Tel Aviv Diary September 20-24, 2018 - Karen Alkalay-Gut

Tel Aviv Diary September 20-24, 2018

Karen Alkalay-Gut

September 20, 2018

There is something about NYC that seems totally natural to me. Even though all we had to do was go to a doctor, and it was a three hour trip because we were coming from New Jersey, as soon as we hit the city i feel like I know where I'm going..

By the way I'm reading tomorrow : THE YALE CLUB 50 Vanderbilt Avenue (between 44th & 45th Streets across from Grand Central Station) either 17th or 18th floor (TBA) New York, NY 10017 Friday, 21 September 2018, 6:30-9:30 pm

September 21, 2018

it was pretty amazing - low key, yet intense. it was good to be the representative Israeli. in our gorgeous hotel the next door neighbors are Israeli - actually everyone is israeli in NY. But not in the poetry circles, apparently. how sad.

I was privileged to represent my language and my country in a poetry reading at the Yale Club. Every one was helpful and warm and I was touched and moved by the significant poetry i heard. The only problem was that i was totally unprepared for such professionalism and warmth. i also didn't have any poetry with me. Had to read from my phone.

September 22, 2018

a walk in Central Park with kiddies - the merry-go-round, the performances, the anonymity of thr public space, must have been as overwhelming to them as the height of the buildings and the numbers of the streets. Tel Aviv, where the small spaces are crowded and intense and the people extremely involved in each others' lives, is a diferent world.

September 23, 2018

New York awaits, but our children are sick and we are confined indoors.

September 24, 2018

The mind boggles at the difference between the Israel nature museum and the new york museum of natural history. The difference is not only in the size and extent, but in the religious limitation put on the scientific explanations by the biblical implications. if everything was created at once, and on a certain date, then there was no evolution, and there is nothing to learn from the development of species, there are no extinct animals...what a limitation on the understanding of the universe! and it has nothing to do with God. The more we can learn of nature and history and astronomy etc, the more we can wonder at the magnificience of the world.

and yet, my vision of the world is much timier, much more concerned with the living individual before me.

the bezine

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