25 Days in August - Diary of a family's journey in the Holyland

(Participants: Husband, wife and four daughters ages 16, 14, 11 and 5)

WEEK 1

DAY 1-2, Wednesday & Thursday
It's been an exciting and exhausting 48 hours. Our day in Amsterdam was full, arriving at 7 am, taking the train into town, at the Anne Frank House by 9 am (where there was already a line-up at the entrance?), lunch at a cafe, a canal cruise followed by a walk through the red light district. The centre of the city was mobbed with tourists. We were happy to leave. We arrived in Jerusalem this morning at 3:30 am. The sleep-deprived five year old screamed at the top of her lungs refusing to enter. As with all Jerusalem apartments the name of the inhabiting family is identified on the front door. In the case of our apartment the artful ceramic nameplate says The Haber Family (the people we are renting from.) Next door is The Meir Family who also have a sticker on their door proclaiming the imminent coming of the messiah. If tonight's 3 in the morning hysterical entrance is any indication, the Meirs will soon despise the Habers. The apartment is a nice surprise with plenty of room, renovated kitchen and two bathrooms. The mattresses look tolerable. And there is air-conditioning. We had to sleep off half the day to recover from jet lag. This evening we're going to explore the neighbourhood.

DAY 3 - Friday
Today, our first full day in Jerusalem, the wife and I took the kids on an excursion to the ultra-orthodox hasidic enclave Mea Shearim. I don't know what we were thinking. Big signs on the neighbourhood's border warn gawkers that Mea Shearim is not a tourist attraction and that their presence is not be appreciated. I guess we simply couldn't imagine that a woman accompanied by her five year old daughter would be harrassed. We were wrong. The girls were dressed appropriately, or so we thought; shoulders covered and skirts below the knee, in spite of the upper-thirties temperature. Not fifteen minutes after entering the main street of the delapidated, crowded 17th century shtetl-like neighbourhood a flying object crossed my field of vision and struck our eleven year old daughter in the shoulder. I looked up thinking that perhaps something had fallen from a balcony overhanging the street. Then an assailant, a black-coated, fur-hatted hasid leapt forward from the shadows and spat at my wife and the two younger kids. He turned to the fourteen year old and me trailing behind and tried more spitting, but couldn't muster adequate saliva, shouting Tetzei mikan! (Leave here!). The eleven year old screamed, more out of shock than physical injury, and the five year old started bawling. No one else in the crowded street reacted or seemed to hear the wailing of our children. It was as if we were invisible. We looked for an escape route in vain. All the connecting streets went further in to the quarter and the only way out was to backtrack. We sought momentary refuge in a corner. Then suddenly a crash! A water bomb had been hurled at us and exploded against the wall. I caught sight of the same hasid ducking into a side alleyway with a water bucket in hand. A passing cab (as if on cue - I'm quite sure he makes it his regular route) showed up to whisk us away to Machane Yehuda (Jerusalem's main food market) where we joined the throngs doing their Sabbath shopping. In the cab, our fourteen year old remarked that she never imagined when she came to Israel that she would be attacked by Jews.

DAY 4 - Shabbat
We trekked twenty minutes from the apartment across the Valley of the Cross up to the newly renovated Israel Museum. By the time we arrived at the museum the faces of the fourteen and eleven year old were purple from overheating (the five year old rode in a stroller). Jerusalem reached 41 by noontime. Even if the museum wasn't absolutely magnificent, which it is, the price of admission would have been worth the full blast air-conditioning. The museum is an endless array of rooms filled with art and archaeological treasures. The best news of all - hasids stay away from museums on Shabbat.

DAY 5 - Sunday
Yesterday was officially the hottest day of the year in Israel according to the news. In some parts like Eilat and Tiberius the thermometer reached a mindboggling 55. It is now apparent that we arrived in Israel at the beginning of a heat wave. We decided to spend the day at the beach in Tel-Aviv 50 kms away. Israel's metropolis is a bustling city and Jerusalem's secular opposite. The trip was a bit of a shlep (bus-bus-bus each way, six in total) and we got a late start, but we were on the beach by about noon. The public beach is wide and uncrowded and the sand fine. What shocked us was how disgustingly dirty the water was, with little bits of paper and clear plastic rolling in the surf like jellyfish. Leaving the water you felt a coat of slime covering your body. Later, it was reported that a ship offshore had dumped a load of trash polluting the Tel-Aviv shoreline. In the evening we walked up and down Dizingoff and had dinner at a place on the beach famous for their crushed ice fruit smoothies. Tel-Aviv has the character of a lively, rambunctious, progressive city that does not take itself too seriously. A refreshing change from Jerusalem. One has the sense that the two city's are like siblings of the same parents who resent each other and don't talk. Jerusalem the elder and more needy sibling getting the lion's share of parental attention while Tel-Aviv the younger child works and grows and makes it on its own. Oddly, it felt safer to be in Tel-Aviv.

DAY 6 - Monday
Today the wife and I decided to take it easy on the kids after yesterdays long day of shlepping them to Tel-Aviv and back on public transportation. A late start and leisurely walk to the Old City Arab market for souvenir purchases. I had some personal business to take care of at the Wailing Wall - notes for good health and blessings given to me by friends and work colleagues to slip in the cracks. Temps were in the upper 30s. In the Old City I was approached for donations not less than a dozen times; I have started counting. We exited through Zion Gate and climbed the road, arriving at a lookout where you can view the anti-terrorism partition that separates the Arab towns of the west bank from Israel proper. I said to myself, that wall is the one I should be praying at and kissing.

DAY 7 - Tuesday
Another absurdly hot day. Neither the five year old nor the eleven year old left the air-conditioned apartment all day. The five year old discovered that her favourite tv show characters from back home in Canada, Bunnytown and Handy Manny, also speak Hebrew. When I asked her how she understood the shows, she answered "I understand the pictures." The wife and fourteen year old went for a walk in the neighbourhood. At some point, the wife stopped a man for directions. He invited her into his car to get a lift, and then, in the company of our fourteen year old, shamelessly propositioned my wife (I'm almost surprised he didn't proposition the fourteen year old too.) That's twice so far the wife has been propositioned in six days - more score-keeping (one score card for the wife getting propositioned, one score card for the number of times I get approached for a donation.) I'd had enough of shlepping around on public transportation in the heat and decided that afternoon to book a rental car. I went to pick the car up in the evening; a brand new Mazda 3 with a total of 4 kms showing on the odometer. I barely averted my first accident on the way back to the apartment when I misread the lane assignments and traffic signals turning left. I was corrected by a chorus of honks, and one taxi driver who was kind enough to verbally let me know through his open window where I rank on the intelligence scale of our God-chosen tribe.

Gotlieb stories

I hadn't heard from my elusive old friend Maurice Gotlieb for some time. I began to wonder if he was well and whether in fact he was still writing fiction anymore. Then word arrived that he is indeed alive and well and writing, with not one but two stories online: "Seymours International" and "Another Way Of Putting It". I'm happy to see that he's still at it. Mazel Tov Maurice!

The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff and other stories by Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is one of my favourite writers. One of the under appreciated masters of American belles lettres. Even as his fiction and essays have appeared in every major magazine and newspaper and his non-fiction books have been NY Times bestsellers, one has the sense that Epstein is a bit of a throwback, and might have achieved the recognition he truly deserved had his work appeared twenty years earlier when books were more central to American culture. Epstein is no flavour of the month sort of writer. He writes crafted, crisp, clearly-thought-out prose; no flower and very little sentimentality, in fact, he has a bitter aversion to the pretension of artsiness. His chosen subject matter is often Chicago Jewish males, and in the case of this new collection, men about the author's age, in the third act of life. It's very much Saul Bellow territory and one may wonder why Epstein has never written a novel, though guesses are easy to hazard. For one thing the novel is a 'messy' form (Mordecai Richler, when asked why he wrote novels instead of poetry or short-fiction, famously said that novels left a lot of room for error.) For Epstein, it is apparent from his prose, that any 'messiness' would be intolerable. Another reason may be that novels about Chicago Jewish men of a certain age and ilk are Bellow territory, and he's smart enough to know that it would be unwise to cross that boundary and risk being compared to his illustrious predecessor novelist. It's too bad really because I think Epstein's work would stand up quite well. His doesn't have Bellow's penchant for excess (over-thinking, over-writing, over-indulging.) An Epstein novel, I believe, would be tight and satisfying, perhaps even surpassing Bellow's late period novellas. I know this is pure speculation but the economy and humour of Epstein's prose allows him to manage in a few words and sentences what it often took Bellow pages to describe. For example, in the story "Bartlestein's First Fling" about a man in the plumbing supply business who flirts with the possibility of living a life of passion for the first time, Epstein writes, of the protagonist, "He found the Lexus to be the perfect car for him: dependable, not too showy, efficient, quietly luxurious. He has himself become a kind of human Lexus." In another story, Epstein says of a businessman, "he laughed a lot but I never saw him smile." The comparisons with Bellow, admittedly unfair, are inevitable. It may be why I read the modus operandi in "My Brother Eli" as Epstein's response to what Bellow himself was known for; writing family and friends into his fiction, particularly as a way of humiliating ex-wives. Eli is a Bellow-like character, a novelist, winner of every major literary prize, the toast of Chicago and the literary world, married multiple times, irredeemably self-centered, indulgent and miserable despite his 'success'. Eli keeps getting bailed out by his older brother Lou an auto parts salesman and narrator of the story. When he reads Eli's novels, Lou can't make heads or tails of them, "I had to drag my eyes across every page, thinking who could possibly give a damn about all this. So the hero of the books is sensitive, and the people he is forced to live among aren't. I didn't see the big deal." Epstein mostly sides with the uneducated, the uncultured, and the stalwart. He has genuine affinity for hard-scrabble, hard working, self-made men, particularly those who came of age with WWII, and who might have skipped university in favour of building lives for themselves and their families; men who sought and achieved a quietly noble existence. In the collection's exquisite coda "Kuperman Awaits Ecstasy" one such man is introduced to the pleasures of classical music by a dying woman while providing the ideal companionship to her in the last stage of her life. Every story in this collection seems to be about the search for dignity, which arrives, often unexpectedly, in the form of a gift from a relationship between two complete opposites. In "Beyond the Pale" that relationship is first between a boy and his grandfather who teaches his grandson to read Yiddish. Later, the boy, now a young man and literary editor, becomes the last hope to rescue from oblivion the reputation of a famous Yiddish novelist. As I said, Epstein is a superb craftsman of character whose prose are diamond-cut, hard and precise, not a word wasted. Where his stories tend to lack is their endings. They fizzle out instead of crackle-pop. And maybe that's another reason why Epstein has avoided the novel, plot is not his strong suit. One ending that does provide the required punch is "You Could Also Love a Rich Girl" which closes with a Vaudeville-style zinger.

The Rocky Mountain Locust Plague of 1875

A swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts streams overhead for five days, creating a living eclipse of the sun. It is a superorganism composed of 10 billion individuals, devouring as much vegetation as a massive herd of bison — a metabolic wildfire that races across the Great Plains. Before the year is up, a vast region of pioneer agriculture will be decimated and U.S. troops will be mobilized to distribute food, blankets and clothing to devastated farm families... By clocking the insects’ speed as they streamed overhead, and by telegraphing to surrounding towns, Dr. A.L. Child of the U.S. Signal Corps estimated that the swarm was 1,800 miles long and at least 110 miles wide.

On 'grasshopper glaciers' and the lessons learned from the mysterious disappearance of a plague of biblical proportions.

"No place in the Quebec dream"

A bit of a row over at the Cyberpresse. Montreal filmmaker Jacob Tierney had the chutzpah to tell it like it is here in Quebec culturally-speaking; "extremely inward-looking" where "anglophones and immigrants are ignored". La société québécoise est extrêmement tournée sur elle-même, dit Tierney. Notre art et notre culture ne présentent que des Blancs francophones. Les anglophones et les immigrants sont ignorés. Ils n’ont aucune place dans le rêve québécois. C’est honteux. Predictably, the responses have ranged from outrage to a "circle the wagons" mentality. Well, it's not just in film. Here's my story, for what it's worth: A novel published by a small but respected Montreal publisher of english poetry, prose and fiction. The novel, set in Montreal, is about an orthodox Jew struggling to manage an industrial building in the heart of the city's famed garment district. It is well received, garnering positive notices in newspapers across Canada (Toronto Star, Globe & Mail, Montreal Gazette among them). It is selected by W.P. Kinsella as a finalist for the Amazon.ca/Books In Canada First Novel Award alongside Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road and others. The small, respected publisher sends the book to a few of Montreal's more prominent french publishers to explore the possibility that such a novel (positively reviewed nationally, prize-considered, Montreal-set) might be translated and published in French. The answer he receives (I paraphrase) is no interest because the novel is deemed 'offensive'. No further details are given. However, I got an inkling of what could possibly be considered 'offensive' about my novel when a review came out in a small cultural magazine called Spirale, in a special edition of essays on Anglo-Montreal writing which ends up being the only review of the novel published in the french press in Quebec. It was an extensive, thoughtful review which, among other choice assertions, accused the novel of being an 'exportation product whose secondary objective is to soil the image of Quebeckers' (The Rent Collector est un produit d'exportation dont l'un des objectifs secondaires est de salir l'image des Québécois.) Had my novel realized the grand ambition given it by this reviewer as 'exportation product' (sales outside Canada were poor) I would have been very satisfied. Look, Quebec publishers are free to publish whatever they want for whomever they suppose will purchase their product. But if this isn't a case of cultural paranoia, or at the very least, severe hyper-sensitivity, I don't know what is. Jacob Tierney, whose reputation is growing, whose career as a filmmaker is on the rise and will undoubtedly transcend the bounds of suburban NDG, but who loves his city as much as I do and wants to tell its story, the story he knows, is exposing the smallmindedness and insularity that exists here. And the Québécois don't like it.

Enough to be angry about

This review of a recent poetry collection makes a really interesting point: There's just not enough anger in today's writing. Not enough outrage. And with the state of, well of almost everything, the economy, the environment, our families, our streets - the greed, the corruption, the values (or lack of same) - there is so much to be angry about. If the arts are any indication, we are in a blithe period; polite in our art and criticism, form trumping content, attention-grabbing foolishness (Lady Gaga) masquerading as originality, escapist-fantasy eclipsing discourse. I know it's been said before and better (Neil Postman's seminal Amusing Ourselves To Death). But it might be that the reaction to Yann Martel's latest novel, is also in part, a reaction to an author who dares to be 'serious' and who believes that art/literature should be taken seriously in an unserious ironic age, to the point of being 'offended' by such a position. Clearly, the 'offense' expressed by some reviewers was entirely misplaced and overstated, curiously so. Misplaced outrage in a review says more about how culturally misguided we are than reflect on the quality of the work in question. It may bespeak the forlorn state of book reviewing at the moment but also show how inured we have become to outrage as an important motivating emotion in the art we create and experience. Where anger and outrage still find purchase in our culture seems to be with essayists/media commentarists, some witty, articulate and intelligent, (Christopher Hitchens) and others downright insulting and obnoxious (Rush Limbaugh), especially (and maybe only) when it entertains (John Stewart). It's hard to imagine a novel published today that will outrage, say the way, Tropic of Cancer did. Or a painting the way Guernica did? Or a song the way the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen did: Works so powerful and truthful as to become influential.

Watching England lose

Okay I'm sucked in. And that goal/no-goal... broke my heart a little, but not Roddy Doyle's.