There's fish sold here
Here you won't pay for sex"

6.
The orange vendor at the souk says:
"Half to eat and half for juice."
He knows how to talk to a woman.

Picturing myself at the Superpharm
buying orange-chocolate
flavoured condoms.

Talkboard

Still a few days before I am allowed to break the silence, in the meantime I received a thousand words to share - my father finally managed to send a photo of me at the hospital taken by his cellphone.

So he's dealing with high tech communication technology, while I present my simple "talkboard". Somehow, both of us manage to get through in the end.

A söchtener Reuter möcht i wern, wie mein Voater gwen is

One morning in the year 1828, as the sun came over the town square of Nurnberg, a teenaged boy was seen standing motionless in its midst, holding out a letter.

In the letter was a request that the good people of Nurnberg take care of the chap, Since he's been held in complete isolation since infancy and has not even the ability to speak. His name was Kaspar Hauser, as is known to all who've watched the beautiful Werner Herzog film: "Every Man for Himself, and God Against All", which is based on this true story.

Hauser was the victim of atrocious and bizzare abuse. The hand that wrote the letter was possibly also the hand that held him prisoner, and the one that murdered him, a few years later, with an ax. It isn't true, however, that he could not speak at all. He could say this one sentence, in a heavy South German dialect: "I want to be a gallant rider like my father was before."

No one is quite sure to this day what this sentence means. To me, tonight, it means a lot. See, I can't even say that. I am completely mute following my surgery, running a one man vipasana workshop in the midst of a very talkative town. I walk around with a little notebook trying to convey my needs. I confuse my friends, not all of whom know how to handle my situation. Strangers are convinced I'm hearing impaired, and the many pretty women of Tel-Aviv are generally unapporachable to me until I heal, in a week or so.

In such a situation, one just wants to yell something out, to make a statement in bold red type. This is why I put Kaspar Hauser's inimitable phrase as a title over this text. Let this be my message to the world, I want to be one too.

4'33"

Tomorrow morning I am to be operated on my vocal cords. Consequently I will lose the ability to speak for a week.

In honor of this experience I am presenting you with a clip of 4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music compesed entirely of silence.

While the work was initially composed for the piano, this is its full orchestral rendition.

Season's Greetings

This Eid Al-Fitr is a time of good tidings, beginning with a surprise email from Gloeta Massie, one of the world's great travelers. My poetry is being reviewed for a cool anthology of new Hebrew verse. Lin is finally getting money she was owed from Israel, while her stepfather Jay is retiring and heading for the life at sea he's always dreamt of. Al Gore and Doris Lessing got the Nobel. Only bad news is that Ramadan lights will now be taken down and the neighborhood will be a little less colorful.

Oh, big deal, it's pretty colorful anyway.