As part of our Sabbath preparations, we found ourselves in little kosher Sweden, the always crowded and frightfully expensive Ikea. (It’s still cheaper then buying local) We used to shop Ikea in the U.S. but that always seemed like a regular American outlet store with pretensions of sophistication. The Ikea here, as anyone who has shopped there or read my diary knows, is multicultural – with as much Arabic, Russian, and French as Hebrew. People here seem to treat it like a disneyland for adults, and today i noticed a (rather large) family going around from living room to living room and taking little family portraits, even going so far as to dismantle a little crate of wine glasses so they could toast the camera.
We followed that experience with a little visit to Tiv Tam, which has much more of a foreign flavor. It’s the Russian supermarket, and you will find little that is Jewish there. As I waited in line for a chicken, waiting for the woman before me to get her ham wrapped and conversing with the butcher, I suddenly realized I understood their conversation. I only needed a few words of Russian for this: Sabaka (dog) Amstiff (mastiff) viechera (dinner) and Bog’zniyet (God knows). So I turned to her and said to her, in Hebrew, that I could follow what they said. She looked at me blankly. Later the butcher confided that lots of people in this country dont understand Hebrew. There was no need to learn.
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