Reading

It is so hot that I have had a hard time writing. My fingers keep slipping off the keys. I am greasy. I can't see the keyboard because of the thick cloud of sweaty steam coming off my chest. How hot has it been exactly? I'm guessing something in the thirties, 33 or 34. Benjy, Lev and I couldn't get a cab today and when I asked the cabbie who finally stopped what was going on he said it was the heat, everybody was taking cabs.
I am reading The Family by Iris Leal. I had never heard of her or the book. I bought it because I wanted to read an Israeli novel and it was the smallest one I could find. I looked at a bunch of different things by Amos Oz most of whose books I read at one point or another in English, but there were a LOT of words in most of them -- hundreds, maybe thousands -- and so instead I settled on this which I read by the paragraph with a dictionary at my side. I have been writing down the words that I have looked up in the front cover. Here's a partial list.
"lie/deceive
lacking ?
absorb
nostalgia/longings
prefer
compete
grip
stock
storm"
The third from last in my list (she uses it on page 12) is the verb "hitmogeg" which means melt. (She uses it in a metaphoric sense. The narrator says that the family of the title is melting over her sister in law and brother in law, but I am not sure what it means? Are they sick of them or are they sort of fawning over them?) Anyway ani mitgogeg. I am melting in a non-metaphoric sense. I wish I could say whether I recommend the book, but I would have to understand it first.
Another literary note: my "gis" (brother in law, word number one in my front cover list), Menachem, left a copy of "Skeleton Crew" a short story collection by Stephen King in the appartment. It has a picture of a demonic little monkey on the front cover which really bugged Ariela, to the point that she would turn the book over if she came across it lying around. Let me just say that Skeleton Crew sucks. Sorry Menachem, (sorry Stephen King too). There are a few scary bits but mostly not. They are however ridiculously readable and I finished the whole book in a sort of dutiful way, including the notes at the end which provided the most genuinely horrifying bit of the whole book; he mentions in passing that his short story "The Raft" (originally titled "the Float", which conjures up images of a man-eating glass of rootbeer with ice-cream) earned him TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS back in 1970 from the skin mag that he sold it to. Now, anybody who has sweated out a short story and pedalled it around to three dozen magazines and then finally counts him/herself lucky to get it published in The Cocquitlam Community College Literary E-Journal for the big reward of TWO FREE COPIES will shake with real horror at that.

Explaining the Deep Bath metaphor a little and the bigness of Rhinos

Pamela emailed to say she doesn't get the Deep Bath. She is concerned that this may be because of her pregnancy but I think it is probably more because I just left it all very opaque, hoping it would seem, well, deep. Let me try to explain with a story. Years ago, I came to Jerusalem with my brother who had stopped in and surprised me on kibbutz while he was on a round the world jaunt. We stayed at a hostel and in the morning when we were leaving the guy at the desk stopped us. He was a young American guy, blond mid-western, not Jewish, former Marine I think he said and he was doing rip curls while he was sitting at the desk, pumping his already considerably pumped biceps. "Goin' to the Wall?" he asked. We said we were. (That's the Western Wall, the last surviving element of the Second Temple; actually a retaining wall and not a wall of the Temple itself so whether it qualifies as a piece of the Temple is up to you). It is considered by most to be the holiest sight in the world for Jews. "Your feet are gonna burn. Your gonna know you're standing on holy ground," said the guy behind the desk without interrupting his curls. He had a little bit of baptist preacher in his voice. I had been before and didn't feel my feet burn. I guess I was curious to see if it would happen this time, or if indeed I would feel any deep religious stirring though it is an impressive wall and it is impressive that Jews can now pray there freely (which they couldn't do before the war in 1967 when the Old City of Jerusalem was under Jordanian control). It is amazing to see so many people praying so intensely but I always felt left out of that intensity of feeling. And sure enough my feet did not burn when we got from the hostel to the Kotel. I had that same feeling that I should be feeling something more. A non-Jewish semper fi hayseed could feel it and I couldn't. But maybe that was just because I was looking for it, or not looking or too far gone down the road of worldliness... who knows? Then you wonder if all these people are just crazy. Anyway, I often have the feeling that everything in Jerusalem is kind of overdetermined, religiously, politically, historically. Like I am thinking about what my experience is supposed to be rather than what it is. You think the bath is deep but maybe its just a bath, even a little shorter. The heat helps with this. So do the kids.
We went to the Zoo yesterday though we did not see Aravah. The place is enormous and we got a membership since it is obvious that we will have to go back. I will say that rhinoceroses are very big and that is about all that can be said on that subject because if you try to get across in words or pictures the bigness of rhinoceroses you will just fail. I also have a story to tell about the Jerusalem central Bus station making up for the generally civilized and well-behaved travel experience we had arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, and that story will resolve the not-very-mysterious mystery of Bag number eight (see previous post) but it will have to wait. The boys start school next week everyone keep your fingers crossed. Thanks, Gala for taking care of Lev's blanket. We miss everyone at Over the Rainbow, in Montreal and Vancouver. Ariela has gret photos from the zoo, definitely check it out. Here is one that I took while we were waiting to go in.
Love J

Cyborg Tortoise Takes Over Zoo as Prelude to Wolrd Domination

Thanks to my mom who told us about Arava, the African Spurred Tortoise at the Jerusalem Zoo. Arava's back legs are paralyzed and so the zoo has built her this wheel-chair contraption. We hope to go visit the zoo this week.

The link for the photo and story is here

HOLY UNDERWEAR, BATMAN!
Lev's underoos hanging on the line outside the storage room, from whence you can see the sky if you are in the umbatia amoka.

Hey all; So congrats to Laurie from Hackensack who was the first to correctly identify our goofy message in the Zurich Airport Terminal A Kids play room guestbook. So the boys slept through the night last night, so did ariela which left me with the responsibility of lying awake and processing the day (actually ariela tells me that after I finally dozed off she woke up and did forty five minutes of yoga, probably a better use of insomnia time than going over the events of the day). So here's what I had to process of our first day. The big thing for me was speaking Hebrew again. I hadn't realized how much I missed speaking Hebrew. The fact of people speaking Hebrew in parks and on the streets is always amazing to me and I love getting to do it too. I don't know why I get such a kick out of learning odd Hebrew words but I do. We took Lev and Benjy to a little park not far from our house. There we met a little boy and girl with their caretaker. We told Benjy how to introduce himself in Hebrew and he found a likely set of candidates and went over though he was stumped once he had done that, so we came over to provide some back up and ended up chatting. The little boy told us that his family was going to Eilat for a few days. I asked if he was going to swim in the sea. He told me that he didn't know how to swim but that he could 'litzlol,' which it turns out mean dive. Now I know the word for dive is. Today, I told everybody that we were going to dive into life in Jerusalem, so as to cement litzlol in my mind. I mistook the little boy and girl for the children of the woman who was looking after them. She said they weren't her kids she was just looking after them for their "imahot" mothers. I would have gotten this in english no problem but for some reason in a second language you always make things more complicated so I tried to ask if they were cousins. The little boy straightened me out, though saying, no she's my sister and we have two mothers and a father.
Another story about language in the park. We were getting ready to leave. Ariela suggested that we go get popsicles (the heat here is pretty intense, it's over 30 every day). I said to the boys "yalla, bo nelechu liknot glida." Let's go get some ice cream, then I corrected myself and said to Benjy, "I don't know how you say popsicle in Hebrew." A man who was doing sudoku while his daughters played, smiled and asked me what word I didn't know. I told him and he filled in the gap. Kerach (literally ice) we started chatting, where are you from etc. We mentioned we'd been through switzerland on the way to Israel and he told me he had family there. "They have big problems, so may arabs are coming there. There, everywhere. They want to throw us in the sea. Since the time of Abraham. " A nice guy, three sweet girls, happy to provide a newcomer with the word for popsicle.
"They're all the same," he told me.
I said that I didn't think so, but it was clear I wasn't going to change his mind.
We said goodbye and went off to get our "kerach"
To complete the Hebrew lesson for today and to return to my theme of the other day, haumbatiah haamoka, that's The Deep Bath.

we are here

we made it. a gizzilion bajilion miles and seven hundred hours in airports -- I recommend that you read what we wrote in the guestbook of the Zurich Airport Terminal A kids playroom, just if you are passing through, under a pseudonym of course, just to make it challenging -- and now we are here in Jerusalem (Tel-Aviv airport was disappointingly orderly and the people unforgivably well-behaved. Coming from Zurich where everything runs like a swiss watch dipped in chocolate I was hoping for the full-on middle eastern garbanzo when we got out of the plane). My first act in the new digs was to take a bath... My back was killing me from lugging 7 out of 8 bags, each packed to a maximum capacity of 40 lbs. ("Why 7 out of 8?" you may ask. That is a good question that missing eighth bag. where is it, what happened to it... but more about that in future posts). Did I mention that my mother-in-laws (beautiful) appartment where we are staying is up two flights of stairs. My mild cold had also turned into plague somewhere over the Atlantic, so a bath seemed right in order for muscle relaxation and sinus draining. And guess what... When I looked at it THE BATH WAS DEEP. When I got in it, I felt it to be deep. I could also open up the door to the storage/laundry room and see a little sliver of sky. What can I say about the sky over Jerusalem? It's blue, its a little grey, a little pink. Very sky-y. And I was feeling like this was very satisfactory and possibly transplendant when I realized that being able to see the sky out of your bath is not such an unusual thing. And then it occurred to me that maybe the bath wasn't so deep. Maybe it was an optical illusion because it was so short (which was no optical illusion, it was for sure short). My knees were bent, maybe the bath just seemed deeper. Which is what happens when you go away, especially to a place like Jerusalem with an august and historic name. The bath seems deeper than a regular bath and you just can't tell if it is you, or the bath.
The boys did fabulously well on the trip and have been playing happily with a bionacle that their grandmother got them for the last 2 hours so as far as they are concerned the whole thing was worth it.
Ariela has unpacked and ordered everything while I have done nothing but groan since I dropped the seventh (of eight) bags on the stone floor.
That and take a bath. I have reached no firm conclusion about its depth. Maybe its just the neo-citran talking. Love J