Tel Aviv Diary October 4-8, 2007- - Karen Alkalay-Gut

Tel Aviv Diary - October 4-8, 2007

October 4, 2007

If you can read Hebrew you can find out about Pappa'shere or here and Oren as Elvis in the shuk. Or read about it in English here.

In the meantime we ate our dinner in Chicago at the hotel restaurant and the hotel manager, also our waiter, served us banal ravioli with great panache.

It was my fault - i was worn out from coughing all the way from SD to Chicago and now I'm off to bed.

October 5, 2007

Now that I've 'covered' most of the US someone asks me if i don't feel safer as a Jew in the US than Israel, especially since Iran is breathing down our necks. Well I see much of the same level of security in jewish institutions here as there - so i don't know where is ultimately better - and here is an interesting comment on that.

October 6, 2007

Keep forgetting. If you're in Chicago I'm joining Raul Nino, M.L. Liebler, Beatriz Badikian, Carlos Cumpian, and Hooly 777 in the World Bicycle Relief benefit poetry reading which takes place at the Heartland Cafe, 7000 N. Glenwood Ave., Chicago, on Saturday, Oct. 6 at 8 p.m.

You missed it. I walked into a cafe that seemed to me suddenly foreign - the poems were mostly in Spanish very overtly political and reminded me of the poetry of Maghrar - nothing like what I had brought with me to read. But the open audience had room for me too - and I wish I could have stayed for the entire long evening.

October 8, 2007

Because I live in a city of apartment buildings, close quarters, and great nervousness, sprawling gracious Chicago seems like a different world. But there is one thing i hear in all the neighborhoods - this country needs a change of regime. Every individual, of every economic bracket, of every religion, color, point of view, says the same thing in the same words.

I read some poetry yesterday to a group of very intelligent people - we spoke only of women but as someone from outside I felt painfully the sense that of the irrelevance of government in the needs of people.

The word for politics in Arabic apparently comes from control - horse training - Siasia.

More about the differing concepts of politics when I get a chance. Right now I've got a long journey ahead. We leave in the morning for what has become the nightmare of air travel.

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