Tel Aviv Diary: Karen Alkalay-Gut

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.
The time has come to vote. which blog do i keep up? Why not comment here?

ich shtarb avec – i had barely managed to begin to kvetch about catching Ezi’s flu when the great computer divinity swooped down and restarted me. and you know i write on line (sometimes on this site first and sometimes on the other one – but always with a quick paste into the other one before i save.

Forget it, the unsaved is best forgotten.

Tomorrow is student day at the university – i used to enjoy it so much but nowadays classes end at 12 and the students go off and we have to stick around to figure out how we can possibly manage this semester. I should be better by tomorrow but i’d much rather be able to get into the spirit of ‘almost summer’ of the students then ‘the winter of our discontent’ of our faculty.

And we all know our students deserve the very best – equipment, teachers, support – most of them only get to university after army service so they are much older, and many many have to work to support themselves (at least 20 hours a week) so they are not allowed to live the life of the American or British campus. When I was a student I was pretty amazed by the special treatment I got, and the money and the encouragement was the cause of my success, such that it is. The students here have to have much more determination than I ever needed to get through a degree, that’s for sure.

May 19, 2009

If you’re a Hebrew speaker, you might want to check out Orit’s article on Ynet. If you can’t read Hebrew you probably have problems with languages, perhaps as a result of ADHD – in that case you really NEED to read this article….

ADD and all those disorders seem to me to be a result in part of the tempo of contemporary life. too much to give attention your to.

Certainly it is hard to focus. I walked past two of my students in Zara today, and said in my usual academic tone, “Shalom.” They kept walking, conversing in Arabic, and five seconds later turned around, and slowly a shocked look appeared on their faces. Then giggles all around.

But the business of context appears all over the place. Just before Zara I was getting rid of the feeling that I might have picked Ezi’s flu up by stocking up on Lancome. “I heard about you,” the salesgirl said. “This guy told me he was surprised you speak Hebrew – he says you only spoke English in class.” Turns out the perfume guy took some classes with me. But I maintained my cool until she added, “Then he told us some of the things you say! My goodness!” I think i bought an extra lipstick just to cover my embarrassment.

I wasn’t on the board of the Yiddish Writers’ Association last year or the year before because of Ezi’s illness, but today marked my comeback. There was an annual executive meeting this morning and i discovered that not much had changed. The financial crisis is far more serious because donations have greatly diminished, and the house itself is in danger. The old Yiddish writers who began their professional careers with government support of their journals and publications are now being left without any professional encouragement.
It would seem to me that there are people out there in webland who might be interested in adopting a yiddish writer, or even a writers’ organization, so that the race doesn’t disappear. Click here for the English Site. There’s no doubt that there’s a renewed interest in Yiddish all over the world, but i think this is probably the only working writers union in Yiddish.
I should have gone to Maghrar this afternoon for the opening ceremony of the poetry festival there, but Ezi’s sick, and has probably given me his cold so i decided to put my visit off until Tuesday. I really wish i was there. It is one of the craziest festivals I know – and i write about it every year (except last year when i think Ezi was in the hospital). So i’d better get there, even though we have a wedding to go to that night.
Please test me on this = i am pretty sure there is a difference in the accent of the birds up north and the birds of Tel Aviv. I mean they all chirp, and they have tunes, but the ones here sound more nervous, speeded up…. Could it be that city life affects them?

May 15, 2009

Celeb visitors in Israel. As the Pope waves goodbye, leaving an audience with very mixed reactions, I can only think of what it means to this neighborhood to have a guest of significance and influence in Israel. When Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary) was here last month with Charlotte Frank, they introduced their project, Operation Respect that is meant to encourage respect for others in all areas of life. Their efforts were in all directions – Yarrow sang with a choir of Arab and Jewish students from Yaffo and visited cities of mixed populations. He also led us in singing, and the idea of promoting understanding through music warmed all of our hearts. This is why there is no doubt in my mind that the coming visit of Leonard Cohen will have an enormous effect. There is something very encouraging to peace to have visitors who understand the difficulty of solving the problems here, on all sides.

I’ll be spending the day in churches around the Sea of Galilee tomorrow….Tell you about this later…