Tel Aviv Diary February 1-5, 2020 - Karen Alkalay-Gut

Tel Aviv Diary - February 1-5, 2020- Karen Alkalay-Gut

February 1-5, 2020

The more I think about this Great Peace Deal the more I hate it. Surely no one believed the Palestinians would accept it. But then, the more i think of it, the less i understand. in any market the buyer makes an offer, the seller is insulted, and then he comes back with a counter offer, and then they go back and forth. so what was Bibi doing next to Trump - who was making the offer? how could an offer be made without one of the parties? Can Abu Mazen come back with a counter-offer Israel can't refuse? the whole thing is quite amazing.

we were going to go to Baka this morning with some friends who know exactly where to buy but some thing, she asked.s stopped me from getting things together. tonight i hear there was a big demonstration in Baka against the peace proposal, but our friends who went there could only talk about the heavenly food.they picked up there.".what demonstration?" she asked.

February 2, 2020

Just a wee bit too late, Jared brought up the idea of negotiation about the peace plan. As if the Palestinians will relinquish their sense of insult in a flash. May Abu Mazan be a patient and forgiving leader.

This is one of the moments when we all have to pull together to protect the world from a pandemic. and to keep the world's economy from collapsing.

Seymour asked me about N.O.Brown - bringing me back to the amazing opportunity i had in the sixties to study with the most amazing people. N.O.Brown was one of the least of them - his book,. Love's Body, was amazing and i return to it sometimes. it is on the shelf above my computer. It's so passe in the world of academia, but it was so refreshing in those days, and we sat at his feet and admired. Tel Aviv is not that far away from those days...

February 3, 2020

Orit knows how to describe the worst scenario in a positive way - when she was let out of the hospital this afternoon after they found no reason for her fainting on the street, she texted her brother, "released with the diagnosis of 'shit happens'." The Emergency ward has streamlined a great deal since I was last there, and the order has improved incredibly. But the patients were not always clear about what was happening. "What's triage?" they asked each other before googling it in Hebrew.

These stories were told to me to ease my mind.

what is this? it's not like I've run out of stories of my own. At one point i even swore i would never put my family (except for Ezi - who really doesn't care) in my diary. i mean they have Futures and may someday be reading this stuff. And I was going to bring up the subject of the effect of Corona on us already. Not that we've had a single case of it. But our builders are Chinese - and they're stuck in China. Even the Tel Aviv light rail is not progressing. And so much of our economy is dependent on Chinese materials Clearly, we need China to be healthy....

And we wish every one of them well.

February 4, 2020

Rivka Bassman's poem, ver hot gesen - on youtube!

i don't have the text at the moment in the original - but if it isn't translated, it should be.

In the hematological ward today i ran into an old friend who was carrying medical equipment. It turns out she was convicted years ago of tax evasion (she's a widow and wasn't totally aware of her financial situation) and sentenced to public service. she's fine with that, she says - would be doing charity work anyway. Me, I was so exhausted emotionally from being in the hospital two days in a row that i spent the entire afternoon with my singer sewing machine (extreme return to childhood pleasures). i don't know how she does it, but there are thousands of women like her, most of them not under court order, helping out.

And the news, what of the news? i can't even follow. Bibi headed off to Uganda as soon as he returned home, and is coming back with amazing results - apparently changing the world order. where was he all these years? and why isn't he doing something about the educational system, the poverty, the road jams?

February 5, 2020

With the repeated rocket attacks and the incendiary balloons it is no wonder that the mothers of terrified children in the south are begging mothers all over the country to join them in protesting the inaction of the government to neutralize the danger. what can a mother when her child is afraid to go to the bathroom alone - and justifiably so?

As a mother I had no choice but to spend the evening with my daughter, who doesn't seem to have been diagnosed and doesn't seem to be improving. Is there a doctor in the house? I need a good diagnostician, the kind my father would take me to. I was overwhelmed by this guy's medical knowledge, the way he would begin by evaluating you from the moment you walked toward the desk in his long office, from the way he looked into your eyes, and your nails when he shook your hand, and evaluated your mouth when you spoke...

so today i went lab tests first things in the morning, and came home with a bottle for collecting urine. no one looked at how I walked, how my hand felt, what was in my eyes. No doctor has looked into my eyes for years...

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