>”No, no sunlight!” I screamed like a vampire at Ezi as he dragged me out of the house. I didn’t think it would do me any good to go to Ein Harod to see this first display of a private collection of Israeli art. “I’m still sick.” But he would have his way. (This might be a slight exaggeration) But there was a picture or two that made it worth it. Uri Lipschitz’s abstraction called “Kfar Kassem” that shows the shock and blood and confusion of the massacre there in 48. Shalom Sebba’s sketch of the stained glass windows for the parliament, with its twelve tribes of Israel overwhelmed me – because each son was so typical of the present members of parliament: jealous, suspicious, unfaithful… No wonder Sebba never got to make those windows. They are brilliant. I started telling my sister-in-law about them and she laughed, “You know my mother saved them from the waste basket,” she said. “They were individual sketches and Sebba wanted to throw them out.” They are so beautiful, so human, so profound, and to think they almost were destroyed by their maker. There were numerous other gems in this collection – Batya Apollo’s amazing consciousness, Yohanan Simone’s early clarity, Reuven Rubin’s family with donkey (in which the donkey is the focus) and Aharon Messeg’s darkening vision, for example. What I couldn’t get into were all those impressionistic paintings of landscape. When the light here is so clear, so sharp, why did so many Israeli painters make their blurred visions of the scene? Was their idealism clouding the paintings?
In any case we really had to leave in order to get some shopping done for Shabbat, and although I considered the nearby Arab town of Uhm El Fahem I decided it was too much of a hassle to shop where I don’t exactly know where things are, and we raced back to our neighborhood before the local supermarket closed. That turned out to be funny because I had never noticed before that in the supermarket where I shop all the workers and many of the shoppers are Arab.
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