Carrots & Ketchup

{posted by Kelli}
I PROMISED TO WRITE ABOUT GAZA
Uh, and Lebanon, too, since as of yesterday, Lebanon has thrown its lot in with those in Gaza, and Israel has reacted in its typical bull-in-a-china-shop fashion. What ever happened to the days of sending Shin Bet operatives in, James Bond style, to retrieve kidnapped soldiers? When will they get it that large-scale destruction aimed at a despondent people with nothing to lose only stirs them up more?

Many of you are concerned about what Israelis call “ha-matsav,” or “the situation”—a Hebrew term that’s been used for decades to describe the ongoing tension between Palestinians and Israelis. I don’t know how else to describe it than this: you know the news you get of Iraq, the stories of kidnapped American soldiers and harsh American military strikes and so on? How do you react? Concerned, but not enough to stay home from work or to actually leave the US, right? That’s how it is here for us, at least at this point. If we didn't seek out the news (papers, internet, and brief radio bits), we wouldn't know anything was happening in Gaza or Lebanon. “Bunker mentality” doesn’t set in here until after a string of suicide bombings hits a particular area. I don't know if that's a testament to Israelis’ perseverance, ignorance, or apathy.

Typical day: yesterday morning I got up and checked the news on the internet, reading the Israel articles right after first reading the “American Idol Contestant on Porn Charges” piece. Our proximity to Israel—sitting smack in the middle of it—doesn’t come with any insider information, so the news we have access to is exactly what you’re getting in the US. Sarah headed to her 8:45-5:00 Torah study program. I did my Hebrew homework then wrote some birthday cards and mailed them along my walk to an afternoon showing of the (overall outstanding) European Film Academy Short Film Competition 2005 (more on the film festival below). Then I grabbed lunch at our favorite veg restaurant downtown before beginning our weekly babysitting gig for our friends who live across the street. I was with the two kids at our neighborhood playground for a little while until Sarah, done with her studies for the day, showed up to switch with me so I could catch the bus to my 6:00-8:30 Hebrew class. After my class, we met at the little hotel in our neighborhood for a late dinner and comedy show by a very funny man, Yisrael Campbell, who converted from Catholicism to Judaism some years ago.

This morning we got up, checked the internet news, Sarah went to her program, I worked on the home movies we’re creating on the computer. . . you get the picture of our daily life.

If this sounds ordinary, it’s because at least for us foreigners here, nothing has changed—despite the fact that Gaza is less than two hours from Jerusalem, and the Lebanese border is some four hours away. Israelis, naturally, feel closer to what’s going on. In a small country, a disproportionate number of people—something like one in seven?-- know the kidnapped soldiers or their families or grew up on the same kibbutz, etc. And nearly everyone can relate to army service, as it is compulsory for almost all of the population here. In other words, there is much less distinction in Israel between “soldier” and “civilian.” Yesterday in a shop that had the radio news playing, one person said something to another about “catastrophe” and “chaos,” which I assumed was in reference to the news about the 8 subway bombs in 11 minutes in India. I realized later, after checking the internet news, that they were talking about the new developments in Lebanon. Still, “catastrophe” and “chaos” are more fitting descriptions for 200 commuters killed in bomb attacks, I would think.

CHANGE OF PLANS?
In completely unrelated news, we’ve been talking about leaving Israel a little sooner than planned and returning to DC later than we thought. Construction of our DC renter’s new home is taking longer than expected, and she’s asked to stay on through March—a development we see as an opportunity, since everything about our place is already arranged for us to be away, so why not take advantage of that. Meanwhile, we don’t have any plans here post-November, and Sarah’s parents’ weekend apartment in Manhattan is an inviting home base while testing out interpreting work in NYC for a few months. So we are talking about possibly spending Dec.-March in NYC instead of staying here through January.

Interestingly, we specifically chose Israel for the full year experience thinking we might get into the Jewish calendar and overall swing of things. Turns out the Jewish schedule is a royal pain, trying to figure out what places are open on which random holidays. I still don't want to become a Jew, and Sarah is less interested in Jewish life herself. Some days I'm ready to head to France for the rest of the year. . .

But enough dreaming of chocolate croissants in pretty alleyways. We’re here for now, and World Gay Pride is happening in Jerusalem the second week of August, so things are really going to shake up here soon!

I LAUGHED, I CRIED
Initially, the Jerusalem Film Festival was turning out to be a big bust for me. I had painstakingly narrowed down the 190 choices to my top 40, then, facing financial realities, pruned that list to what I was sure would be the best of the best: 12 I-can’t-miss-these films. One we both wanted to see, about archeological research into the fact and fiction behind biblical stories, was sold out. Then the first three I went to stunk: a documentary on American customer service call centers in India (lots of potential, but it just didn’t pan out), a series of clips from films about Jerusalem (didn’t notice in advance that none of them were subtitled, so I was lost except for the one clip in English—a bit from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1965 visit here), and a documentary on nomadic sheepherders in Turkey (yes, you can only blame me for that choice). Just as I was getting concerned that the entire festival was a waste, I saw “October’s Cry.”

This movie was about the ongoing fight by victims’ parents to bring to justice those police and government officials responsible for the October 2000 killings of 13 Arab-Israeli citizens during a week of demonstrations held in Israel. What’s key to point out here is that the police shot, in some cases point-blank, 13 citizens of its own country who were taking part in demonstrations held inside democratic Israel. This wasn’t about Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers fighting each other in the Occupied Territories. The film was well done, but what really got me was at the end when the filmmaker asked the family members we’d just seen on the screen to stand. I had no idea the audience included a dozen of the very people whose painful, six-year struggle we’d just witnessed. When the stoic, erudite father highlighted in the film—whose teenaged “Seeds of Peace” camp participant was one of the 13—stood up right behind me, I couldn’t keep from crying. Crossing my fingers for the week’s remaining films.

THEY MAKE ME GIGGLE ‘TIL I SNORT
It’s time for some funnies of the linguistic variety. Some of these gems are from the newspaper, proving once again that perhaps it’s best for us westerners to leave our languages at home so as not to further contaminate the delicate, still-developing, modern Hebrew language.

>bekex: the Israeli mangling of the English “back axle.” Funny, but even more so when you realize that they also say “bekex kidmi” for “front axle,” which, of course, is actually saying “front back axle.”

>fillim: used for “film” like one puts in one’s camera; more or less like the English pronunciation. Here’s the problem: to make a masculine noun plural in Hebrew, you add “im.” The result of the infiltration of the English “film”? Israelis wanting just one roll of film enter camera shops and ask in Hebrew to buy one “fil.”

>Here’s a non-Hebrew mangling just for fun, also printed in an Israeli newspaper. An Eastern European handyman working at a London home rushed into the house to announce to the owners, “Hitchcock in the back-front!” Investigation resulted in a dead hedgehog in the back garden.

>A sign in English we saw in Turkey in May: “Welcome to Old Town, full of history-smelling atmosphere.”

I’ll end with a couple of Hebrew doozies recently uttered by yours truly and Sarah.

>Kelli (in front of the whole Hebrew class plus the teacher): “He must go through with the bar mitzvah ceremony in order to become a full-grown carrot.”

>Sarah (in response to the Burger Ranch worker asking, “What’s your name?”): “Ketchup.”

How could we possibly leave Israel now, just when our Hebrew is finally taking off?