Corinna

Who is arresting Egypt's democracy?

2011-04-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

Just received this in the mail. Was the army sending innocent civilians to fight for it's hidden satisfaction?

Will the army, able to to imprison a pacifist blogger - let the election free of any interference and manipulation?

What future awaits Egypt, the Middle East?

am I insulting the Egyptian army, G-d forbid?

EGYPT: Pacifist blogger and conscientious objector Maikel Nabil Sanad sentenced to three years in prison

War Resisters' International has learnt this morning that pacifist blogger and conscientious objector Maikel Nabil Sanad has been sentenced to three years' imprisonment yesterday on charges of "insulting the military".

Yesterday, April 10, 2011, in front of the military court in Nasr City in Cairo, his family and friends were told that the trial had been adjourned, while in fact it was happening, and Maikel Nabil Sanad was being sentenced to prison, without his family or lawyers present.

This is an outrageous violation of the right to fair trial according to article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Maikel Nabil Sanad was arrested by military police in the night of 28 March 2011, and has been kept detained since. He is being tried in a fast-track trial in a military court, although he is a civilian.

Egypt is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Freedom of expression and opinion is a human right, protected under article 19 of the ICCPR, as repeatedly stated by the UN Human Rights Committee.

The newly approved interim constitution of Egypt also guarantees the right to freedom of expression, and the freedom of the press.

In his writings, Maikel Nabil Sanad made use of his right to freedom of opinion and expression. This includes his right to criticise the role of the military during and after the revolution.

The sentencing of Maikel Nabil Sanad to three years in prison is a violation of his human rights - especially his right to freedom of opinion and expression and his right to a fair trial. In addition, Maikel Nabil Sanad was tried in a military court, although he is a civilian. This again is against Egyptian and international law and legal standards. He was sentenced deprived of the presence of family and friends, which is a violation of the principle of public trial, an important aspect of the right to fair trial.

War Resisters' International calls for letters of support to Maikel Nabil Sanad:
Maikel Nabil Sanad
Toura Prison
Mansheya El-masry
Tora
Cairo
Egypt

War Resisters' International calls for letters of protest to the Egyptian authorities:

Director of Military Judiciary
Major-General Ahmed Abd Allah
Military Judicial Department
Cairo, Egypt
Fax: +202 2 402 4468 / +202 2 411 3452 (ask for fax)

Military General Attorney
Major-General Medhat Radwan
Military Judicial Department
Cairo, Egypt
+202 2 412 0980 (ask for fax)

Minister of Defence
His Excellency Muhammad Tantawi
Ministry of Defence
Cairo, Egypt
mmc@afmic.gov.eg ; mod@afmic.gov.eg
A protest email can be sent at http://wri-irg.org/node/12728.

Egyptian Embassy in Britain
26 South Street, London W1K 1DW
Tel.: 020 7499 3304,
Fax: 020 7491 1542,
E-Mail Address: eg.emb_london@mfa.gov.eg
A list with contact details for Egyptian embassies is available at
http://www.mfa.gov.eg/English/Embassies/Pages/Listing.aspx

War Resisters' International calls on the Egyptian authorities to immediately release Maikel Nabil Sanad and all those other activists arrested during and after the revolution.

Andreas Speck
War Resisters' International

Is the Egyptian Army/Military still a Sacred Cow?

2011-04-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Non Violence is stil illegal in Egypt.
What can one do from far away except spread the word?

Cairo/London, 3 April 2011

PRESS RELEASE:
EGYPT: Trial against detained pacifist blogger and conscientious
objector Maikel Nabil Sanad adjourned to Monday 4 April

The trial against Egyptian pacifist blogger and conscientious objector Maikel Nabil Sanad on charges of "insulting the military" and "obstructing public security" has again been ajourned, this time to tomorrow, Monday, 4 April 2011, War Resisters' International's observer, conscientious objection campaigner Andreas Speck reports from Cairo.

Maikel Nabil Sanad was arrested by military police in the night of 28 March (see co-alert, 29 March 2011, and has been kept detained since. He is being tried in a fast-track trial in a military court, although he is a civilian. "According to international human rights standards, civilians should not be tried in a military court", says WRI's conscientious objection campaigner Andreas Speck. "Especially on charges of 'insulting the military', there is serious doubt that a military court can be impartial. In fact, the whole way this trial is being conducted is a clear violation of article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the right to a fair trial. Maikel Nabil Sanad has no time to prepare an effective legal defence with his lawyers, with only a few days between arrest and sentencing, which we expect to happen tomorrow. In addition, interested members of the public - such as myself, and his friends and supporters - have not been allowed to attend the trial, thus there is a clear breach of the principle of trial in public," he adds.

"Besides these shortcomings in relation to procedure, the charges themselves do not stick. Maikel Nabil Sanad only exposed the truth when he published his blog post on the role of the Egyptian military during and after the revolution. But this is probably what the military does not like, and why they are having a go at him. He showed that the military does everything but defending the revolution - it is defending the status quo. But then, you probably insult someone more by telling the truth than by spreading lies", he continues.

"However, his blog posts are protected by the right to freedom of opinion and expression. And the UN Human Rights Committee is very clear that this freedom also has to include the freedom to criticise the authorities and the military - whether they like it or not."

"War Resisters' International calls on the Egyptian authorities to immediately release Maikel Nabil Sanad and all those other activists arrested during and after the revolution. And we call on everyone to make their protest heard with letters to Egyptian embassies wherever they live", he adds.

Ends

Contact:
Andreas Speck, War Resisters' International (in Cairo)
Mobile: +44 (0)79-7368 3936

Javier Garate, War Resisters' International (in London)
Mobile: +44 (0)78-5303 8160

War Resisters' International office
Tel +44 (0)20-7278 4040
Email: info@wri-irg.org

Addresses for protest letters

Director of Military Judiciary
Major-General Ahmed Abd Allah
Military Judicial Department
Cairo, Egypt
Fax: +202 2 402 4468 / +202 2 411 3452 (ask for fax)

Military General Attorney
Major-General Medhat Radwan
Military Judicial Department
Cairo, Egypt
+202 2 412 0980 (ask for fax)

Minister of Defence
His Excellency Muhammad Tantawi
Ministry of Defence
Cairo, Egypt
mmc@afmic.gov.eg ; mod@afmic.gov.eg
A protest email can be sent at http://wri-irg.org/node/12474.

Egyptian Embassy in Britain
26 South Street, London W1K 1DW
Tel.: 020 7499 3304,
Fax: 020 7491 1542,
E-Mail Address: eg.emb_london@mfa.gov.eg
A list with contact details for Egyptian embassies is available at
http://www.mfa.gov.eg/English/Embassies/Pages/Listing.aspx

--
War Resisters' International
5 Caledonian Road - London N1 9DX - Britain
tel +44-20-7278 4040 - fax +44-20-7278 0444
Skype warresisters
email info@wri-irg.org http://wri-irg.org
Use email encryption! More information at http://wri-irg.org/node/11496

My Island

2010-12-30T04:50:00.000-08:00

It's 4:48 in the morning and I am happily at my computer. Writing.

Ages ago, in a different incarnation, I was a writer in disguise: mother, cook, cleaner, counselor - not necessarily in this order. We lived in a two-tiny-bedrooms apartment, and naturally those went to the kids. The living room doubled as the masterbed at nights.

A room of my own? Not even a bed, or a chair.

From time to time friends would give me keys to a vacant house, and I would sneak off for a day to write.

One day I discovered there are places known as Writers' Colonies. It gave me so much strength! So, there are places where not only writing but the writer herself is respected! I started telling people that we need to have such a place here in Israel.

To my great surprise, no one said, "Fine! I'm going to build one!" What they said - the ones who did not declare this a crazy idea - was: "Fine! Do it!"

Finally in 1984 I plucked up courage and established two residences for writers and artists, in Galilee and in the Desert. International they were, and the writers each had his/her modest renovated old apartment, for up to three months.

In exchange for this they contributed to the regional Jewish-Arab community actually over five hundred cultural and educational activities.

As for myself, I did have a room and a chair and a table and a bed - in the respective offices, or worldwide where I went to raise funds.

I was always writing in my head and on scraps of paper, in the bus, on planes, waiting for meetings. Then one day, eleven years later, my innkeeper, my devoted innkeeper which my body is, reminded me, not so gently, that it was time to have a room of my own before I collapsed.

Dutifully, I obeyed.

So here I am, in my large apartment, free at last and on my own. One room is my independent studio. Another room is the archive, with all my writing projects, except the current one, organized on files and far out of sight.

A third one is the room where I keep my sewing machine and ironing board and the winter clothes. I go there from time to time to dust and water the plants... Sewing, ironing, all those mundane "have-to's" can wait.

My apartment is filled with plants, the window frames and the doors covered with colorful paint. I'm surrounded by art and books and classical music. When people come in, they say, "It's like Nirvana here. So different from the violent world outside!"

But the outside knocks on my windows, seeps in through the radio news, throws itself in my face from the newspapers lined up outside kiosks down the whole length of the main and side streets.

So my working place, my faithful apartment, is my refuge, the only place where up to now I can be "the mistress of my destiny", sovereign.

I choose when to turn on the radio, open the door, answer the phone. Banished are the TV and all mobile phones.

I was a resident at two distinguished artists' colonies in the USA. The food is good, the country green and peaceful, (or so it used to be back then before 9/11); but nothing compares with my little tranquil island.

Here I'm closer to my colleagues, Palestinian and Israeli writers and peace activists.

In the Heart of Darkness, they are my island.

Once she was a child (Noffey Haneffesh: Soul Landscapes)

2010-11-09T21:26:00.000-08:00

Soul Landscapes tells the universal story of childhood in times of upheaval, as conveyed by some of the most extraordinary international woman writers. Done mostly on location, these intimate encounters mirror a rainbow of human existence shaped by injustice, turmoil and struggle, and still victorious: six year-old Russian Svetlana Vasilenko awaiting death while caught between the Powers dueling with nuclear bombs; the little Italian child Dacia Maraini starved in a Japanese concentration camp; twelve-year-old. Belgian Am?lie Nothomb, reading by candlelight in a Bangladeshi lepers' house; five-year-old Leena Lander living in the Finnish prison for delinquent boys where her father worked as a supervisor, contemplating in fear and horror her sexually mangled doll found thrown in the forest; eight-year-old Palestinian Anissa Darwish torn by war from the Malkha village of her sweet childhood and the author herself - Corinna Hasofferett, born in Tecuci, Romania - all and each of the writers in this book map the way to survival and hope.
They ask us also to take a second look at our own life, and, well informed, to make sure the right decisions are taken in all that concerns this precious little world.

As a literary form, ONCE SHE WAS A CHILD is a hybrid: it owns the genes of literary fiction, with its attention to language, ambiguities and symbols, carved out by the author's mostly invisible questions, and editing; and it carries the genes of narrative nonfiction as those are real life stories of real, and most impressive persons, showing how gloriously they've survived Evil. Glimpses from The Past, of childhood recollections, set, like pearls on a string, with the author's journal as the connecting thread or background. The reader is invited to absorb. At the end of the book s/he'll discover in a separate section, as an addendum, how far they've reached in The Present.

HudnaPress. Hebrew Publication Date: Spring 2003
Rights information can be obtained at: hudnapress (at) gmail (dot) com

Excerpt:

In the Beginning

When my children were little we were standing one day at the bus stop. It was very hot, August. Suddenly, across from us, two children, suddenly one of them cried to his friend: 'You Arab!'

I looked at my children startled. The younger was then three, the same age I was when I came out of kindergarten and they threw stones at us and cried, 'Jidans, go away to Palestine!' Children I'd played with the day before.

I wanted my children to know that 'Arab' was the name of a people, not a curse.

So I made contact through friends of some friends with members of the Arab intelligentsia who lived in a village in the Galilee and we visited them, they visited us, a contact was made. Mahmud and Lutfia Diab, from Tamra, two hours from Tel Aviv. That was in 1970.

Three years later Lutfia's younger sister, Amal, married her teacher, Munir Diab. And Munir began in those years to manage there the first Arabic community center. So in 1975 the idea occurred to me to arrange a meeting between educated youths from Tamra and from a neighboring Jewish settlement with Jewish and Arabic artists. Munir loved the idea and thanks to him it really happened. We had meetings and conversations with Aharon Meged, Anton Shamas, A. B. Yehoshua. Once every two weeks. One time in Tamra and one time in Shlomi. Finally we had an evening of theater improvisation with the late Peter Fry. He came several times and prepared them.

From the start I'd limited my involvement in that for only half a year. I would come there every two weeks. Shlomi is located eight hundred meters, half a mile, from the Lebanese border. At that time terrorists murdered at night a mother and her two year old daughter, in Dovev. And still people came to the meetings and participated. Very willingly. But in one of the meetings, in Shlomi, someone said, 'Fine. Only you are returning to Tel Aviv and we are staying here not knowing what terrorist will roll upon us at night from the mountain.'

In my apartment in Tel Aviv we lived at the time five people in a space of four hundred and twenty square feet. No room of my own, there wasn't even a bedroom.

Then I thought, if there was a place to which artists would come for a stay of some weeks or months so they can be free to create, then both the artists and the community would benefit. It would answer to the needs.

I returned to Tel Aviv and began telling all kinds of people and organizations, that that was what they had to do. Some said, How come, and some would say, 'Why not, do it.' In those days the world was divided for me into dreamers, and doers. Two separate groups. Me, do? I come up with ideas, and they should do. But all the time it still bothered, burned in my bones. In 1984 I suddenly got up and said, 'I am acting to found such a place.' Now I understand that in that moment I turned from a child citizen into an adult citizen. Very difficult. You need to go to the world, and bow down. It's impossible without money.

Within all these hardships, in Europe as well as in the United States, I would go into bookstores, to find solace. And I would think, So many books, So many woman writers! Who are they?

view/add comments :: 0 comments :: updated Friday, 4 April 2003 03:24 PM GMT+02

Haaretz on "Sodot" (A Minyan of Lovers)

2010-10-10T09:09:00.000-07:00

Beside the road I saw two kittens. One jumped between the cars and managed to reach the other side of the road. His brother remained on the traffic island, hurt, his hind legs paralyzed, and was trying courageously to reach a safe place, dragging himself on his front legs.

I stopped the car in the middle of the road. Horns hooted, it was raining, I was late for an important meeting - but the sight of that kitten was wounding my heart.

There are such moments: The world stops its rush for a second, you feel almost suffocated, the stomach hurts. Naked nerves. a sudden need to touch, face pain, feel.

Those are the moments Corinna relays. The heroines of her book, Anna and Siwar, live on the naked nerve, where love and pain interchange continuously:

"What happens to one who continually embraces an iceberg? Whose heart will be first to melt? There is always this longing, call it a yearning." (page 241)

Corinna writes from both inside the body and the body itself - in a way which is so physical and emotion laden that it is hard to believe she's using the language we all know. There is total symbiosis between the writing and the feeling. Corinna creates a kingdom where there is no room for the governing of syntax rules. Most of her sentences are simply coming into being, are present on her own terms. The dialogues are uttered some from her mouth, some from her head, in a whirlpool in which times, speakers, and subjects intermingle, creating words and sentences written with the rhythm of poetry:

"Salim is calling from the village,/and Andrei/ who'd asked,/'It's not hard on you, don't you miss sex?'/'The alternative is much better?'/'Once one man has caused you harm and you punish all men?' asks the interviewer in the newspaper the woman that was victim of rape and has written a book. She's not answering and goes back to her home where she sleeps with a revolver under the mattress." (page 157)

In the same way in which she sheds the rules of prose and mixes them with the association-laden poetic form - Corinna also refuses to accept completely the rules of State and Religion, replacing them with her own morals.

Anna, the heroine, standing before the Rabbis at the divorce ritual, refuses to cover her rebelious shoulders with the offered rag and puts on her own scarf. She's the one sending away the husband and she expresses this not in words but in what is unsaid:

"A man and a woman are splitting apart, they have been together for many years and now must be weaned of so many habits, like when you remove a bunion and it grows right back...
...he says, 'OK, I'll find myself some dump to live in.';
This time she no longer says, 'Stay.';
Puts on a red skirt and appears before three male judges in the religious court. They stand with grave faces behind a tall bench.
'You-are-hereby-permitted-to-any-man.';
None of them laid a warm hand on her belly to feel the foetus move.
Imposing themselves as permit-givers out of their territory.
In hers." (page 156)

Anna, in a feminine dress, is sexual, attractive, independent and tempting.
Mimmicking men's ways, she counts the males who come to her bed upon her divorce. She's the mother who struggles to protect the son imprisoned in the military cell, attempting to translate his naivety as stemming from hers, to hold on to the similarity between them; trying to give love, warmth and tenderness to the whole world except her own self, which she's not really hugging.

"Dorn, now I know why you looked at me the way a loving, indulged child looks at his mother when I gave you a midnight snack at home. Johanna would stand in front of the refrigerator, protecting it with her body so the children wouldn't take food for their friends. She was frigid. Now she'ss a vegetable. If I had stayed, that would have been my fate too." (page 204)

It's not spelled out if those are the words said to him or that have never been uttered. It's not even important from her point of view since the intensity of her feelings covers all. Her thoughts tear her from deep inside and like water seep to all avalable spaces.

Her fights against laws, her silences, her secrets and decisions, have left her with no room of her own. She stands exposed, withdrawn and above all - exhausted, left with the unsaid and silenced sayings, with thoughts which, if only uttered, might have helped create a bridge between her and the world instead of pain and exposed nerves shrinking away from closeness while longing for it.

"Revelation", the last chapter, is Siwar's journal pages. Yet it is not only the revelation of Reality before Siwar's eyes (her observations of her husband's betrayal, her dependance upon him as a man, father and home, her obedience to society's rules).

The journal is also Anna's revelation, as much as it is Corinna's Manifest on loneliness. A manifest on the inability to reach out and touch, not only a man but also the mother; on pain and oblivion and the shattered option of salvation.

Because, who are we realy saving. when we save a kitten? Are we saving it or is the act pointing to our own self?

"At night when the baby's asleep and Salim's at his meetings, when a hidden pain wells up despite my tiredness, I turn to you, my notebook. The rest of the time, it is I, not you, who am abandoned. I have become a married woman and a mother, like my mother. Not grieving over what my mother did to me any more, but wondering when I get lonely what it was that that man did to her. When I was young I refused to see her when she asked for a meeting. I was thinking while the social worker's muffled blows struck home, isn't it enough that she and her lover murdered her old husband? Who will punish her for her other murder, for the murder of me?

There is a point midway between forgetting and knowledge. I am destined to circle round it, unable to forget, disabled by memory."

(c) all Hebrew rights, except to the quotations: Gal Karniel, Haaretz Book Review, 21.1.03
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

An Urgent letter to Sir Martin Gilbert

2009-05-22T05:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Sir Gilbert,

I've just read in the Haaretz Hebrew online pages about your work on a new film relaying Righteous diplomats' courageous acts during the Holocaust.

I am a published writer of Hebrew literary fiction and narative non fiction. May I bring to your attention a name I have not seen mentioned in the article - that of the Portuguese Aristides de Sousa Mendes. By now there is plenty of information on him on the net.

Please allow me to quote from my book How Far From Paradise - encounters with international women writers on Childhood dramatic recollections.

The quotation is from the Lidia Jorge chapter:

"...we have a hero here, like Schindler: the Consul Aristides, Portugal's Consul to Bordeaux during World War II, who saved thousands and thousands of Jews despite Salazar, the terrible dictator, and Salazar
threw him out of a diplomatic career and he became a poor man who ate the soup of the poor.
He and his youngest son.
It's a marvelous story.
In France, in Bordeaux, he issued visas for thousands of Jews, to allow them to pass through Portugal on their way to freedom, to the United
States and England.
Now we remember him and there are many books about him.
He risked more than Schindler - his life, his son, his wife. When he was far from Portugal, in a dangerous situation.
One of those books about Aristides is titled, A Good Man.
Can I write the name of this man? It's so important.
Aristides Sousa Mendes. Yes, only now they're talking about him.
My son is twenty three years old. Last year, when he read the book, he wept. He said, "But there are good people, there are heroes in Portugal.”

With warm regards, Yours,
Corinna Hasofferett

The 4th Estate - I like it!

2009-01-11T23:05:00.000-08:00

Meet My Neighbors.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

DORON

2009-01-11T11:54:00.000-08:00

The son changed too. When she hugged him, he hung his hands dryly at his sides, unlike once, "when you were three years old you said that I was the most beautiful one in the world."

"I can't be responsible for everything I blurted out at the age of three," he bent over to rummage in his mother's suitcases and pulled out the record of Tristan and Isolde. "And by the way, just so you won't make any mistake, the poster's mine. I'll take it out of here tomorrow."

Went off to close himself in his room with the music.

While she was away, he slept in her bed and hung on the wall a big poster of the statue of David. At the sight of the silky skin and the tender line of the knee, she wanted to touch it, but reined herself in. The testicles were levels with her lips, and the organ seemed sound asleep, restrained. A slight whimper, like the warning signal of an approaching train, suddenly burst out of her, followed immediately by many freight cars of thoughts: Why did I go there. Why not to Greece, for a rest. I could have lain in the sun with some warm Nikos. She stood between the closet and the suitcase and put the clothes away in slow motion as if each garment were a memory that had to be shaken out and arranged so as not to cause damage.

Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav

Visiting Nina Cassian

2009-01-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

Getting to Nina Cassian isn't that simple.
I took the ferry.
It was evening. Men and women in suits and sneakers got off the boat and walked home.
One street, a promenade. Gulliver would have just lifted a leg and crossed over from this bank to the Manhattan bank on the other side.

The photograph on the back-cover of the poetry book was very bad. And here I was approached by a tall and upright woman. The more she talked, the more beautiful she seemed to me.

She said the place is very safe, "It's an island here, there's nowhere to run."
But at the entrance to the building there was a doorman, and a closed-circuit television system.

Right away she offered me some cigarettes, whiskey. I said, "No, thanks," and her face dropped when she heard that the cigarette smoke bothers me. She'll have to take smoking breaks.

What language did we speak? Ostensibly English, but that was only a cover for the real language -- Romanian.

As if I had lifted a leg and crossed over to Romania which is an island inside me, the real island on which Nina lives as well.

When we parted I said what I sincerely felt, that she was a beautiful woman.
She hugged me.

A few weeks ago I read that she got married. Love is the magician of beauty. It's great that it has come back to watch over Nina.

Nina recommended that I take the cable tram back to Manhattan. The cable tram moves very slowly, tottering high above the dark water as if it's about to fall any minute between the dwindling lights of the island and the splendor of Manhattan. Apart from me there were only two boys in the car, and they didn't seem bothered at all by the fact that no one had equipped us with parachutes and lifebelts.

All my life I've been like that, hovering between the Romania slumbering inside me and the present. It was a miracle we survived. If we had stayed there after Ceausescu came to power, who knows were I would have been now.

If only politicians could thus be tamed...

2009-01-07T10:02:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Mark Forrester for the inspiration.

Introduction To Niam el Baz, part One

2009-01-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

It turns out that the British knew about the death camps already in 1941. They knew from the German army transmissions that they were able to decipher. From these transmissions it was clear also that the German army cooperated with the SS and not as has been claimed all those years, that they had no part in the murder of the Jews.

Churchill knew.

Before and after 1941, the British Empire knew, and did not let my parents immigrate to Eretz Israel. With the knowledge that by doing so they were abandoning us to the hands of the murderers.

So I was born in Romania, Niam.
A small house, that my maternal grandfather and grandmother collected penny to penny to build. That we left behind, in December 1947, since the exit from Romania had to be done in secret.

Tile-roofs, spotted hens in the courtyard. A pleasure to discover an egg among the flowers, to punch a tiny hole and drink it on the spot, warm and fresh, and the egg-yolk soft.
A neighbor who had returned from a visit to see relatives in Eretz Israel said that there in the kibbutzim they had this piece of furniture, a play-pen, for infants, and they should build one just like it for the twins.

A year ago my aunt told me, "Even when you were babies, we used to take you out of the play-pen first. You were like that, quite a number."
They say it was a large piece of furniture, of heavy wood.

One evening, when I was four, four and a half, I collected the letters from a piece of newspaper and read a whole word, out loud. The room filled with silence like during the revelation of the Messiah.

Our uncles, twenty, twenty-five years old, would come in the evenings and dance ballroom dances with us, when we were three, four, five. Then they took them, and our father, all the Jewish men, to forced hard labor.

They put them to work by the railway tracks. The German soldiers would pass by on the trains and shoot for fun, at them and at the Romanian guards. My uncle says that one of the prisoners would always lie with his ear on the tracks to hear if a
train was approaching, so they could hide from the Germans in time, they and their guards.

One in the afternoon.
A call from Idit, who works at Yad va-Shem. She is sending me a list of the books they have in Arabic about the Holocaust.
There is only the one problem, how to send them to Niam.

Now, after having completed the deciphering of the conversation with her, again and again I see Niam's bold face as she says authoritatively what she'd been fed by Neo-Nazis in Germany, "It's not true!".

The Jews weren't allowed to ride the trains, (except for those in which they were taken to the death camps) and father did, in order to send, each time from a different town, anonymous letters to the editor of the newspaper PORUNCA VREMEI -- The Order of the Day: "If you do not want us, why don't you let us go to Palestine, where Jesus bade almost two thousand years ago Love thy neighbor like yourself."

The Order of the Day answered:
'The leprous jidani, awaiting their Talmudic rule, are sending their leprous fingers across all the nations and taking dominance over them. This is the reason that rivers of blood have been shed, and not only Romanian blood.'

The neighbors to our right were Christians. Father, mother, daughter and a son a few years older than us. We would go over to them through a hole in the fence.
I saw them also on the sidewalk among the children, when they were throwing stones at us and shouting, "Jidani, go away to Palestine!"

Afterwards, but after what? What should have come later, maturity, came too early. In my life, like in the life of that whole generation, times got mixed up. One day they confiscated our house, and we lived in the servants' room in the yard. And another day we came out of a shelter, and on the street we found a parade
of Russian tanks, people were applauding, and the town was full of loudspeakers, Red Army songs, announcements of daily victories, while children, skin and bones from hell, were arriving to town, forbidden for us to touch lest we catch what they had been struck with. They put them up in the Jewish school until they were adopted or driven to orphanages.

But it was impossible to disinfect the entire world in order to protect us because right after that, or before that, someone brought a bar of soap from the death camps and the whole town marched at the funeral.

Yesterday, over the phone, I said to a Israeli friend, "My childhood stories were the Nuremberg trials" and she said, "What a terrible thing to say."

I would sit on my uncles' knees and give them the daily reports from the trials of the Nazis in Nuremberg after the war. I read from the newspaper and they were so pleased and proud of me, that yes, there was nothing to worry about, the memory-safe was in good hands.

So the world, which during the first years had behaved like a womb, was cut apart and healed again, cut apart and healed.
Outwardly there was still the appearance of paradise. In the spring, in the summer, and in the autumn, ornamental flowers blossomed. Large and warm raindrops fertilized the leaves of the trees and the bushes. In the winter the snow piled up as high as
the fence, and the frost painted Christmas tree decorations on the windowpanes.

There, amidst all this, for twelve winters and summers I was Corinna.

The Woman and Her Seven Sons

2009-01-04T15:50:00.000-08:00

1.

While reading Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales, I noticed all of a sudden the heaps of good measures those folktales bestow upon women.

Truth is, we have our own Hebrew folktales. Our tradition notes and appreciates deeply the passive heroism of the Israeli woman.

2.

Is it because of Hanukkah that the first example which comes to my mind is the story I'm going to tell you now?

You know, Hanukkah is the celebration of the victory upon the Greeks.

Not at the Olympics.

Some two thousand years ago.

They demanded of the monotheistic Israeli people to bow to idols.

3.

She's "The Woman and the Seven Sons".

Or, "The Mother and the Seven Sons".

Later versions name her, "Miriam Bat Tanhum and the Seven Sons".

Or as of late: "Hannah and The Seven Sons".

4.

Kill me, but I do not believe this is a true story.

Who cares about such horrible stories today?

Maybe in a small provincial place...

Like at an educational site of the third largest city - Haifa...

With professional suggestions: Discuss the Nature of Heroism.

5.

The Woman/Mother/Miriam/Hannah advises her sons not to bow and witnesses their cruel executions, one after the other.

To the youngest, a mere toddler still suckling, who comes for her advise, she says:

"My Son, go to Abraham our father and tell him: 'Don't be too proud. You've only set one altar for one son - I've set seven. Yours was just a test - mine was The Act itself.'" (Talmud Bavli, the book of the Maccabees)

6.

What is Heroism? Abraham Our Father? Are you kidding?

With Abraham it was the abolishment of the pagan rite.

The Woman is reviving Tradition, speaking to the pagans in their own language.

They know only the language of Violence.

7.

At "Noffey Haneffesh" Dacia Maraini tells how she cringed whenever she was told the story of her namesake Dacia The Martyr, whose breasts were cut because she refused to bow to idols, or give up Christianity.

United We Stand!

8.

The mother sends her seventh to the bosom of Abraham.

For sure we are not as primitive as those who delude themselves with virgins' bosoms awaiting them in Paradise.

9.

One version relays that The Mother lost her mind a few days later and threw herself from the rooftop of her house.

This I believe.

One rooftop is the farthest The Woman/Mother is allowed to take her disobedience to, and Jump.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read it in Hungarian;

You've landed at the right place...

2007-11-06T02:15:00.000-08:00

Come in.
You must be tired, wandering around our Planet Virtual.
My screen swears this planet and everything on it are square.
Not me. I'm not square. I'm like you.

I'm like you, living here with one foot, or rather a toenail, outside my private bubble, which is supposed to stave off the anguish of the Other outside it, my own distress inside it.

I've thrown out the T.V. twenty four years ago, the radio is tuned to the classical music programs, I write during the night and sleep when the world is noisy, and each evening I vow to never again surf the News sites, yet do open them, and read, and shed an inward tear.
Like you.

So you might ask, Is it the right time to establish a new publishing house
(and dare name it HudnaPress),
come out with new books,
set a new web site? and now Odeo podcasting, YouTube Vblog?
What is it, self-pampering? A timid expression of sanity?

The Kabbalah, as much as I recall it from the university classes, teaches us that in the beginning of Creation the world was contained into ten vessels, such as Nobility, Wisdom, Charity, Valor, Splendor…

It so happened that the vessels fell, and broke into tiny pieces. "Sparks". Since then in each generation there are thirty-six (Lamed Vav) righteous men whose sole task is to find and put together those shattered tiny pieces, the Sparks.
Bring Tikkun (Repair).

Yet these men are to remain anonymous.
Not an easy feat nowadays, especially if you are a politician or a "celebrity".
Well, only thirty-six - no wonder it takes them so long. And them being all male, exclusively.

So this site, along with my deeds and writings, are the tiny pieces of clay I've volunteered to put together all my life.
Anonymously.

As much as it depends upon me, I promise to live forever. But why wait so long? Isn't it time for our generations to wake up from the stupor that has come to envelope the world? No Prince will appear to wake us up, although more than one drop of blood has been shed in our Age of Violence.

Your visit here was a nice first step.
Now, why not send an unbroken link to your closest Lamed-Vav friends?
Men and Women alike.

Leave the door open, and come again,
L'hitraot!
See you again,

Read it in Polish;in Farsi;in Russian; in Hungarian; in German; in French; in Italian;

Stop This War Now! Lebanon, Cairo, Revisited...

2006-10-31T11:43:00.000-08:00

I've just found this important message in my e-mail.

In 1993, he was the Director of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo, Egypt. I was researching for my "Noffey Haneffesh" - encounters with international women writers telling the story of Childhood Emotional and Spiritual Landscapes.

For a full week he put his entire staff at my assistance, in in our endeavors to meet with Egyptian women writers. A most warm, special person.
Here come his words of wisdom, uttered almost two weeks ago.

Our politicians choose to cover their ears and sadly enough, are able, as so often in history, to delude a majority of fools scared into blind submission.

End this War Now

To: Every Concerned Person
From: Emanuel Marx

Armies are trained to destroy enemies and conquer their territory. An army that runs out of control will find and fight more and more external and internal enemies, always in pursuit of an elusive victory.

That has happened to the Israeli Army on several occasions. Whenever it was allowed free rein, its campaigns ended in humanitarian disasters. Just now we are witnessing another instance: while the campaign against the Hizballah terrorist organization did not save the Israeli civilian population from rocket attacks, it rapidly turned into an assault on the Lebanese civilian population. Within days it deteriorated into a humanitarian catastrophe. Half a million innocent Lebanese civilians lost their homes and became refugees.

The Israeli Government must reassume control of the Army and stop the fighting immediately. Negotiations will surely achieve better outcomes.

July 21, 2006

(Emanuel Marx is a professor of Social Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.
He is a jubilee year (1998) Israel Prize laureate.)

About Me in Hebrew

2006-08-02T00:47:00.000-07:00

נולדתי ברומניה.

בתוכנית "קפה תיאטרון", שאל נועם סמל, "מהי המולדת שלך?"
היינו ארבעה מתארחים אצלו.
רמי סערי אמר שבשבילו, השפה היא המולדת.
אני לא יכולה לומר שהשפה היא המולדת כי מתחת לעברית, שבה אני כותבת, מתנגנת השפה הרומנית. שפת אגדות ושירה.
שמעתי את עצמי אומרת, "המולדת שלי היא משפטי נירנברג."
דודי היה מושיב אותי על הברכיים שלו ומבקש שאקרא מן העיתון את הדיווח היומי מנירנברג.
וגם: המולדת היא לשון התנ"ך. הפשטות. התימצות. עושר האמירות שחבויות בין מלה למלה.

ב-1962 התפרסם ספר הביכורים - לילדים. "מי ראה את מיקי."
על הנוראות שבאו לי עמו סיפרתי בראיון עם עופרי אילני.
את הסיפור הראשון פרסמתי ב-1970, ברבעון "קשת".
ב-1973 יצא הספר השני: "כעין תשובה".
ב-1989, ראה אור הספר השלישי: "דפים ורודים."
לקח רק משהו כמו חמש-עשרה שנים.
בספטמבר 2002 ראה אור ספרי הרביעי: "סודות".
פרוזה. נכתב על פני שלושים שנה.
בתחילת יוני 2003 יצא אל העולם הספר החמישי: "נופי הנפש."
שלא כקודמיו, הוא ספרות תעודה.
שיחות עם סופרות בינלאומיות על ילדות פגועה, שזורות בין דפי היומן האימפרסיוניסטי שלי.
על הספר הזה עבדתי עשר שנים.

מאז דצמבר 2000 אני עובדת על הספר השישי. מקווה להשלים אותו עד תחילת 2006.
מלבדו עומדים בתור שבעה ספרים נוספים. ייקח לי בין שבעים למאתיים ועשר שנים, ואשלים גם אותם.

טוב שיש בלוג, מקום בו ניתן לכתוב במנות קטנות יותר.
בספטמבר 2002, עם צאת "סודות", עלה גם האתר הרב לשוני.

חצי שנה קודם לכן תחקרתי את האינטרנט לאורך ולרוחב. גיליתי אתרים של מעצבים יצירתיים מאד שהפכו את התחום לאמנות בזכות עצמה. מהם השכלתי.
האתר מתארח חופשי בצד עיתון אינטרנטי שאני תורמת לו מדי פעם. אלא שיש הגבלה: לא יכולה לעדכן לעתים תכופות.

לכן הקמתי בלוג עברי.

בהביטי מן הצד, אני עשר פעמים ביום אומרת, לא די לך באלה?!
מה עוד? אופנסיבת בלוגים?

כן. הבלוג הדעתן, מסתבר, יש לו כוח להפוך אותך מאזרח ילד לבעל/ת בית על החיים כאן. את זה השכילו להבין בעולם.

מה עוד את זוממת?
מתהווה בלוג רב לשוני. בזכות אנשים מופלאים מפה ומשם.

יש עוד?

בלוג רדיו באודיאו. בלוג וידאו ביו-טיוב. בלוג ממאדים.

כל החיים לפניי.

עד כמה שזה תלוי בי.

Lebanon and the Anthem: The Cult of Glory

2006-07-15T01:49:00.000-07:00

Yet Charity is blissfully present - which gives way to hope.
Or is it the reason the Cult of Martyrdom seeks to overcome the Cult of Charity?
My heart goes to the people of Lebanon. Like us, like all people on this anguished Earth, they deserve a sane life.

All for the country, for the glory, for the flag
From the beginning of centuries, our pencil and sword
Our field and mountains are making the men
Our word and work on the way of perfection
All for the country, for the glory for the flag

Young and old at the voice of the country
Lions of forest at the time of violation
Our east is its heart forever Lebanon
Its God protects it all over the time
All for the country, for the glory for the flag

Its sea, its land, are the pearl of the two orients
Its symbol, its charity, fill up the two poles
Its name is its triumph since the time of our grandfathers
Its glory is its cedars, its symbol is for the end of epochs
All for the country, for the glory for the flag

Iran: The Cult Of Martyrdom is our Doom

2006-07-15T01:36:00.000-07:00

The Flag and the Anthem, the words and the image, all directed to move our senses toward the prevailing mottif: You are but a tool in the hands of The-Power-Driven, who swirl your heart into the false, manipulating message:

Martyrdom Is Bliss. Life Is Hell.

Hence, to prove it they'll do everything in their power to create this hell on Earth - for you:

Three equal horizontal bands of green (top), white, and red; the national emblem (a stylized representation of the word Allah in the shape of a tulip, a symbol of martyrdom) in red is centered in the white band; ALLAH AKBAR (God is Great) in white

Arabic script is repeated 11 times along the bottom edge of the green band and 11 times along the top edge of the red band:

Upwards on the horizon rises the Eastern Sun,
The sight of the true Religion.
Bahman - the brilliance of our Faith.
Your message, O Imam, of independence and freedom
is imprinted on our souls.
O Martyrs! The time of your cries of pain rings in our ears.
Enduring, continuing, eternal,
The Islamic Republic of Iran.

War, Israel, Lebanon, Hizballa, The Other Side of the Moon?

2006-07-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

Oh, how tired I am, and not just owing to the late hour - past 01:00!
Reading through Raja's report from Beirut and the multitude of comments brought me to see behind the clouds of war and all the Hizballa mighty presentations of innocent patriotism: there is an intention there, so I detect, to create an atmosphere of despair and, wait and see! soon we'll have demonstrations of calls to Syria to drop by and save Lebanon from its weak goverment.

Yet, since we are not just on the same moon but actually mirroring each other - I fear the day such a call will spread here, to bring about a strong leader.

Meanwhile our civilian Ministers, play hostages to our generals.

All in all, the boys games go on ad infinitum.

Or until we step in and stop them for awhile.

Raise the Black Flag, people. Let's have some rest of all these stupid games of war.

Critical Love

2006-06-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

1.
Luckily, my books are appreciated by the reviewers.
Yet, as we all know, quite often reviewers write on books they dislike.
Hard to understand: why waste time on a book you consider unworthy?
2.
Reviews of the appreciated are most of the time serious, even profound.
Reviews of books abhorred are mostly ridiculing or cynical.
Amusing indeed they are, and especially satisfying the popular desire for Blood.
Which of the two attracts more readers?
Which of the two is more demanding, Time-wise?
3.
It is common wisdom nowadays that in order to write a book, all some need is just a computer and a noisy publisher.
A real flood.
Hence, it is said that reviews alerting us are essential. Otherwise, left alone, how could we discern?
4.
Years ago - by chance at the annual Hebrew Book Fair in Tel-Aviv - I noticed a man standing in a corner of the square, next to a basket in which lay three cocker-spaniel puppies.

I took one out, just to stroke it gently.
Do you think I ever put it back?
No.
I bought it.
I was not familiar with those species. Had never heard of them before.
That's how books buy my heart*.

* a Hebrew expression.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Read it in Russian; in Polish;in Hungarian; in Hebrew; in Farsi;

Thanking Laila

2006-04-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Laila for your words.
Unlike some of the commentors, your dignified attitude is quite touching.

I'm back home from a few hours of holiday gift shopping. All along I was thinking, with a trembling heart, here we are and there they are, so close by and yet all this aimless suffering. There is no justification for all those power fights, bringing disaster on the innocents in an endless circle of mindless cruelty.

Thank you for being.

In Hebrew Laila means, Night. So persistent is the feeling that Night itself closes upon us. Yet your words, paradoxically, point to the opposite, give hope, crossing above walls of concrete and fire. I have close friends on the other side of the wall, in farms and kibutzim, mothers trembling for their own innocent babies.

It's time for us to get up and issue an order to those leaders playing ping-pong with our lives: Stop all power games. Enough is enough.

Pass On! Pass On!

2006-03-11T04:40:00.000-08:00

If you care for freedom of communication, pass this link on: TOR does!

Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves.

How safe from Vandals is your computer?

2005-11-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Just back from Mark Russovich's blog , completely shaken.
Planning to buy a Sony or Sony related CD?
Mark, the ultimate detective, has just discovered that those CDs come with a piece that goes straight to the heart and brains of your Computer.

Just go read it, even if, like me, you're not a master of your PC intenstines.

Meanwhile, my moral dilema re which Notepad/PC to purchase, only grows heavier.

I feel like going out with a candle, to search for Honesty.

"I write, my wife does everything else."

2005-09-17T07:39:00.000-07:00

What Mario Vargas Llosa found here is no news to me.

Yet there was one sentence in this interview with Mario Vargas Llosa:
"I write - my wife does everything else."

I do everything, writing included.
True, nowadays, with children grown up and on their own, I have, in theory, the freedom to do just the writing.

Except that - how can one write when hungry.
I get up and do the cooking.
How can one cook, when the kitchen is empty.
I go out and do the shopping, bills have to be paid and settled on time, money has to be raised - to buy food and cover the bills, too much dust is bad for your lungs, the floors must be washed...

I can stop all activities for a whole month - I cannot stop the sense of heavy burden.

Dacia Maraini, whom I've visited with in Italy for my "Noffey Haneffesh" (Once She Was a Child), does have a secretary, agents, help. Yet she did the cooking for the fourteen guests at the party in the evening.

Even before a woman takes a pen in her hand, she's, most of the time, handycapped.

The only place where a measure of freedom exists, or rather responsibility is for a while lifted - is at the artists' colony. It's called a retreat, only that one finds it hard to retreat while surrounded by twenty or fifty energetic writers and artists day and night.

No doubt - having a wife to do "everything else", is a good idea.

I won't exchange my full freedom for anything else.

The sense of responsibility feels like a great burden only in memory. It shouldn't be that terrible when one is responsible only for one's own life.

Like a freed slave, the greatest task is to erase the imprint left by years of slaving to responsibilities.

This book I've been writing since December 2000, am still working on - my fifth - brings new revelations daily.

Writing is such an irresponsible adventure!

Take Note, Chopin, Shubert, Sharon,

2005-09-17T07:11:00.000-07:00

When concerts are free and people are less than free:

Piano against the Wall
report by Beate Zilversmidt
just received in the mail from Gush Shalom

The idea of "a protest recital" by pianist Jacob Allegro Wegloop on one of the Friday happenings in Bil'in came about in August, in an Amsterdam cafe: "I would gladly come and offer my music to Palestinians as an expression of my sympathy."
There happened to be already a piano in Bil'in. It had just been donated by the Pollak family. Without it, the whole idea may have evaporated. And Zamir Barlev - activist & piano tuner -had been so kind as to come on Thursday and repair some broken keys.

Friday Sept. 16, a minibus arrived in Bil'in already before dawn. It had been decided to go to the West Bank village straight from the airport - as to arrive before the army would close the access roads - as has become its new practice on Fridays. Gush Shalom had hired a van for the occasion, and Uri Avnery was there, too.

The ground floor of the Abu-Rahme house has been transformed into a kind of youth hostel, with matrasses spread out, and a self service kitchen corner. Apart from the more permanent internationals, it hosts every week a group of Israeli activists who come on Thursday in order to be in Bil'in at the weekly event.

"It's nice to be woken up by piano music, and not by the army megaphone imposing a curfew" said one the guests.

From where all the kids came was not clear, but they surrounded the miracle - the piano had been moved meanwhile into the front guarden. And when Allegro could not decipher the handscribbled notes of the Palestinian anthem - given to him at the spot to be added to the repertoire - the children sang it for him enthusiastically.

Jacob Allegro played and played - melodious pieces of Schubert, and some Chopin - as to force the somewhat stubborn instrument to open itself up. "What is your message" was a question asked by different interviewers who started to appear: "Sympathy for the suffering." "You are a Jew, a holocaust orphan" -- "That did not make me blind to the injustice done to others." "What do you say to the building of the Wall right through the middle of our lands?" "It's a shame! A big shame."

It's not easy to say where the preparations stopped and the concert began. Several times the crowd of the front guarden ran to the street at rumours of army patrols arriving. But the invasion of this day was of TV crews: several Palestinian stations, Al-Jazeera, Reuters, Egyptian TV , the Israeli Second Channel, etc. They had all been invited by Mohamed al-Khatib of the Bil'in Popular Committee to come at 10.30am and shoot pictures inside the village, as it was expected that the army would be far from helpful when a truck, and on it a piano, would arrive to the site where the wall is being prepared.

On Israeli TV the scene appeared after all not on Channel-2, but on the respectable first channel, using Reuters material. It was one more amazing report from Bil'in, from people who now already for months capture the headlines with their imaginative, non-violent ways of protest, undeterred by army violence.

There is still much struggle ahead; there is an appeal on the way to the Supreme Court, which this week created a precedent not without hope in the Qalqilya region. But one achievement already stands and is visible from the faces: this struggle, and the support shown for it is strengening the people in Bil'in in times where one either becomes stronger or sinks down.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was not there in person, only in spirit, yet I'm gladdened.
I admire those courageous people:
Their gestures tell me that the world is not empty of humanitarian support.

Yet a world in which it takes courage to attend a peacefull, non violent rally, is not a good place.

Oh, my beloved country and region, Wake up.
Enough is Enough.

Bush, Sharon and the UN: since then they lived happily together

2005-09-15T03:32:00.000-07:00

Reuters ©

"What Ariel Sharon and you have going:
Analyze your relationships with Ariel Sharon - in mathematical terms - for presence and strength of mutual commitment, intimacy, passion, and synergy."
© Top Synergy Corp.

Is it Hurricane Symbol, or Just a Shadow?

2005-09-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

Do you remember 13 September 1993?
The day The Oslo Accords were officially signed in Washington DC before our mostly thankful.
Twelve years to the day.

Today, the very politicians who had denounced and stomped upon it - its very fierce opponents - have now led the exodus from Gaza.

Still every drama has a farce. Bathos is following in the footsteps of Pathos.
True to life Shakespeare was.

After the demolition of all the settlers' houses, at the very end were left the synagogues.

Time after time there were appeals to the court to leave them intact.
The State solemnly explained to the High Court of Justice that it is out of question.
The judges left the final decision to the government.

Overnight, at the last minute, on the eve of the final withdrawal, the Minister of Security, Mr. Mofaz, solemnly changed his mind.

Overnight, Sharon and all his Ministers except two, have changed their mind.

What happened?

The Head Rabbis decreed the synagogues are to be left intact.

A very good decision: Now, not one of the politicians fearing the approaching elections will be held responsible.

So what if the Palestinian had refused again and again to take responsibility?
Their hooligans will burn our synagogues?
Ours might burn their mosque of mosques.
So easy, so simple to incite the mother of all wars.

Here we are with those buildings: What for one is a holy symbol of Jewish suffering throughout generations - for the other is the leftover symbol of the sufferings of occupation.

That's what happens when symbols turn sour and become taboos.

This disengagement was planned ahead for two years. There was plenty of time to think ahead.

Ours is The Only Democratic Country, led by nose by Chief Rabbis, and a complying government with a straight face.

From now on, In Fear We Trust.

Niam el Baz, Cairo, Egypt

2005-08-28T12:38:00.001-07:00

27.5.94 Friday

Niam is a big woman. Stood up to greet us in sandals on thin heals, and immediately sat down, freed herself from the sandals and touched the floor with her bare feet, taking pleasure.

Niam:
When I was born there were already two sons, and a daughter. My parents wanted another daughter, so my sister had a friend - so when I came, my mother and
father were very glad. But my grandfather was very unhappy, so my father said, "Girls are Niam, the good things that Allah sends us. I will call this girl Niam."

I come from the delta, near the forking of the Nile, in the north, so I love the Nile very much. I've put it in my eye. We are not peasants, but in my childhood I was
simply glued to a family of peasants there. I look for the peasant's bread everywhere and I can't find it.

I used to go down and play with the children of the peasants who worked for us. My parents didn't want me to play with them, they would pull me by the hand like this
back home. I would take off my shoes and walk barefooted.
Until now, everywhere, if I'm around plants and grass, right away I take off my shoes. I can feel belonging only if I'm walking barefoot on the ground.

I really loved playing with their children. So much so that if they were having a joint meal, because they are poor there so each would bring with him to work some pita and onion, I would bring a plate full of rice and vegetables and meat and share with them. I would gather them around me and tell them what I had seen in the
cinema, it is a very distant thing for peasants' kids.
We would wash every day. Not like the peasants' children, who would maybe go down to the Nile every now and then.

Not because of the mother's neglect, it's just that the mother would go out to work in the field.

The children in the village itself would wash before holidays, one after the other, in the public baths, pour some water and a little soap. I would say to my mum, You
wash me, it takes you an hour, and there -- hundreds of children are being washed in an hour.

I want to ask you if you have any stories from childhood, something special like that.

I like listening to yours.
Atidaal: (to Niam) Let her enjoy your stories.
Niam:
It interests me very much. About Romania. When you were a girl, did they ask you whether to come to Israel or not?
OK. I have a memory that I am three years old --
Niam:
These are the signs of writers. Not everybody can remember.

The Downfall: Der Untergang

2005-06-08T23:32:00.000-07:00

Coming out from among the Berlin ruins to the luxury of a high scale mall in Tel-Aviv - only then composure sheds and pain pushes tears to my eyes.

The memory of the days in the shelter, the exit to the light and the sight of the saviors. All of a sudden our enemies are waving and throwing flowers at the Russian army.

"The Downfall." In Hebrew, "Hanefilla". Yet from the same root we have the "Han'fillim" - the huge immortals visiting us as they have fallen from above.

The Nazis aspired to be seen as N'fillim. They forced their way into so easily addicted minds of millions. Fallen they had, yet the seeds of and evil and mass induction are sprouting everywhere, as they themselves have been sprouted from earlier seeds.

As long as there is on the face of this planet even one single soul willing to sell itself to blind obedience, to regard Obedience as the Basic Law, above all human rights, as long as Obedience is not unmasked for what it is, the obliteration of the human spirit - then Tyranny will keep visiting us under its modern disguises.

As I walked among the well dressed people, passing past shops and huge modern buildings, a clearly named shiver groped my heart.

But tomorrow I'll be speaking at the Activism Festival, so here is something to look forward to - a glimpse of light.

When do you realize something was lacking?

2005-06-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

Mostly, when it re-appears.
For instance, in Spring, when you organize your cupboard and move up the winter clothes - and there all of a sudden you see a long forgotten blouse, a letter, a hundred shekel bill.

What I'm finding nowadays, and has been long forgotten, is the re-appearance of Smiles.
It has taken only a few quiet months to bring those back to people's faces.

Like today, on the bus, the driver was asking people to get off at the rear door.

A senior lady rings the bell and comes to exit at the quite narrow front door.
The driver says, "Why from here, why not from the rear door?"
The lady answers, nonchalantly:
"So I could say Shalom (good-by) to you."

The driver and all of us laugh heartily. She gets off and leaves us her gift of smiles and good humour.

It took only a few months of quiet. Driver and passengers are no more tense with suppressed worry, Will we arrive home in one piece?

Sanity should be the norm. Is it now, can we be indeed content?
No.

As long as on the other side of this horrible Wall, a million and a half people of all ages are brought to lead insufferable anguish - we are still on the mouth of a volcano which might and will erupt upon us.

Our Spartan generals want us believe there is no option but endless war.
Can we overcome this brainwashing and build here a Culture of Peace and Equality for all and each human being?

I'll rather smile with a clean conscience.

On Gratitude

2005-06-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

I love this medium - so much in apposition to my, mostly lyrical, prose. Direct, immediate, keeps me in touch with the outward world. Enables me in Commentary and Satire to react right away to the daily political and social upheaval and have an immediate impact on my community, instead of boiling inside helplessly.

People write to ask, "Do mention my work at your blog."

I say, Take the fishing rod. Start a blog of your own. The technique is as simple as a.b.c. The content makes all the difference. As long as you have something meaningful to say.

Most of the time they do open their own blogs.
Most of the time, most of them remember to express their thanks, online, and with a link to this blog, or to the Hebrew one, entitled: "Writer, Publisher, Trouble Maker".

To-day I had for lunch an impressive young lady. She's organizing my meetings with readers. The upcoming one is scheduled at the Festival of Activism (site in Hebrew), this coming Friday at 13:00.

Israel is brimming with people active in building a culture of peace. I feel grateful.

Still, the question nags, especially at this late hour: Do we stand a chance?

What a nice day was yesterday

2005-06-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

And what made it so nice?

A tentatively new Flower Market. In a central garden in town, Flower Growers from around the country exhibited and sold their flowers and even some plants, at low prices. For a few weeks, on Fridays. I went there yesterday for the first time.

The garden was full of smiles, people of all ages, flowers with their multitude arrays of colors, and full of smiles was, still, the sun.
It seems that we are like people out of shelters, happy and grateful for the small joys of life. Or are we like the dancers on the Titanic?

Ayalon, the Army departing Commander in Chief, has some grim message for us.
To sum it all up in one sentence: "It's not Us, It's Them - we carry no responsibility."

Let's hope he'll never be a Prime Minister here.
One Ariel Sharon is more than enough, as far as I am concerned.

Concerned I am, indeed.

How To Turn The World Upside Down

2005-05-07T04:25:00.001-07:00

A. Now: Olive Trees

I should have known.
I didn't know.
I have not seen.
I didn't hear.
I stayed silent.

Here and there I saw large signs
No nursery name mentioned, no address provided - just a mobile phone number.

Olive trees seem to be multiplying, in the boulevard opposite my place and right throughout the city. They are almost like the papaya trees: it is enough to toss the seeds on the ground and they grow all by themselves.

I got to the "Kibush" web site and it was almost like a movie. The turning over [1] of olive trees. They get turned over and turned over and then they get transported to some place, by the authority of so and so, with not-so-anonymous people turning a blind eye.

Journalist Meron Rapoport (now at Haaretz) had his investigative feature on the subject published at the Yedioth Ahronoth daily back in January 2002.
He won a prize for it.
Not in Tel-Aviv. In Italy.

You can't love all the people all of the time.
But trees - how can you not love them, all of them and all of the time?
There are greater lovers than me. Their love breeds blindness.

I wrote in my Hebrew blog at the "Notes" web site:
"Let's see you, Agatha [Christie], solving my cryptic riddle."

Answers started arriving from far-flung places like the Technion in Haifa, a mansion in mighty Savion [2], a boulevard in Ramat Hasharon, town squares and village squares, rural communities and kibbutzim.
It's spread like cancer.
I had a second go: "Agatha Christie is not silent."
Then I had a third go:
"An interim report: the Truth Situation.
Along with explanations and clarification in response to readers' comments.

Eclipse.

Here and there someone wrote about the supply of olive trees; their point of origin.
People tsk-tsked about the heartless uprooters and oppressors. So distant from us. So much not like us. What are you on about, Corinna?

Who we forgot along the way? Who should we not avoid considering? Who should we raise hell about, till they blush?

We have to keep going till "An ancient olive tree" will no longer be a expensive fashion statement that dropped like a tendril into our lap, out of nowhere. It has to be acknowledged as to what it has really become: a symbol of blind or feigned innocent collaboration with an evil deed.

B. The First Victory

Strom Thurmond was a leading opponent of desegregation between Blacks and whites in the United States. Even though he was a member of the Democratic Party (sounds familiar) he stood against Harry Truman and won only in the southern states (such were the Democrats there). He lost but didn't give up. In 1956 he initiated and wrote the Southern Manifesto opposing the Supreme Court's ruling for the abolition of segregation. He topped it all and excelled himself in a filibuster of non-stop 24 hours and 18 minutes speech against the USA civil rights legislation in 1957.

Obviously, he never made it to be President. He did make it to his own hundredth birthday party, on December 2002.
On that occassion, Mr Trent Lott, then Senate Majority Leader, raised his glass in admiration: "I want to say this about my state [Mississippi]: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

A statement praising racism made by the Senate majority leader 45 years after equality of citizens was enshrined in law.
You would have expected a political storm.
It was mentioned as a two-second, light-hearted, item on the news.

By 2002 there were nearly a million bloggers in the United States. One after another the bloggers grabbed the story and didn't let go. The whole thing spread like a bushfire in the blogosphere.

Journalists read blogs. They had no choice but to invite the honourable Trent Lott to the TV and radio studios and ask him the inevitable questions.
He apologised more than once.
It didn't do him any good. He had to resign.

Then a loud voice was heard from the forty corners of the blogosphere. Yes!
And I, who was watching from the sidelines, said to myself: when can We do this here in Israel, when?

C. Hear this word [3], oh nation of bloggers and readers in this holy land:

There is one of me and many of you.
Arise you people from your slumbers! [4]
Go write in your blogs.
Raise hell, write to your city and shire mayors.
Call on your neighbours and on the mansion owners.
Ask them: where is this tree from?

Have you checked the wandering path that it traversed to get to your garden or boulevard?

If you find out that it is indeed stolen, would you be willing to return it to its owners, as you should by law?

Go and check: Is there a brave editor who would publish interviews with Savion residents who are paying 25,000 shekels for "a truly ancient tree"?
Go find out how far are newspapers and TV channels willing to disengage themselves from the wrath of the rich and powerful.
More than 100,000 olive trees have been uprooted and stolen from the Occupied Territories.
In the Savion mansion and at our town boulevards, the olive tree is a brand name - an instrument for displaying a pretend authentic Novo-Israeliness.
For the Palestinian olive grove owner, the tree is his/her life and soul.
Sad is the matchstick. [5]

"Ancient olive tree for sale."

Translated by Sol Salbe from the original Hebrew;
Translator notes:
[1] The word can also mean a revolution in Hebrew.
[2] Savion is just about the most prestigious address in the whole of Israel.
[3] Hear this word, ye king of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink. (Amos 4,1)
[4] "Arise you workers from your slumbers..."(The Internationale).
[5] "How fortunate is the matchstick which flared up a fire..." famous poem by Hungarian-born 2nd WW Jewish heroine, Hannah Senes, symbolizing selfless courage.

There is a BlogRunner in your cup!

2005-04-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

Blogrunners collects and links to blogposts on specific themes and even from NYTimes.

I'm game, so I went to NYTimes to see what they have to say today and was astonished to find out that their main concern is not the Middle East, neither the Disengagement from Gaza, nor the growing poverty here and not even the last gem of this or that rabbi now submerged in politics.

They are still relating to Pope Benedict XVI, known before his anointing as Cardinal Ratzinger.

An interesting article, with some astounding revelations, which made me once again realize why I could have never become Catholic:

"Once, about 10 years ago when I was visiting him in Rome, he told me, 'I have my personal sense of freedom, my sympathy for freedom. I have to keep it to myself. I have to obey the pope. The pope told me that it is my biggest religious obligation not to have my own opinions.'

"Ratzinger told me this after I hadn't seen him in a long time and he felt the need to explain to me why he is so strict," Professor Seckler continued..."

"Kill" me, but my biggest religious obligation was/is/will eternally remain, to have my own opinion.

So, sadly, I had to give up on Catholicism. Or, for that matter, any institutionalized religion whatsoever.

International Action Alert and The Greatest Enigma

2005-04-20T01:25:00.000-07:00

I've just received in the mail this disturbing message from Gush Shalom.
It touches me in person, as I well remember the time when Rumanian soldiers presented my mother with a similar letter back in 1943.

I well know that some people, instead of confronting the issue at hand, will jump to evade it with: "Do you compare to the Holocaust?"
No, I do not compare to the Holocaust. Does it translate into belittling suffering which does not reach the Holocaust magnitude?
No, and never.

Does it, should it translate into sensitivity to The Other's anguish?
Yes, and always.

In my eyes, the greatest enigma remains: Why have we come to be divided into two groups - the ones who close their eyes and hearts and go forth unheeded and the ones who wish all those deeds done in our name were just a nightmare, and then wake up, frustrated, to send another e-mail, like passing on a glimmer of hope that none of us is ever alone.

Sharon and the Amazones

2005-03-12T04:28:00.002-08:00

A group of Likud Ministers and Knesset members, nicknamed "the rebels", are threatening to vote down the proposed budget, which might bring down the government and at least postpone the "Disengagement" - the army withdrawal from the Gaza strip and the evacuation of settlements from the Gaza strip.

Never mind. Sharon had a solution:
Acknowledging Women's immense capacity to influence men, on March 8, The International Women's Day - a day to celebrate Equality - our mighty PM came to speak to a gathering of the only Israeli real women - Likud women activists.

Facing the only important section of our world, at the Amazones conference, he states that women's place is not equal to that of men but much higher, high above of even plain Knesset members and simple Ministers:

Women, at least in the Herculikud - and how have you not noticed this until now - women are those who dictate to men for what to vote.

New Times, 2005 splendor.

See for yourselves: If women won't be behind men, but, God forbid, Knesset members and Ministers - they'll lose their power for nothing.

There'll be no one left to influence.

You girls know exactly what he has in mind.
Don't tell me Hercules does not read Greek. What, at his native Mallal village they did not teach the Amazones story?
At least part of this word*** was in use in the Army (In Hebrew the plural is Amazonot; for the rest, see the dictionary).

Pay attention, you mighty Herculikud Women:
By all means, the Budget must not be voted down!
The men rebel against their king?
You must rebel against men!

Put on Brave Hyppolita's belt and sing out loud and clear:
Bring the Budget! Bring power and hunger - or you'll see soon some disengagement! Day and Night there will be no one to influence you!Well said, Hercules?
Where is he?

Shhh! He's counting eyes, on the knitting needle.
Who gave him wool, who?
He dismantled the old woman's sweater, the one in the hospital's corridor.
Oh. What's going to come upon her?
Shrouds.
Rightly so. Who could she influence anyway?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read it in Russian;

I'm going to a Fortune-teller

2005-02-27T14:48:00.001-08:00

1.

Most of the time I have no problem telling the future.

You're saying, "That's not such a difficult trick. No difference here between Past, Present and Future. Our Time is linear, following a straight line, like the cardiogram of a person unilaterally disconnected from the world.

The second law of thermodynamics claims Time is irreversible?
You're making Time laugh, baby. Turning back could be achieved only when you're moving.
Telling the future in our world is really a child's trick."

2.
I'm going to the fortune teller, and tell her straight away:
"Listen, usually I have no problem foreseeing the future. Suddenly - I'm in the dark. I see nothing."

She's gathering her skirts around her, mixes her cards, swallows her coffee, divines the residue at the bottom of her cup,
and faints.

I wipe her face with my dainty muslin handkerchief (the laundresses is for sure raising an eyebrow) and softly say,
"Maritza, don't put up a show. What is it you're seeing?"
Answers she, "Corinna, sweet lady, Nothing. Pit endless darkness, I swear."

Now I'm real scared. "You too?!"
I push the megaphone into her face and scream, "What is it you're seeing?"
Says she, scared and crying, "I see nothing, I swear by the black angel of terror and vengeance, I see nothing."

I plead with her, "Maritza, please do give me one glimpse of future. I'm not a lady, I'm the baby you've breastfed from day one. What is it I'm asking in this desert? Just one drop of future, sweet and pure.
Tell me what is it you're seeing."

Says she,
"I see a silent movie. The Future is watching, asleep, quietly waiting for a Rabin on a white horse to wake her up with a loving kiss."

read it in Hebrew;

Human Anguish in a Manly World / Ma'ariv, September 3, 2004

2005-02-21T10:59:00.000-08:00

"I was thinking: So many books, so many women writers, Who are they?" asks Corinna in her words on the back cover of Noffey Haneffesh ("Intimate Landscapes").

Noffey Haneffesh (Once She Was A Child), written as in answer to this question, is a collection of intimate conversations with women writers, linked by the author's journal and responses as she follows their tales with her own.

"Women Writers". Is there an unifying element to help us define "Female Writing"? Had Corinna meant to describe here an entity of "Female Experience"?

The writers whose life story fragments are disclosed to us are so different, almost all over. In "Once She Was A Child" you'll find Barbara Frishmuth from Austria; Amelie Nothomb - A Belgian born and raised up in several Asian countries; Leila Sebbar - born in Alger to an Algerian father and a French mother; the Israeli Karen Alkalay-Gut, the Dutch Marion Bloom, Leena Lander in Finland, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Amina Said and Michelle Grangaud in France and Hanne Marie Svendson in Denmark. They mostly relay the story of their childhood, yet do talk also about their youth and adult life.

Those are memories' glimpses of women who on the surface seem to have nothing in common - and yet they share so many similar facets.

The most prominent one is Absence - an experience of emptiness, of want. Many times this experience appears linked to a father's disappearance: Barbara Frishmuth's father was killed in the 2nd World War - she remembers nothing of him; Svetlana Vasilenko's father (Russia) never married her mother - he comes and goes, leaving behind him a trail made of big holes.

Sometimes the origin of the spatial emptiness is different, as in the death of a child, Dacia Maraini's (Italy) - whose death is mentioned in passing, in just one sentence, almost unsaid.

Many things are left unsaid. They are absent from the book's pages, yet exist in-between the lines, in the space the writing itself opens - paralleling life's story.

In total apposition appear and reappear in the book experiences of brutal intrusions and invasions. Such is the breaking into Anisa Darwish's house at Ramallah 2002 and the doubled helplessness she feels while facing the Israeli governing powers as well as while facing her Israeli friends, to whom she cannot describe her lot in their language - the language of occupation; or the helplessness expressed in the story of the penetration into Karen Alkalay Gut's body, doubled by the inability to talk about rape in a Men's World and in a language whose meanings and borders are defined by a male's worldview.

Other themes, such as the relation to one's name or to one's native place, resurge throughout the book, linking the diverse stories - as if hinting to us in Corinna's name: These are the matters which being female build.

All throughout the stories the book links strongly to the Israeli existence. Two major Israeli narratives correspond with each other: One is the Holocaust, which keeps popping up in the first part of the book - the voyage to Europe and the conversations with European writers. Yet in the second part of the book, that of writers from the Arab world, where the Holocaust seemingly disappears entirely, the Holocaust is present in it's denial and oblivion. When this denial becomes outspoken (in the Egyptian Niam El Baz's narrative), Corinna, via her travel journal, brings us back in time, to her childhood in Romania of the 2nd World War.
As if she meant to say: It really happened.

But maybe she wants to create a link to that other Israeli narrative - our relations with the Palestinians, the "Peace" and, mainly, the war. When the memories from Romania emerge - military governing, soldiers entering home at midnight to search for her fugitive father, the home confiscation , the wire barbed camp of imprisoned refugees in Cyprus - there echo pictures as if taken from Anisa Darwish's story of her life in Ramallah. There is no explicit statement on the relation between the two narratives, but the way they engage and disengage opens to the reader a new vista enabling re-consideration of the various links between them.

Slowly the book has invaded me. So much strength it contains. Women's strength to confront traditions, religion, Man's World Laws - and yet, so much pain and anguish. Female anguish and human one as well. Not always I am able to discern between the two, between what might constitute a human experience and what is unique to women's life in a world run according to Men's Laws.

This pain cuts through especially when it surfaces repeatedly in attempts to find happy memories. It's just then, when it steals its way through the back door, stubbornly re-affirming its presence in the lives of those women, it is then that it presents itself, eternal, compelling with the utmost power.

Hagar Kotef-Sekund
The Literary Supplement, Maariv 3.9.04
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read it in Polish...in Hungarian...

Duet: Sharon and Abu Mazen

2005-02-08T15:34:00.000-08:00

(Standing at the two corners of the stage, while tearing one by one petals of red carnations):

"I'm very tired to-day, what with all this hand-shaking, and more handshaking - to the last photographer and cameraperson. My hand has grown soft and delicate from being that unused.

"Now, does he really mean it, or is it again another game, to gain time for another not-surprising surprise?

"Am I going to get killed, Rabin style?"

"What's the name of that Egyptian who started all this commotion. Hah, Saadat. Yes. They shot him. That was not a nice thing to do.
Well, he was skinny.

The very irony: they did not want Rabin and got their own Sharon forced to perform his job - same Sharon who prior to the assasination was so heated and heating. Now the whole world can see that the guy was just upset for not being invited to the regal Nobel Prize dinner."

"Ha-Ha, laughs who laughs last: and who was Not invited to the sumptuous Sharem summit dinner?
little peres.
I left him in Tel-Aviv with his Nobel diploma."

(turning to each other, hands outstreched):

"Shall We Dance?"

read it in Farsi;

Twice Ariel Sharon

2005-02-05T15:24:00.000-08:00

Each Meeting Was More Fantastic than the other...
a long title for a short story, with no moral

Israel not being a kingdom it's not rare to meet some of its knights.
Yet for an Israeli humble writer to meet Sharon would be rarest than meeting the royalty in UK.
For where could she meet him?
At a rally against the invasion (we're talking Lebanon)?
No chance.

But even much earlier, here's what happened:

How I Met Ariel Sharon, #1
On the evening preceding the 1973 Yom Kippur Eve, some relatives from South America came to tour Israel.
Remember, a few days earlier Dayan, then Minister of Defense had declared, "Never before was Israel's situation safer!"
(Another reason why we feel so safe and trustful).

On the night preceding the 1973 Yom Kippur Eve - a time when the weather is still unbearably hot - we came to pay our respects to our wealthy relatives, dressed in our best attire, which in my case consisted of a long dress with a great decollete.

There we were, at the palatial Hilton Tel-Aviv, waiting for the elevator. And very soon indeed the click and ring and light flashes signaled it's arrival,the doors opened, and out comes, who if not Ariel Sharon.
He was already quite large and hence impossible to ignore.
I looked at his face to read what it says and indeed it spoke, actually his eyes alone, not to me but straight to the depths of my decollete.

How I Met Ariel Sharon, # 2

A few years later - cannot recall if it was before or after Sabra and Shatila, The Lebanon War - the exact date was not put on record among the multitude of dates assaulting us daily.
We were invited to a colleague's son Bar Mitzvah.
As an event, a Bar Mitzvah, when a son reaches the age of thirteen, is second only to a wedding in its importance.
If it's a colleague's son celebration, you better attend it if you fear for your life.

But what if this colleague happens to be a member of the central committee of your party?
Indeed, he might be only one of some two thousands, but still, these people are the ones who choose the leaders.
If you fear for your political life, you better attend it. So the word spread out: Arik Sharon is amongst us.
I went to the buffet, put a few things on my plate, and turned to go back to our table.

Rest assured I was still young and beautiful and so was my decollete.
I turned from the buffet with my plastic plate in my hand, and who do I see heading straight to the crowded buffet if not, again, the same Ariel Sharon (almost, yet much greater in stature).
I looked straight at his face and again his eager eyes spoke eloquently.

He was staring straight into my hands, at the borekas on my plastic plate.

Being vain I don't want even to contemplate the burning question:
What If I were to go up on that elevator at Hilton in the same dress, yet with a plate-full of food in my hands?
And why, after so many men have peered into my decollete and so many others have eyed the food on my plates, why do I still remember that one above all?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read it in Polish; in Farsi in Hungarian; in Russian; in Hebrew;

Naive Questions, God-knows-why

2005-02-04T13:14:00.000-08:00

I've been wondering lately:

Is the Titan planet in the same state Planet Earth was some one hundred and forty bilion years ago?

Is Titan The New World we'll turn our face to from now on, some of us in terror, some in hope?

Is it going to become - like The New World who beat no bush while hastening to tour with its army in our neighborhood - the criminals' deportation location, the place to transfer over there stubborn nations, or leaders who've lost favor, who've done one wrong too much, who've committed crimes against humanity?

Shall we dare send over there world hugging-to-suffocate industrialists?

Or is there a danger lurking in the invisible future- that ages later they'll lash back to punish us here?

Should we set out for a seven-years exodus, escorted by angels and getting there - proceed to build a strong wall of defense?

Even there?

How should we act so to avoid transferring or, even better, avoid keeping here even one single Trojan virus?

read it in Farsi;in Russian;

A Parliament Member's Confession - February 2065

2005-01-31T15:19:00.001-08:00

Sixty Years from Now

1.

Your Honor, The President of Shelterel, esteemed Knesset Members, Ministers, Prime Minister, Honorable Audience - -

This confession is not that easy to make.

Not that easy since - unlike during those dark times - it comes non-coerced, from the depths of my heart.

I was young then - relative to the present - and have grown older, yet the thing does not leave me alone. Her voice echoes inside my head when I go to sleep and as I awake.

Her name in Shelterel was Citizen C.

Very little I knew of her, but of course it is impossible to know all the time all about all the citizens - this is not even our duty. Enough to know that they are naive and alive, that they trust us and that on the decisive day they will know for sure to insert the right piece of paper inside the right box.

Citizen C. did trust me, I had no doubts about it whatsoever. To me she came, here and there, with the stories of citizen-with-no-citizenship Anisa, as-if-citizen Salim, corruption in the small townships and why not have a country-wide publicity against sexual harassment at the work-place - I swear to you that at our Ministry even seventy years ago such things never occurred, for sure, I told her so... etc.

I assume that my assistant took well care of her calls.

2.

Things went on smoothly, me doing my thing, she doing hers. I trusted her.

Then, one day - she'd find the right time to call! - in the midst of a most fateful elections time, really fateful for me as citizen and as chairman of a party so close to it's fall, to mine.

Sixty five years have passed. I well remember and will never forget:

"Do listen, please: Those who were children during the Holocaust times - not the death camps survivors, but the ones whose turn to be sent there had yet to come... they are still alive, here, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, myself included - and they are not young anymore. Sick, poor, robbed of their compensations by The State of Shelterel who'd reached the Reparations Agreement with Germany in our unasked-for name, and undertook to compensate us itself.

"Shelterel had taken hold of those monies!They interrogate each claimant!Come, do come to the Justice House and see for yourself the march of the robbed and dismantled. People in their eighties, leaning on a cane or in wheel-chairs, coming to explain to the eternal judge aligned to the eternal legal representative of the Finance Ministry - explain and prove minutely, have them spread out in the court their bitter fate - all in all just to get a few more crumbs of disability percentage to enable a few additional pennies to their Holocaust Survivors' Disability Pension.

"Come and see how law representatives of the Finance Ministry interrogate at the court: a woman who was raped by German soldiers was asked to say what color the soldiers' uniform was; if it was the color of the local 'legionars' (enabled by the Nazis) then she is not entitled to compensations - that is The Word of the Law in Shelterel!

She couldn't remember the color of the uniforms - and her appeal for that meager Disability pension was denied!

She had no strength to appeal to a higher court, so appalled she was, so shaken.

Come, Come and hear the Legal Representative of The State of Shelterel uttering lightly the sentence frequent in the vocabulary of the Holocaust Denial: "It was war-time, so everybody suffered. At war-times everybody suffers."

It is mandatory to change that law once for all!Now we have Basic Human Rights and Freedom Laws!They are robbing the Holocaust Survivors!Those robbed of childhood are robbed now by The State of Shelterel!"

3.

As if I have not know all along that much.

I told her, this was sixty-five years ago, I well remember and will Never Forget:

"The naked truth is, Citizen C., that people as well as the government and all the bureaucrats are really fed up with the Holocaust.

"Look here, I'm now immersed in the elections. I give you my honorable word that immediately after the elections I'll harness myself wholly to this task of having the law changed. Take my word for it."

4.

The truth is, she gave me more than one day of grace after the elections, more than the conventional ninety days.

Then she called.

She wrote.

The secretary received her calls and letters. Passed them on to me.

I was immersed in negotiations with the Finance Ministry. A Minister of Education has great responsibility towards the children of Shelterel. Faced with that dilemma which I now share with you undisguised, I had to make a selection, to choose between the children living their childhood with us here and between those robbed of their childhood way back over there. It was not us who'd robbed them of their childhood - the German Nazis did it, let their name be erased!

We'd only robbed them of their reparations. Yet we provided them with tents, we provided them with housing and lands taken from you-know-who. We've built a Shelter State exactly as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.

I was busy with a multitude of activities, with the Party needs. There is a limit to the age a Minister of Education can be made responsible for, there is a limit to how much one can bargain and quarrel with the Minister of Finance and his well experienced clerks. I well knew that right away they'll throw into my face: "How much of your budget are you willing to do without?"

Their childhood had lasted three or four years. Their olden days with us weren't long either.

There is a limit to the quantity of pain a heart can hold.

The hour has come to say, without any monetary commitment - True, Mr. Minister of Finance, true? None of them is with us by now, true?

Simply, a confession:

Her voice echoes inside my head, inside my whole being, to this very day:

"Yosiniu, Yosiniu, do not forget who you are!"

The voice, the warm, hugging trust that only a naive citizen is able to express. Lost.

"Yosiniu, Yosiniu, do not forget who you are!"

Even if she is not with us at the Distingushed Guests gallery, she's here, shouting inside my head.

Enough is Enough! Have her Shut-Up! Till when?!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Any semblance to Reality is not by chance.

read it in Russian; in Hebrew;in Hungarian;

Restaurant Life (according to Radio News)

2005-01-23T15:48:00.000-08:00

"Good Morning! You're early today, it's only 11:45. What will you order?"

"Brunch. May I have a menu? What's up?"

"Here."

"Oh, where are my glasses... Do read it for me."

"Right. Lady, We have a special offer, a la carte, on fire!

"First Course:

"60 years old gentleman. Killed his divorcee. Passionate love. Shot her.

"Son, killed his father. Quarrel over a cigarette.

"8 years old boy. Shot in the back of the brain. At Beit Hanun. Sorry, not at our restaurant. Over there. Pity, brain is most tasteful, ha? Why don't you smile?"

"Enough."

Main Course:

"50 years old father, raped and abused daughters since they were 4 years old. Clean previous record.

"Five young men spent some nights with a girl, then sold her around. For the duration of one year. Happy she was."

"Nothing new at your place. Anything for Desert?"

"Sure! 2 years old baby, found walking alone on the road, in the cold and rain.

"Naked.

"Sweet, ha?"

read it in Hebrew; in Russian; in Polish;

On Trolls, Re-visited

2005-01-23T12:45:00.000-08:00

A new blogger has recently joined the Hebrew site "Reshimot" ("Notes") - where I happen to publish my posts in Hebrew. We are a group of some 80 independent bloggers.

Sure enough, the trolls made their appearance.

As a veteran blogger, I wrote her with some words of comfort and advise. The following is my last letter:

Everybody gets visited by trolls, they are not that choosy.

You do not see them at my blog because I erase them as fast as possible.

People know that if they leave an enlightening and to the point comment, it will not get smeared by trash or drowned in it.

Trolls get where there is a crack in the door. When they are kicked out they try the window (like commenting on you at someone's else "Reshimot" blog. When it happens at mine, I erase them on the spot, as common courtesy demands.)

Trolls are especially attracted by the new blogger. Some of them have tried to get a blog at Reshimot and were refused - so they have good reasons to try destroy the site.

People are violent in Israel at a growing rate and in growing numbers.

This is another good reason for me to keep my blog clean of violence and so build my own model of rational, benign, friendly communication.

After all, we are the majority, why let the few take over?

Tsunami vs. Mechanics

2005-01-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

"...Thousands of lives in countries such as Sri Lanka, India and Thailand could have been saved if an early warning system similar to one that exists for the Pacific Ocean had been in place. U.S.A. Officials said that they wanted to warn the countries but that there was no mechanism to do so..."

Maybe there was too much mechanism, too little humanism?

It's December 2004, mind you. CNN is open at all the hotels worldwide. You have TV, the internet, cellular phones, radio - an endless list of communication means.

Has even one of them been employed?

Who are the anonymous "Officials"? How could they have gone on about their lives and work, knowing well that a disaster is about to hit and doing, What?

Save me from the Officials.

2.

Who are those anonymous Officials?

Their heads we know. Loudly and shamelessly they refuse to sign the international accords meant to minimize - not obstruct entirely, just minimize the pollution endangering our Planet.

We know now well that the warming is man made, we know that mechanism.

Time is running yet Bush & Co. Are playing mechanism games.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) -- U.N. talks on climate change ended early Saturday with few steps forward as the United States, oil producers and developing giants slammed the brakes on the European Union's drive for deeper emissions cuts to stop global warming.

Oh dear accomplished Humanity, where are your bicycles?

read it in Hungarian; in Hebrew;

An unforgettable New Year Resolution

2005-01-02T13:51:00.000-08:00

Technorati challenges us: What is your New Year Resolution?

To tell you the truth, I'm out of resolutions this year.

Except some, not fit for print.

But I do remember one New Year Eve in New York City, back in 1990.

I was invited to a party at a lady's fancy house.

A roof apartment in the SOHO neighborhood.

The living room was lighted with candles.

People sipped wine, talked, each one presenting her or his kind resolution.

We were invited to the roof, or rather slowly people started drifting to it, passing through a little bedroom full with toys.

"My granddaughter's room," said the hostess, proudly.

The night was bright. The roof was rich with plants, actually the same plant everywhere.

People were sampling the leaves, giggling. The air filled soon with this sweetish smell I abhor.

"What plants are these?" asked Corinna.

"Joint! Grass!" said the hostess. "Want some?"

Politely I thanked the resolute grandmother, and went home to my Muse.

Musing.

Tsunami & Mommy

2004-12-31T03:57:00.000-08:00

1.

Yesterday I happened to visit a house which, unlike mine, has a TV set in it's midst.

Played and replayed and repeated to no end, CNN style, I saw the film done by that "amateur" camera: a boat appears on the screen and people, much alive and healthy, happily sun-burnt, are washed out of it by violent waters, and no, it's not the Water Amusement Park.

Like ants you find in a dirty glass and flush out, annihilate with water from the faucet.

Then another program followed, where for thirty full seconds the journalist discussed profound issues, like: "How had the Israeli media dealt with the Tsunami Disaster? There are more people killed in car accidents in Israel than the missing Israelis, yet even before one single Israeli was found dead, the media had treated it as an Israeli issue! Why? To serve the Rating!"

2.

I find the Tsunami disaster of interest to all Humanity. What is our existence if not Constant Defiance: building, dusting, clothes, shoes, fire, electricity and the tree you've just planted - all are Ants' acts of defiance saying, We can stand up to you, Master Nature!

You show up as a mighty giant and dragon, but we are such smart people, the little finger of a mere child of ours can stop Deluge itself!

You are not the only one able to kill and destroy - we are bad at it no less than you.

You are unable to discern between the just and the evil - we have laws and constitutions cutting through Israel.

With you, as much as you keep destroying, Man will build anew;

With us - once we destroy - erased are the destroyed, Allah have pity on them, alas.

3.

What?

I cannot hear!

I've missed the point?

Who are you?

I'm Mother Earth.

So what? You're not relevant. Tsunami is at sea, Mommy!

Haven't you seen how the sea had retreated before me, how I've sucked it back? Has it not brought you to ponder and reconsider? Not you, Corinna, you're OK, you've already written something in Sodot, indeed, Chapeau to you!

"Two brothers fought between them over two and a half acres, each of them said it was his, so they went to the rabbi, to let him decide. The rabbi said, 'I don't know much about lands.
Let's hear what the land has to say'. And he laid down on the ground. They thought he'd gone mad.
Eventually after about ten minutes he got up and said, 'I don't know much about lands. I asked the land whose it was, and the land said,
I don't belong to anyone, they belong to me'".

But what with the multi millions and hectars grabbers **?

When will they ever learn?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

** the caricature shows Sharon telling his sheep: "One day all this will be yours..."

In the background is his one thousand acres farm, or Israel itself...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read it in Hungarian;

Cheating the Cheaters

2004-12-14T15:33:00.001-08:00

A Frank Conversation With a Self-Acclaimed Casino Cheater.

1.

I've just come across this blog which Blogger thinks worthy to be noted...

Apparently one can be proud of diverse actions and choices, even of spending 25 yrs in the business of Casino Cheating.

2.

I'm musing, entirely unamused:

Don't you feel that by cheating you're actually replacing the Big Cheaters (The Casino Owners), not the System?

You might have made lots of money, but haven't you actually lost 25 (twenty five) best years of your life in this spiritual prison you're describing?

I'm interested in the human perspective. Telling the truthfull story of your life, feelings and urges could make a contribution to this lamentable world and population.

4.

Once I saw a men pulling something like one hundred dollars to pay for a bunch of lottery tickets.

I asked him with a smile (he looked so poor and worn out):

"Is there something left for your kids' food?"

He took the money and went away.

The lady running the booth admonished me:

"It's not nice what you've done. He'll go to another booth and I've lost a customer!"

In answer to your questions posted on my site:

Richard:

1.

While I'm not sure what it is you're asking here in relation to the Big Casinos and the System, I most certainly didn't replace the casinos. I put a little bit of hurt on them and was able to do so because of their greed and aggressive pursuit of sucker's money.

2.

I didn't lose 25 years in any spiritual prison. I LIVED my life. I travelled across the world, made a nice living, experienced a roller coaster ride filled with all of the adventures that life has to offer, and did so with a great deal of comraderie ith trusted teammates and close friends.

3.

I haven't read your books, so (unlike you) I won't attempt to offer assess them.

You should read my book maybe it'll inspire some adventures of your own.

The human perspective depends on experience. I lived my life fully (and continue to do so). I own all of its amazing experiences. Instead of being what I suspect as being at least a bit overly introspective, and feeling the world and its population is lamentable, you might be better off going out and having some fun. It may change your perspective to a more realistic and positive one.

Finally, my book is published by a major New York Publisher (St. Martin's Press). No need for a ghost.

Richard

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Indeed one needs to read a book in order to assess it (by which you probably mean, evaluate). While I've been indeed talking of Values, in regard to your book I was referring to the genre itself.

Literature is by its nature introspective, offering an in-depth perspective on life. How-To books do not reach that far. It's like the difference between a straw chair in your kitchen, and, let's say, Van Gogh's. One stays with you for as long as it is usable, the other survives Time itself.

You have written in the genre of "kitchen chair", which is usable in its way.

The issue is far reaching and deserves a Van Gogh.

True, he was introspective and suffering and probably most of the time very lonely and tormented. I do not recommend those aspects...

I feel there is a need to understand those deep layers of human spirit.

Dostoevsky was trying to reach into such deep wells. A ghost writer, a professional literary writer in your country might bring some inner truths out to light and then, behold, the "kitchen chair" will attain a totally different level.

While musing on this issue it dawned upon me that in my country, in the world at large, we are all, in a philosophical sense, Lottery Cheaters, as we try each in our petty corner to cheat the Sky, the Wheel dealers. It is pathetic and lamentable yet not as much as the people who populate the Casinoes are.

Some of us even take upon themselves the role of Robin Hood. If I understand correctly it was not your way.

In most countries those institutions "donate" monies to not-for-profit organizations. This is money taken mostly from the poor and deluded.

I know quite well that Casinos exists despite what I might call "the Cheaters of the Cheaters". What I meant was that you replaced, or joined, the System by using those monies.

As for adventures and camaraderie - we found them at the Mafia and criminal gangs as well, so they can stand on their own feet only while bestowed with qualitative content.

Hence my introspective question remains:

What is the Meaning of one's singular unique life?

Take a candy, child!

2004-12-07T13:03:00.002-08:00

1.

Yesterday, at the clinic of those coerced to stay healthy.

The nurse, in a loud voice:

Just a moment! This mother comes first, she's been calling since two weeks ago for a vaccine.

Mom:

Nurse only wants to see you.

Child

(3 years old boy) Just this?

Mom:

(touches the small arm gently, fast, with the tip of her fingernail) Just a tiny sting, and you'll stay healthy!

Child:

(in tears, howls) NO!!!

Mom:

But you're a hero, you're a hero, right?

Child:

(cuts short his weeping. Stands in silence, eyes wide open. They enter a side door, come out of it 2 minutes later. The child is wailing, dazed).

Mom:

You're a hero, a real hero you are, Right?

Nurse:

(running to the other end of the large reception room), Wait, do not cry, just a moment! Don't cry, don't cry! (still running returns with a large, golden box, opens it) I have Someeething for you! Here, see, Don't cry, have one, put it in your mouth, Don't cry!

The child, his mouth stuffed, is sobbing softly. He was brought to this world unasked, a big bird has dropped him like a package on the steps of a house he was never asked to choose. His face is a picture of helplessness and disappointment with The Adult World, your heart goes out to him, to hug and caress.

Mom:

Do not cry, you're a hero. Right?

2.

I bit my lips, turn my head aside so as not to see the needle, and say to the quite large nurse seated across from me, busily filling the syringe with my precious blood:

"Now you understand why people get fat?"

"Why?"

"They eat to avoid crying."

"Aha," she says with a sad smile.

3.

Back home I listen to the radio, read the papers, surf the net and the blogosphere:

"We have empathy.

"Our heart goes out to you, dear settlers. A large bird has brought you to the occupied territories, dropped you as if you were a package, not asking for your agreement - and now they suddenly want to pass you on to a foster family, lying to you that this one is not your biological one.

"Poor things. Real poor things.

"Do not cry. You're Heroes, You're real Heroes, aren't you?

Brilliantly Simple!

2004-12-04T13:46:00.001-08:00

http://www.daily-news.ro/ Terente

These days I've been wandering from site to site, trying to understand the Rumanian reality as illustrated throughout the election's events.

From time to time I would land back home, to see how those were reported in our media.

How?

Mostly in the form of a quote from a foreign news agency, which in it's turn gets its milk from the present comusocialist government, now gravely blamed for illegal procedures.

Could it be that this is the way news are channeled to our own plates?

Feed us, feed us your lazy lies. All we want is Peace.

A Talent to Forget

2004-12-04T13:34:00.000-08:00

The pattern is old, and still, to this day we are led by the nose.

As the proverb goes:

Blind Followers never go away, they only get replaced by new ones.

A bitter proverb, when you realize that the Followers are Us,

human society throughout history.

Divide & Rule.

In one hand the Whip, in the other the Straw.

Sometimes the whip is hidden behind the back, sometimes the straw -

yet always ahead go the One and The Chosen Few, followed meekly by

the multitude meeeh... meeeh...

No, we are not cut to the bones, led to the gallows, glo-glo-glo,

in full presence of mind we sacrifice our lives for the sake of Sacred Unity.

Why, meeeh... We lack inside knowledge, our brains are too small.

Only total leaders know totally all.

So, to the question if is there a chance for peace in our lands, I mean those supposedly sacred lands:

No Chance, as long as Power is Sacred.

Divide and Rule between Iran and Iraq, between Palestinian

and Israelis.

Invest your power strongly to ensure the European Union won't duplicate

itself in the Middle East.

Divide and Rule in South Africa, in the darkness of Africa.

Divided you'll stay glued united to US.

It's called: The New World Order.

diplomats...

~~~~~~~~

read it in Polish;

Faluja Landscapes

2004-12-04T13:32:00.001-08:00

Is there a Future for Literature?

2004-11-22T13:41:00.001-08:00

Reading comments on Madonna's literary enterprise has helped me see that there are so many people who share my concerns. The problem is that writers are isolated, and not exactly in the mindset of conglomerates, which makes it easy for the last to act by “Divide and Rule.”

What we can do as individuals is still a lot, and can make a difference. As teachers and professors we can teach how to discern, maybe create a new form of Comparative Literature, that will compare real books to the nonbooks polluting our culture.

As reviewers we can create this kind of review, in which a new book of value is presented along with a nonbook from among the “best sellers.” Compare a “how-to” book to passages in literature which deal with human dilemmas in lasting and forceful ways.

Those among us who are successful literary writers can pressure the houses that publish them to devote a percentage of their budget to literary works chosen for their literary value alone, and to invest in their publication the same resources invested in the selling of a commercial book.

We can also demand from the newspapers that, along with and on the same page as, their list of the weekly “best sellers,” they publish a list of “best books.” Even if many newspapers belong to the same owner-publisher, they cannot exist without their journalists’ co-operation.

We can patronize independent bookstores and consider the slight difference in price as our individual contribution to the sustenance of culture. Being creative by nature, we can devise innumerable ways to have our concerns voiced and heard, create change. And since writing is our common language, we should strive to make it the real global language, by opening up to the rich diversity of the international spectrum. This applies especially to the insularity of the U.S.A.

As for the nature of change we’re witnessing – the second law of thermodynamics applies only to Time, not to what we do in time. Of course the past cannot be changed, but our actions as a society or as individuals can be changed at present and in the future. I am encouraged by the model of the Green Movement. It has built awareness and brought about a reversal of actions: threatened with the possibility that people won’t invest in or patronize companies that do harm to our environment, conglomerates as well as small businesses go out of their way to manifest that they are acting ecologically. Maybe we should enlist the Green Movement’s support. After all, pollution is pollution, be it intellectual or physical.

I was also thinking that, left to their own devices, big businesses do not find it in their interest to support independent thinking. An intelligent and culturally well-informed reader is not the type of consumer or laborer easy to manipulate. Therefore, I think it is in the interest of our society and democracy, not only in that of the writer, to reverse the tide.

Sadly Funny

2004-11-16T13:51:00.001-08:00

Just found in a books chainstore a heavily discounted beautiful book - red hardcover, excellent paper, jacket - a pleasure to hold and behold: Mark Twain's "A Tramp Abroad".

I'm still at the beginning yet already reading Twain's humorous description of the German students' spartan corps code and their insane dueling, one stops smiling. A root, unstroken.

>"...It was considered that a person could strike harder in the duel, and with a more earnest interest, if he had never been in a condition of comradeship with his antagonist, therefore comradeship between the corps was not permitted..."

"...I had seen the heads and faces of ten youths gashed in every direction by the keen two-edged blades, and yet had not seen a victim wince, nor heard a moan, or detected any fleeting expression which confessed the sharp pain the hurts were inflicting..."

Money?

2004-11-16T13:29:00.001-08:00

I'm really touched to "hear" on the net people discussing issues which actually cross the line between the virtual and life itself.

Reaching out from Israel, the blog is a laboratory where behind glass windows, it is possible to experiment building a beta reality, where communication can be sane, relaxed, as close as possible to the unattainable ideal.

I couldn't stand the temptation and had the adsense at some of the English sub-blogs - yet I set it at the bottom of the blog, like in this old Jewish story of the legendary people of Khellem - they made a brand new beautiful floor for the synagogue

but then got worried that it will be smeared with mud, so they covered it with straw...

This seems to me to be the "dillema": how to keep the beautiful blog in sight and yet not have it smeared with mud...

Planet Sauvage

2004-11-14T16:25:00.000-08:00

Planete Savage (Fantastic Planet) invaded my life some twenty years ago.

At that time it seemed like another animated science fiction movie.

Yet it stayed with me throughout those years.

Three classes people Planet Savage:

You see the Lords, who do not move at all. Nothing. Not even their eyes. Some bluish hail around their heads is their means of communication with the world, of ruling it.

I do not remember if there are any female characters among the Lords. They seem to lack gender and human characterizations.

Then you have the human Slaves. A bluish collar is enclosing each one's neck, informing the Lord exactly where a slave is at any given moment. A monitoring leash is embedded inside each collar, controling the slave's movements and actions.

Some of the slaves, a very small group, have managed to free themselves from the collars and are leading a dangerous partisan life in freedom, always on the run.

I'm reminded of this film daily, by the Israeli political situation, by the way actually not only in my country and throughout the Middle East but all over the multitudes are still led by bluish or reddish collars.

How come intelligent people agree to be enslaved?

Is it because the collar is always presented as a utilitarian gadget?

Look around you and see that you might be possessed by a such one. You hold it in your hand, or pocket. Even in a theater. With it you're never left on your own. It's called "cellular" or "mobile".

In some factories or at conferences, you're to wear it on your hand, next to your watch.

Alas, life is changing, even Romance isn't what it used to be: When you need one of your hands to hold your mobile's mike and your mouth to talk into it, Love becomes one-handed.

I don't own a cellular, nor plan to ever buy one.

No need to, there is always one handy. The Modern slaves are good natured and ready to share their fate with partisan vagabonds...

"As Befits Worthy Writing"

2004-11-13T16:21:00.001-08:00

"Sodot", by Corinna - a writer who grants us her first name - is a most intriguing book. It turns out that "Sodot" is her third book, with the first one published almost thirty years ago.

Yet the interest in Corinna does not conclude only in her identity. On the contrary, Sodot is an interesting book, different and indeed worthy.

The first encounter is with Corinna's unique language. I assume the reader won't grasp this uniqueness at first, since the book is written in everyday Hebrew, much alive and for sure familiar.

The wholeness of the book is evasive. You need to read several tens of pages in order to understand what Corinna's language is doing to you.

With a most straightforward Hebrew, seemingly simple, in short sentences, quite often devoid of asides, additions or reservations, Corinna succeeds to reach the reader's heart and set before his eyes a viable reality and a well-defined statement.

The style serves Corinna throughout the book. Actually it is the sole constant. "Sodot" is a most modern novel, built of fragments, sketches and stories, with constant shifts in the story's angle and in the narrator's perception.

The concise language that reigns throughout the book enables Corinna to move from the general to the particular, from the large picture to the marginal detail, from the objective drama to the subjective hue. Her success is quite impressive and she succeeds in mastering this sharp tool throughout the book.

"Sodot" tells the stories of people in Israel as of late, of the national events in which they are entangled, of their personal circumstances that are not always entirely tied up to time and place, politics or "the situation", although they are never entirely freed from them. The narrator - who undergoes no small changes by the time we reach the end of the book - serves as a prism to all she encounters, people, places, stories.

Corinna knowingly creates distance and yet grants it clear visibility. She's leading the narrator within the multifaceted Israeli material, yet looks at it always from the outside as well. She stands apart from the narrator she creates and that one keeps herself well apart from each person, place and situation she does meet with.

The book emanates a dreamy quality that envelops the reader. The restraint, the irony, the spark that is aware of itself and well hiding, all these make the reading in Corinna's book an unique and direct encounter, as befits a worthy literature.

© Ioram Melzer

Literature & Books, Ma'ariv 18.10.02

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

translated from the Hebrew by Michal Sapir.

Ioram Melzer is a much respected Israeli writer, literary critic, and translator.

read this in Russian;in Hungarian;

In response to a new friend's questions:

2004-11-13T07:44:00.000-08:00

Can one appreciate the language and culture of a virulent hating nation?

It is my strong belief and understanding that nations do not

hate each other's, as nations are not imbued with feelings, only

individuals are.

As long as the manipulators hold in their hands the

key to information it will be almost always possible to marionette the

individual.

That's why the Internet is so important as it turns the

tables and gives room to the individual voice.

Is it difficult to learn Hebrew?

It is not difficult at all to learn Hebrew when you come from a Middle Eastern

tradition. Hebrew belongs to the semitic languages and is greatly influenced or similar to it.

The theories elaborated by Arabic grammarians were applied to Hebrew grammar during the Golden Age of Hebrew literature and culture.

At that time the Arab ruled Spain and some of our most important cultural figures were in close interaction with theirs.

I was born in Romania as you may read at some pieces on the blog. "Unfortunately", Romanian, although a most beautiful and poetic language, has no Semitic linguistic roots...

We arrived when I was 12 years of age. Two years later, while reading Romain Rolland's Kolas Breugnon in an excellent and most rich translation by noted Hebrew poet Abraham Shlonsky, I realised that not even once have I reached for the dictionary.

That was a moment of triumph, indeed.

Nowadays there are many free Hebrew day classes. Very easy and pleasant. It was not so back in 1948. Parents had to learn from their kids, a task I did indeed perform to the extent that to this day, beware when you speak Hebrew in my presence... I'm on a pilot, You know, like the Pavlov dog...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read it in Hungarian;

In Person

2004-11-05T21:42:00.000-08:00

Hello & Shalom,

My root blog here is TimeIn Tel-Aviv.

Since there is no other way to create categories, I've opened seven sub-blogs to this end - all carrying my own template, made after the template of my website.

No, I'm not a geek, if this is what it means - my website was created, after my vision by Daniel and Neta at Atarim and Yaacov Avnet at MWD is the generous spirit behind the creation of Time in Tel Aviv.

With the new upgrade at Blogger The ABOUT page you're reading right now was added.

And then along came Helen and translated a few pages into German; Natalia liked the idea and offered to translate into Polish; Mehdi, alerted by Natalia, volunteered to do so with Farsi and has just brought along a new friend: Arman; I read Andi's blog and loved the spirit, then S.ra Meller Padovani, volunteered a few pieces in Italian, but, oh, there are still so many beautiful languages and so much room for more!

The only place to see our latest posts throughout all sub-blogs should be MY PROFILE.

With a million blogs on their head, the updating is kind of slow... Check us at the very blog of your interest, I mean - at all of them...

Welcome!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read it in Polish; in Farsi;

Following the suicidal attack at the Tel Aviv market

2004-11-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

1.

A dear friend writes to express his sorrow and ask after the well being of my family.

The truth is - rarely I go to markets. It's become time consuming.

I'm taking buses when people with suicidal tendencies sleep or take a rest.

Any of them looking for me in person will have to come armed with some garden tools and help me tend my plants: First business, then pleasure...

2.

I'm horrified that The Manipulators had the cruelty to employ a 16 years old kid, that they've gone so low as to use abused women.

While feigning concern for Arafat's own life.

Maybe that child, if only spared his life, could have become a leader, a teacher, make a living difference. Or just enjoy life, basic life, if not on Suha Arafat's child level.

Who gives them the right, how dare they take the role of an Almighty God and sacrifice the other, the weak and the helpless. It's blasphemy.

They seem to differ with me on the concept of Courage.

3.

Every victim of violence is my family, in Tel Aviv and in Ramallah, or anywhere on earth.

Every flower blooming in my garden celebrates life.

There is much to learn from the natural world. All it takes is to open the heart.

All who do so - the Manipulators label: Naive.

While we cannot even label them, Blind.

Their monstrous acts are done with open eyes.

Only the heart is closed, with an iron bar.

Well, I'll stay naive. With an open eye.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read it in Hungarian;

Singing Flowers For You

2004-11-01T15:29:00.001-08:00

It's always easy to manipulate the weak and the muted: "We know better what's best for the flowers, for you."

It annoys me to no end.

"...Flowers are inserted into an acrylic tube containing a magnetic coil and an oscillating component. Applying an alternating electrical current causes the tube, and the flowers, to vibrate at high speed, producing audible sound..."

Thanks to Marijano for alerting us...

Blogger is dressing up the naked...

2004-10-28T13:08:00.001-07:00

Can you be an once-a-year-for-one month writer?

Last year, while confronted with the phenomenon, I did respond on the spot.Now, reading Graham and Blogger's exalted recommendation of this Herculean attempt to "write a novel" in one month, I've just posted the following comment at Graham's blog.

Hi Graham,

I'm a writer of literary fiction and non-fiction. Following a book for young children, my second book was written during 3 years, my third in 15 yrs, my fourth in 11 yrs, my fifth in 9 yrs and I've been working on the sixth for the last three yrs and am still far away from its conclusion.

Writing literature is not an one month marathon but a life long one. It takes dedication, the feeling that you cannot sleep if you do not write, that writing is like breathing to you, skin of your skin.

Writing literature is not a typing contest. You write awake and in your dreams, and daily while seemingly involved in mundane activities. Writing is a long process of revelations for which you are just an organ through which they pass on to the insightful reader.

I heard about this McDonald fast-writing concept last year and had immediately expressed my non-admiration.

Above all I abhor the disrespectful use of the word Novel. Disrespectful to Literary Art, to literary writers, to Intelligence and Creativity.

When the information comes from Blogger,and under the "Knowledge" title - so strong a recommendation - it should have had at least room enough for another opinion, comments, discussions. It is not a technical issue. We are talking here Ethics, and this is a totally different realm.

29.10.04

The consumerism ethos has brought upon us only misfortune: wars, colonizational imperialism, terror. I fear the colonization of Humanity's last refuge.

Noffey Haneffesh (Once She Was A Child)

2004-10-27T10:50:00.001-07:00

Noffey Haneffesh tells the universal story of childhood in times of upheaval, as conveyed by some of the most extraordinary international woman writers.

Done mostly on location, these intimate encounters mirror a rainbow of human existence shaped by injustice, turmoil and struggle, and still victorious: six year-old Russian Svetlana Vasilenko awaiting death while caught between the Powers dueling with nuclear bombs; the little Italian child Dacia Maraini starved in a Japanese concentration camp; twelve-year-old. Belgian Amelie Nothomb, reading by candlelight in a Bangladeshi lepers' house; five-year-old Leena Lander living in the Finnish prison for delinquent boys where her father worked as a supervisor, contemplating in fear and horror her sexually mangled doll found thrown in the forest; eight-year-old Palestinian Anissa Darwish torn by war from the Malkha village of her sweet childhood - all and each of the writers in this book map the way to survival and hope.

They ask us also to take a second look at our own life, and, well informed, to make sure the right decisions are taken in all that concerns this precious little world.

As a literary form, Noffey Haneffesh (ONCE SHE WAS A CHILD) is a hybrid: it owns the genes of literary fiction, with its attention to language, ambiguities and symbols, carved out by the author's mostly invisible questions, and editing; and it carries the genes of narrative nonfiction as those are real life stories of real, and most impressive persons, showing how gloriously they've survived Evil.

Glimpses from The Past, of childhood recollections, set, like pearls on a string, with the author's journal as the connecting thread or background. The reader is invited to absorb. At the end of the book s/he'll discover in a separate section, as an addendum, how far they've reached in The Present.

The Herd Instinct vs, Jesus

2004-10-22T11:33:00.001-07:00

1.

While in theory we are all for the glorification of the individum, in practice the Western Contemporary Culture still labels people in context of groups, mostly the Bad (Them) and the Good (Us).

2.

Stigmatic Memory.

or, as I have been asked not long ago in Portugal, out of the blue:

"Is it true you've killed Jesus?"

3.

The Use and Abuse of those manipulations, or, as I'm still finding in the Right's Romanian media (and expressed also in more than one of the comments in previous, related, posts here:

"The Jews were punished by God to wander homeless and suffer forever because they've killed Jesus."

Is there any comfort in the knowledge that no person on earth I know of, in person or from hearsay, is free of those?

4.

The crucification was one of the tools by which the Roman Empire ruled. Cruelty always comes hand in hand with Power.

The subordinates will always react in a myriad of ways, from total opposition to abuse.

Yet no one will say, for instance, that it was not Stalin who murdered the Russian Jewish writers one by one - but the anonymous or not that anonymous devout citizens who sent letters of slander against them, out of envy or plain anti-semitism, in full knowledge of the consequences.

5.

Only when, if ever, Christianity will acknowledge with due respect the right of each human being to be different, not one of the herd alone, only then anti-semitism will be erased from our world.

Better still if all sects - secular or of religions - will reach such an elevated state.

Almost all it takes is for each of us to remember that one is meant to be the Messiah of one's unique life and existence, and undertake this sweet responsibility.

It's heartbreaking how far we are from this, how far from it we have allowed and are allowing religions and empires to drag us along.

Yesterday I spoke with the bride. Elfriede Jelinek.

2004-10-20T14:28:00.001-07:00

In Hebrew, the recipient of a prize is its groom, or, as in Elfriede Jelinek's case - The Bride.

1.

Tel-Aviv, 8 October 2004

Elfriede. Her voice sounded close, in both senses.

She said, in a rather melancholy tone, "You see, Corinna, I told that I want to retire from public life - and now the Nobel prize...

"It's not so sad."

She laughed softly.

The sleepy pond, the pine trees, the round swing chair which hang in the living room, the grand piano on which she played for me and sang "glucklick ist wer vergibt, was doch nich zu andern ist..." - all this I can see now before my eyes as if not eight years have passed since our meeting back then in Austria.

2.

Vienna,August 26, 1996

Elfriede Jelinek suggested we meet at the Cafe Museum. Over the phone we gave each other identification marks. She said, "I'm tall and like every good Austrian woman, I have two blond braids bound on my head..."

I was staying with Eva, a retired journalist, through the recommendation of a mutual friend.

She's in her early fifties and keeps saying, "Everybody is already sick of hearing about the Holocaust."

3.

In January 1996 I found, in London, a book by Elfriede Jelinek. A few months later, on Holocaust Memorial Day, I saw written in an Israeli newspaper, in an article on Anti-Semitism In The World Today, that she, or one of her parents, was Jewish; that there had been attacks on her and that she had been threatened by anti-Semites; that she had immigrated to Germany.

I wrote to her, "I see that you are living in Vienna. I hope that the story about the attacks is fantasy as well."

She wrote back, on the margins of a street poster's offprint illustrated with the picture of a violin - on which was written:

"Lieben Sie... Jelinek... oder Kunst und Kultur?" - "Are you fond of... Jelinek... or of Art and Culture?"

I was astonished. Surely this is slander. The cultural organizations and institutions in Austria passed it over in silence, did not react?

4.

The large cafe was fairly crowded and Elfriede worked it out with the waiter to take us into the inner room.

We sat there next to one of the dark old wooden tables, at first by the windows, but Elfriede, who writes in a very strong voice, talked almost in whispers, and we moved further inside, far from the noises of the road and the street.

Half an hour later, at exactly five o'clock, came the waiter and drew the wooden doors wide open.

"At five they open this room for customers," said Elfriede calmly.

In Vienna order is order.

She said, "It's too noisy here. We'll go to my house."

5.

We took the underground from there to hers and her mother's house on the edge of the town. Elfriede, who was before a trip to her partner in Munich, went to put the food she had bought for her mother in the modest refrigerator. She left me in a small living room which had only a grand piano, a transparent chair hanging like a swing, a desk, and panoramic windows facing a large natural garden and a pond - not one of those manufactured models, but real water and vegetation touching it and in it.

No buses, no cars. Just the sound of birds busy preparing dinner.

I went out to the pond, tears gathering in my eyes as I was thinking,

At such a place one can be only happy.

6.

The dog clung to me and because I was worried that her heavy breathing would cover Elfriede's voice in the recording, I pushed her away a few times before Elfriede said - Not right the first time! - said gently,

"Push her aside softly, because she falls. Her rear legs have nothing to hold on to, her tights are impaired from birth. She's a poor thing."

7.

Elfriede has an uncle in Denver, Colorado, in the United States, with whom she corresponds. His father, Albert Felsenburg, was a journalist, a colleague of Herzel's they were both writing for the Neue Freie Press, and then, as Elfriede read to me from her uncle's letter,

"Then the pogroms stormed Russia and dad said, 'Theo, I read and hear such horrible things about what the Cossacks do to the Jews. Go to Russia and see if it's true.'

Herzel went and saw that it was even worse and he founded the Zionist movement. My father was among the first members."

9.

Albert Felsenburg was sent to the Dachau concentration camp on the first day the Germans came to Austria. He was handed over by his Christian fellow workers at the newspaper.

10.

She said, "The story with Herzel is a legend in our family. I think it is a true story. So that we have a share in the founding of the Zionist movement - which led to the founding of the state of Israel."

11.

Before the meeting, corresponding from Israel, I told her about "Noffey Haneffesh" - Soul Landscapes - the book I was working on.

I had no clue then to where this book will lead me.

In Vienna, I listened.

It got dark. One tape after the other I kept changing.

She said, in a tiredly tranquil voice,

"It's been ages since I've last spoken that much."

In the corridor, on my way out, she showed me the signs in the door left from the times her father - torn by guilt, or by an erased memory - would cut in it, as the door was kept locked so he won't wander out and get lost.

Now as then in my ears rings Elfriede's melodious voice, singing that famous line from The Feldermouse operetta by Johan Straus. 'Those are happy who forget what can't be changed.'"

A very popular song. Everybody knows and whistles it. Every year on New Year's Eve this operetta is shown on television. Even children can sing it.

"This is Happy Happy Austria," she had said then.

12.

I came back to Eva. In an adjunct room she had a pair of terribly noisy parrots. She covered their cage, closed the double doors, and the echo of their shrill voiced remained with us as the smell of burnt food, sinking into the rich carpets and sofas.

While Eva, standing at the oven burners kept repeating:

"Everybody is already sick of hearing about the Holocaust. It was more than fifty years ago! It's boring!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read it in Hungarian; in Farsi; in Russian; in Polish;

The "Average" Voter, A Yom Kippur Confession.

2004-09-24T13:00:00.001-07:00

Some time ago there was this daily poll at an Israeli online paper.

You hit to see the polls.

I got tempted.

Entirely by mistake, a second click occurred.

To my great surprise, this registered as well.

It took me about ten minutes and some hundreds of clicks to turn the tables on that poll...

So polls - I'm not too impressed with them.

Now You Big Mouth points us to an article on this very issue: Are Voters Idiots?

Excuse me: "Are the Average Voters idiots?"

A good idea for another poll: Who is the average voter: You/ your Neighbor/ your father-in-law?

It is true that the individual voter is bound to be an intelligent voter. You do not need academic or any education to judge a candidate for his or her actions, not words and promises.

Yet as a group, when in a group - individuality, reason, wisdom are stripped away and you get pushed into the stream of stupidity.

What is left is to try and stay away from the crowd mentality, avoid it.

(another poll: Is this possible/impossible?)

Confronting the Front

2004-09-24T10:17:00.001-07:00

Robert Spencer at FrontPage relates to rape committed by Muslim terrorists and by Muslim criminal gangs in France and concludes with great conviction:

"...This indicates there are two things the massacre in Beslan have in common with the ongoing massacres in Darfur: both, no less than the 9/11 attacks, are examples of Islamic jihad terrorism, and both are characterized by rape."

If only life was that simple: The US soldiers who raped Vietnamese women not such a long time ago.

The Japanese, the German... Back and forth in history we can go and see the same pattern repeated, with or without the Qu'ran or any other holy tradition.

In war and in peace, nothing is more sacred than the universal tradition which sanctifies and enables criminal violence against women.

Let's Celebrate Farsi!

2004-09-23T13:35:00.000-07:00

Languages, they are the camels of civilization. Throughout the ages they've dutifully carried the heavy, ever-growing loads of each community's cultural uniqueness.

Now we notice with pain the disappearance of ancient languages, we behold with uneasiness the tide of The One And Only Language.

Some say, "It is pre-destined. Give up and turn your back upon your singular culture. It creates division and we want to be One Nation, One Language, One Herd!"

No, it creates mono-culture, this all encroaching weed. Language is Identity. It is our human right, and duty, to preserve each one his or her unique identity.

Today I feel so happy with the addition of Farsi to our evolving blog.

Thanks to Mehdi.

Farsi. The very word carries such a sweet musical sound.

An old, rich, carrier of a most important culture. I will never know it, I may not ever be enabled to visit it's spiritual and physical landscapes, but now it's here with us, close to heart..

Thank you, Mehdi, for your generous contribution .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read this in Farsi.

Globalization

2004-09-21T02:54:00.000-07:00

Slowly and on tip-toe TimeIn Tel-Aviv is day by day combing the forty corners of the world, branching out more densely than MacDonald...

Ladies and all the others... Let's applaud Natalia in Polski!

And Meda in Romanian and English.

Oh, we do take questions. Just turn off the TV lights, please. They blind us.

Yes, there are still some franchises left.

No discrimination, oh, no, never!

Noble People

2004-09-14T15:33:00.001-07:00

I know close to nothing about Iran today or since the Islamist Revolution.

I know some about suffering complete, immediate, fully conscious fear of annihiliation.

Burried deep in my heart and essence, rearing it's trembling head daily throughout this modern brutal existence.

Like a soothing balm to the soul come noble people from the forty corners of the world and say, Let's stick together.

Happy new year, Universe.

No, no: MultiVerse.

It's the New Year. What do you give to ...

2004-09-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

I was debating with myself, What can one give as a present to someone that has everything, really really almost everything.

Luckily, around the forty corners

of the world some friends were sharing my distress.

So now I know, the best gift would be the compact empathy blocker. More efficient than any check-points, less expensive than any Walllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

Above all - it's worldwide effective.

"...That's what I dreamt about.

While touring the respiratory ward of a filthy hospital with many miserable looking patients ready to die, I would try to speak only to be prevented by a piercing lung pain or excessive phlegm, and dark fluid gushing out of my mouth; or the perceptible feel of a sudden collapse of portions of my lung coupled with the sort of panic that would effectively prevent me from uttering a single word.

Then the fellow walking with me calmly directed me to a room and sat me on a chair. The room was clean and well lit, and had a purple sliding door. He began to play with the door and each time the door separated me from the ward, I felt I had my voice back.

Sliding the door open again would simply make me lose my voice. He grinned mischievously and said, "What do you think of our new sliding empathy blocker? The latest model! And I woke up murmuring, "now, that's what I really need... a portable empathy blocker!"

Happy New Year!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read it in Polish;in Hungarian;

Notes on Once She Was A Child

2004-09-01T18:09:00.001-07:00

Instead of introduction, a few personal notes...

When my children were little we were standing one day at the bus stop. It was very hot, August.

Suddenly, across from us, two children, suddenly one of them cried to his friend: "You Arab!" I looked at my children startled. The younger was then three, the same age I was when I came out of kindergarten and they threw stones at us and cried, 'Jidans, go away to Palestine!' Children I'd played with the day before. I wanted my children to know that 'Arab' was the name of a people, not a curse. I made contact through friends of some friends with members of the Arab intelligentsia who lived in a village in the Galilee and we visited them, they visited us, a contact was made. Mahmud and Lutfia Diab, from Tamra, two hours from Tel Aviv.

That was in 1970.

Three years later Lutfia's younger sister, Amal, married her teacher, Munir Diab. And Munir began in those years to manage there the first Arabic community center. So in 1975 the idea occurred to me to arrange a meeting between educated youths from Tamra and from a neighboring Jewish town with Jewish and Arabic artists.

Munir loved the idea and thanks to him it really happened. We had meetings and conversations with Aharon Meged, Anton Shamas, A. B. Yehoshua. Once every two weeks. One time in Tamra and one time in Shlomi.

Finally we had an evening of theater improvisation with the late Peter Fry. He came several times and prepared them. From the start I'd limited my involvement in that for only half a year. I would come there every two weeks.

Shlomi is located eight hundred meters, half a mile, from the Lebanese border. At that time terrorists murdered at night a mother and her two year old daughter, in Dovev. And still people came to the meetings and participated. Very willingly. But in one of the meetings, in Shlomi, someone said,

'Fine. Only you are returning to Tel Aviv and we are staying here not knowing what terrorist will roll upon us at night from the mountain.'

In my apartment in Tel Aviv we lived at the time five people in a space of four hundred and twenty square feet. No room of my own, there wasn't even a bedroom.

Then I thought, if there was a place to which artists would come for a stay of some weeks or months so they can be free to create, then both the artists and the community would benefit. It would answer to the needs.

I returned to Tel Aviv and began telling all kinds of people and organizations, that that was what they had to do.

Some said, How come, and some would say, "Why not, do it."

In those days the world was divided for me into dreamers, and doers. Two separate groups. Me, do? I come up with ideas, and they should do.

But all the time it still bothered, burned in my bones.

In 1984 I got up and said, "I am acting to found such a place."

Now I understand that in that moment I turned from a child citizen into an adult citizen.

Very difficult. You need to go to the world, and bow down.

It's impossible without money.

Within all these hardships, in Europe as well as in the United States, I would go into bookstores, to find solace. And I would think, So many books, So many woman writers! Who are they?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(c) Translated from the Hebrew by Michal Sapir

read this in Polish;in Hungarian; in Russian;

Lidia Jorge

2004-09-01T05:38:00.001-07:00

A few months after I had returned from the first meetings in Paris in September 1995, as I was transcribing the conversation with the French poet Anne Portugal from the tape onto my computer, I heard her saying again how her name always surprised everyone, it was such a rare name in France.

I opened the Tel-Aviv telephone directory and found there alone some twenty Portugals, Portugalis, Portugueses, Portos.

Half a year later, in April 1996, in Lisbon, Lidia Jorge told me that in fact in Portugal everyone is a bit Jewish - almost in every family there was an element of the "New Christians". That is what they call the Jews who had been forced by the Inquisition to convert to Christianity, and that is also what they call their descendants to this day.

Lidia Jorge lives in a modern neighborhood which was built just after the Second World War. At four-thirty in the afternoon, still in broad daylight, a young woman who had helped me find the name on the doorbell asked me to hold the elevator for her till she picked up her post from the mailbox.

I assumed she was in a hurry, and waited.

Lidia, young looking, opened the door cautiously, and I followed her into a sun drenched living room. The smile, the comfortable clothes she was wearing and the soft coaches signaled warmth. She said, "I’m old-fashioned too. I believe a writer should be engaged in the world."

Before the trip I had read one of her stories, in English translation, "The Proof of the Birds".

In the story a man tries to count birds in order to prove the existence of God.

I told her that was exactly what I was doing - trying to count, the women writers...

******************************************************

excerpt from my introduction to Lisbon's chapter at "Once She Was a Child" (Noffey Haneffesh, HudnaPress 2002

On "Writers' Workshops".

2004-08-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

I've never attended any such workshops.

They claim they'll teach you "techniques".

You get the "tools": A story should have a begining, a middle and an end.

Draw a map. Make a list of your characters. Use simple language. Make sure you're understood.

Stiffle your inner voice. Don't let it go wild. You're here to entertain. Just tell your story and let the editor clip the seams.

Teaching techniques is "murder to dissect" for me.

In my experience, as you plunge deeper, you do better on your own. I would say even that you have no choice but stay on your own and dive, or stay on the surface and play with friends, splashing water. Beware of writing workshops, stay away from journalism - so you won't get conditioned to think what does the reader expect, instead of paying respect to what you yourself are expecting from your writing - to stay true to your singular voice.

Don't support the book "trade", not as a reader and for sure not as a writer. This troll insults your intelligence, pollutes, endangers our culture and literary heritage.

Strike the root, but make sure you see it...

2004-08-27T11:44:00.001-07:00

Upon reading another article on the problem The Other poses here and there:

In my whole life, I've never met a person of Armenian origin and still no one has managed to persuade me that "Armenians are" (actually all the list that some easy riders proclaim about the Jewish people).

As Franz Werfel testifies in his important Forty Days of Musa Dagh, it was, and unfortunately to this day it is still possible to manipulate and brain wash groups of people, to instill hatred toward The Other, the stranger, the minority.

It is my conviction that evil will continue to flourish as long as the Individual person won't accept responsibility to think clean of stereotypes, with a pure heart. Not an easy feat, indeed, but the alternative has proved itself as much more worse, throughout generations.

The same goes to ideas. It was not the idea of communism that failed, but the same trait of hunger for unlimited power which it was supposed to help strike at the root.

The idea of Zionism, as a liberation movement, is not to be blamed nor the idea of national liberation for the Palestinians, but again the same trait of hunger for unlimited power which turned upon all of us here in the Middle East crashing as a boomerang.

It is our responsibility as individuals , to limit power. We won't succeed in doing so as long as we accept manipulations and stereotypes.

Ben Gurion, Nixon, Bush, Sharon...

2004-08-26T14:21:00.001-07:00

The more I read about USA, the more I feel really baffled - is it about USA or about my country?

When it comes to news on Bush - I'm completely in the dark. Are they misspelling Sharon's name?

Countries are easier to understand. Physically, Israel is small - USA is huge.

With Bush and Sharon it goes the other way.

No wonder I'm confused daily.

Then, the media. In Israel it used to be that every political party had its own newspaper.

Those were replaced later by independent, commercial media.

The journalist was entitled "the author".

No more.

Now we are back to square one, with a small difference. If at the olden times "the author" was the mouthpiece of the political party, directly - now the journalist is enjoying the services of the PR or Press Assistant.

To-night, reading Antonia Zerbisias, as re-published at the excellent truthout, I can only respond with the Hebrew slang, "I've already been in this movie"...

Probably the most troubling admission comes from Karen DeYoung, a former assistant managing editor who reported on the prewar palavering: "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power," she says. "If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said."

But since when is a presidential pronouncement The Word Of God? What happened to inquiry, investigation and, what's it called again, journalism?

Just Released!

2004-08-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Helen, the multi-lingual aspect is getting enriched with the brand new Deutsch category.

Helen has volunteered a few translations from the English.

Your constructive comments and ideas are most welcome!

Emigrant or Immigrant - it's Vladosgrant.

2004-08-22T07:25:00.001-07:00

Vlados has an English site, on Blogger, worth reading.

Don't miss it!

Have you ever been a prisoner?

2004-08-22T05:02:00.001-07:00

My first impulse was to say, most indignatly, Of Course Not!

Really?

How many times in your life have you felt as if robbed of freedom?

Wasn't childhood a prison in more than one sense - the historical as well as the personal? And to this day - aren't you daily fighting inside your little cell, encircled by bigotry, stereotypes, wars, work, abuses, fears...

Since last week, Palestinian prisoners in Israel are on a hunger strike. Why, and what are their demands you may read at length in the Israeli media.

Collective Wisdom

2004-08-22T04:34:00.001-07:00

This site is not one voice, as a proper blog should be.

A polyphonic compilation, a basket full of wisdom.

Some of them you might have heard already, like this one:

Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and by then there was no one left to speak out for me.

A good place to come when life seems too much for you.

What really happens in Iraq?

2004-08-13T04:00:00.001-07:00

1.

We know so little - we grab each piece of direct information.

CBFTW was an anonymous soldier in Iraq. Still alive, hopefully, yet no more anonymus.

You might have read his "My War" blog.

I've read him for the first time only today, following a link for An Interview with an Iraqi Man.

He says he was not armed when he interviewed him.

And the Iraqi man? Full of praises for the US army and goverment he is indeed.

2.

Once I had a Palestinian plumber working some in my house here in Tel Aviv.

He promised to come on a certain date.

When I finally got hold of him and asked why had he promised since he knew he won't be able to make it, he said:

"I didn't want to insult you."

Reading that interview I assumed the Iraqi volunteer did not want to insult our soldier, so he told him what he knew was expected of him to say. Then CBFTW did not feel like insulting his readers, so he told us what he seemed to perceive as most pleasing to the ear of the uninitiated.

Not an easy position for both of them, not a happy one for all of us involved in this tragic existence nowadays.

3.

Reading further into the blog, I was perplexed, since the guy was all along writing from his guts, with much courage, intelligence, sensitivity and a great natural talent.

4.

Then I came upon on the previous post:

In this episode CBFTW is called to order by his officer. They won't censor him, but he should show his post to his commander, prior to publication.

5.

Why now? The guy was blogging for two months already.

A few posts down, the answer stares you in the face:

A most graphic, detailed report from the scene of war led entirely by USA troops such as our blogger- in stark contradiction to the CNN reporting of "Clashes between police and insurgents".

6.

CBFTW, why do I decipher in the last three letters of your name the acronym for "F. The War"?

Or is it "Cool Brother Forsake True War"?

On Being an Unpaid Writer

2004-08-12T22:35:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to be still full asleep - the first bus, the closed eyed shutters in the buildings, the butterflies in my green garden.

On the electric wire, two young crows, a wing distance between the two of them.
She's looking straight ahead.
His head is turned towards her, his beak moving.

My window is closed, I cannot decipher the crow crow monologue, yet for sure I won't open the window and invade their privacy.

She stays still, unmoved.
He ventures two tiny steps closer.

Immediately she takes flight, disappearing among the trees.
He stands still, his beak raised to the rosy fingered sky.

Then off he flies. Where to?

~~~~~~~~
read it in Russian; in Polish;

Incredible Cheap Beer

2004-08-12T15:36:00.001-07:00

Incredible Cheap Beer

2004-08-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you...

2004-08-05T20:06:00.001-07:00

Working on my manuscript I had to find out about present Dachau.

Remember the days you had to go to libraries, search through your dictionaries, encyclopedias, friends' or university libraries, under the bed...

Now all you have to do is, search the net. In a couple of seconds Google will Aladin-style bring you whatever you ask, and much much more.

All of a sudden before your eyes glitters a jewel. It's like looking at your garden and suddenly discovering some beautiful leaves of an unknown plant.

Here she is. Another free spirit in our boundless blognation.

Have you been to Bilbao, Spain?

2004-08-04T16:59:00.001-07:00

1.

1983

In the beginning, when HILAI wasn't even a seed, just an idea burning in my bones, I met in NYC with the Director of The New Israel Fund.

I was told right away that first of all I must create a non-profit organization.

Never heard of such a creature. The only ones in Israel at that time, almost the only ones, were created and run by political parties, or Ministries, to bring in more funds to their coffers.

"And the most important thing, is to get a distinguished Advisory Board."

"Are you kidding? Everybody in Israel likes to give advise, asked or unasked."

From one to another I managed to recruit some big names. Why not? They liked the idea - to establish an artists colony in the Galilee, with artists and writers contributing to the community, during their short stays, in peace oriented cultural activities.

Additional volunteer help brought in Saul Bellow, Aaron Copland, James Rosenquist.

2.

1985

I arrived in NYC, this time to have an initial meeting with some donors.

In my pocket was James Rosenquist's phone.

Kindly, he invited me to his house.

A house indeed. Three floors.

"Why not stay for dinner? I've already invited a few friends."

I was sleeping at a volunteers' family, out of town.

He said, "Never mind, there is enough room here for you to sleep."

At that time Rosenquist's studio was at an airplane shed in Florida. So big are his works.

In his NYC house he had torn down all the interior walls, probably to make room for a piece or two of art...

I slept in that huge space of a whole floor in which the only furniture piece was a large bed.

I well remember that I was sitting for awhile at one of the large windows, with a tear in my eye, asking myself what I was doing there instead of just writing, at my own modest home, the way Rosenquist devotes his life to art alone.

3.

Two gifts were offered me on that visit. Only one of them I took along.

Rosenquist, in his kindness, offered to create a silk screen of several hundred copies, for us to sell and benefit the project.

What burned under my fingers then was to start the work itself. I was to invest one year alone and time was running out.

I ended up working on Hilai for eleven years. Would it have taken a shorter time if only I had chosen to invest my energy in raising money for the silk screen printer?

In the afternoon, while we were conversing, he got an urgently expected phone call, apologized, took it for two seconds, and then immediately made another one as short as the first, and turned the answering machine on.

Until then, after such a call I would write down in my journal that I should call so and so later on.

No more.

It does save time, even if not years. Above all it buys some peace of mind.

5.

2004

If only Bilbao was across the street here...

News from France

2004-08-04T15:39:00.001-07:00

In today's Haaretz English edition - an interview with Lantzman:

"Lanzmann noted that Jean Paul Sartre once said, "anti-Semitism is not an opinion; it is a crime" - and was right. "Today, however, anti-Semitism is an opinion. Just as there are people who don't like meat or a certain fabric, there are people that don't like Jews."

I would rather say anti-semitism is a generalization, racist, masked as an opinion.

Rationalizing insanity is the hallmark of all racists responses to the complexities of life.

The challenge life poses to every human being is, has always been, to avoid the crowd, to stand up to the maddening crowd.

Stop stop stop!

2004-08-04T08:29:00.001-07:00

My USA fellow bloggers, I won't interfere as long as you discuss only your elections, after all it might only affect my life...

But...

"We will never be seen as an honest broker as long as we support Israel - are you suggesting we no longer support Israel?" (Comment 20)

By "Israel", Do you mean Corinna and the majority of the Israelis who honestly want out of the territories and back to sanity - or our present misleading government?

All you need is to Support Sanity. There are a myriad of ways to resolve conflicts. A leader up to his ears in wars might seem resolute, but resolution in itself is not such an impressive quality. We need leaders resolute in a sincere quest for rational solutions.

I was just reading now about the Vietnam war at a few Israeli academic sites while simultaneously educating myself about our own wars here. It is completely amazing to see how generation after generation was led by the nose by leaders admittedly clinging to their chairs.

You have a choice - be gullible now, again and again, and then tear your hair twenty years from now, or learn from that past and act, resolutely, here and now.

You know what the problem is?

Honest people cannot even grasp, let alone internalize, that dishonesty exists.

It keeps us blissfully eternally surprised.

The Reason I'm not running for Presidency

2004-08-03T15:42:00.001-07:00

I read at BlogCritics that the "books industry" is cooking some trash bent on smearing the Democrats' candidate name.

Now you see why I'm not running for Presidency either in USA or in Israel.

As of to-day now I'm the sole owner and writer of my life stories. At no account I'd allow a good-for-nothing z-rate scribbler steal my precious property!

Diogenes' advise:

Buy some candles and start your own search for Truth.

If you find it, wake me up.

Careful!

2004-08-02T19:09:00.001-07:00

1.

Manipulation is based upon a truthful piece of information mixed up with some well calculated misinformation, deviously delivered by Know-all Power, at well chosen times, straight at the door step of the weak and ignorant Me or You.

The hidden message: "Do not change horses while riding uphill!"

Not all proverbs are wise. If the horse is incompetent, the only way to negotiate your way to the top of the hill would be to change that horse right away.

An universal challenge.

2.

It used to be that everything American reached us ten years later: MacDonald, homeless, consumerism, you name it. Even New Age fads.

Now it's the other way: Same tactics were (and are) used here in Israel before election and/or any internal political crisis.

If the prophesy comes true, you won't be able to say you were not warned or that Goverment was idle.

If it doesn't, then it will show you just how great Goverment is.

It's a win-win tactic. As long as people choose to be gullible, Father Fear will eternally lead us.

So how do we discern?

Ask not how your goverment can lead you into submission, Ask how you can lead your goverment into admission (to unbiased Truth).

Easier done than said...

Another Singer, the same story

2004-07-31T12:54:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from another visit to Michael Moore's site. The "News" category brings in some of the latests responses to the Ronstadt episode.

Now I know that Ms. Ronstadt is considered to be a gifted singer, mature. She reminds me of several such singers in Israel who caused a no less uproar when waking up to voice their citizen attitute.

Reminds me above all of Yaffa Yarkoni, a most venerated Israeli singer. An Israeli icon.

Amnon, an Israeli blogger recalls:

"Every Independence Day, light poles in the streets of Jerusalem were loaded with loudspeakers (horns), and Yaffa Yarkoni's voice echoed (literaly) all over the city, all day and all night, as people danced in the streets."It all changed on on the eve of the Independence Day 2002, when Yaffa Yarkoni, in an interview to The Israeli Armi Radio Station related to the Occupation with her trutful response.

"What happened to Yaffa Yarkoni," said Naomi Chazan, a left-wing member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, "exemplifies the fact that in the current climate in Israel, anything that is not the official line is considered treachery or betrayal."

George Varga at the The San-Diego Union-Tribune sums it up most eloquently:

"Those who complain that Ronstadt should just sing, rather than express her opinions, forget that all art has a responsibility to inspire and provoke, not just soothe and entertain."

Silence!

2004-07-21T16:04:00.001-07:00

Mike Kole comments at BlogCritics, relating to The Silenced Singer USA episode:

1.

"If you own land, will you let me erect a pro-libertarian billboard on your land?"

If the land in question is for renting space for billboards yet discriminates than this will be an unlawful business, propagating monoculture.

2.

"If I own a stage, by what right do *you* or anyone else get to impose your will on me?"

The stage is yours in every sense as long as it and the theater are empty.

The moment you open it to the public and to a performer/artist it has become a public space where by law you are not allowed to discriminate, nor announce in words or deeds, before or after: I accept Only people who think uniformly like me.

Eric Olsen did not accept my reference to "Holocaust, Fascism, etc.".

The essence of Fascism is not just Censorship but the Self-Censorship which enables it willingly. It was so throughout history, it spread all over during the Holocaust Era and is evident to this day. If we do not take notice and stay vigilant, then we'll wake up as the protagonist in Eugene Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, or worse:

"The "epidemic" of the rhinoceroses serves as a convenient allegory for the mass uprising of Nazism and fascism before and during World War II. Ionesco's main reason for writing Rhinoceros is not simply to criticize the horrors of Nazis, but to explore the mentality of those who so easily succumbed to Nazism. A universal consciousness that subverts individual free thought and will defines this mentality; in other words, people get rolled up in the snowball of general opinion around them, and they start thinking what others are thinking. In the play, people repeat ideas others have said earlier, or simultaneously say the same things. Once other people, especially authority figures, collapse in the play, the remaining humans find it even easier to justify why the metamorphoses are desirable..."

As long as they do not deter us from staying humanly benign, I do not mind the zoo yet prefer Noah's whole survival kit. He owned that boat, he made it with his own hands, right? Even the almighty did not order him to censor the passengers. It is good for our survival to cultivate differences. Ok, Ok, too bad there was not room for all and each living creature, but the rule was still fair representation of diversity, not so?

This issue comes up more than once in Israel. Some time ago a famous veteran Israeli singer, one of the two singers from the Independence War (1948) performed at a Protest event and expressed her disagreement with the Occupation. As a result she lost many engangements. The "property owners" in that case were goverment officials and private self-censors alike...

Sing, but don't Think

2004-07-20T20:50:00.001-07:00

A new Brave USA?

Linda Ronstadt dared to speak in favor of Michael Moore, the creator of Fahrenheit 9/11.
At a casino in USA - her own country.

The owner of the casino acted bravely. He threw her out.
Some commentors at Blogcritics are of the opinion that it was merely a Financial Decision...
I cannot but disagree.

The Financial is Political, the Political is Financial.
There is not a single instance in a human's life that is not Political.
It is a complete inversion of Values to consider Money and Business as exterritories of Freedom of Speech.

Gambling is Escapism from this crushing revelation: Humans are supposed to use their brains.
There is a long continuous line from Hitler's Willing Collaborators to all Willing Collaborators wherever and whenever. Step by step, minute by minute they scratch their foreheads until you find yourself with the universal challenge: Join the Rhinoceros or fight back.

Now to the critics

2004-07-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

There are so many ways to achieve Power.

What does a critic do?
Murder to Dissect.

So Michael Moore's film is not perfect.
The Iraqi kids were unhappy during Saddam's rule of terror.
Are they now that much better off?
Are there really only two choices, Suffer Tirany or go to war?

It's the 21st decade era.
How come Russia, Romania, East Germany, etc, have known better?

WordNet Dictionary

Noun

1.

power hunger - a drive to acquire power

Synonyms: status seeking

Related Words: ambition, ambitiousness, status seeking, hunger for power...

To-night I saw Farenheit 9/11

2004-07-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

More than one question invades my mind and heart:

1.

How could it be that the death of a soldier is annouced to his parents on the phone?
In Israel the army sends at least two people, one of them will often be a physician.

The mother in this film was told by phone. She was all alone in the house at that time. All she had to hold to was the leg of a table.

At the beginning of the film Bush Junior says a President does not have to be in the office at the White House - there are faxes, e-mails, phones.

Apparently the USA Army did not have the short-sighted parents' e-mail address or fax number. Otherwise it might have sent the family an Incredimail, with flowers, animation in which the dead son waves good bye, music, the President's most warm and human handwritten signature.
How inconsiderate of the parents.

2.

Since USA is across the street from us, and getting closer by the day, I couldn't but compare each line and image in the film with the Israeli reality.

We do have, especially lately, lots of films relating to one single event or experience.

We do not have yet a probe into the pattern repeating itself throughout those last fifty years in my own country, here in Israel. Same as in USA or wherever money translated into power, power translated into money feed on the gullible honest Everyman, trained to trust blindly.

What a mutual trust: In our leaders Citizen X trusts, in Citizen X our leaders trust.

read it in Hungarian;

Lynch? Yes indeed.

2004-07-08T16:23:00.000-07:00

I know none of the protagonists. I do not identify with their populistic ideas. Still when everybody screams righteously in one voice, a bell rings warning that maybe, maybe, something is wrong with the indignant screamers.

A most unpleasant story is being unraveled (and magnified) here for the last two days.
An Israeli Minister was taped by a private detective as enthusiastically encouraging that guy to "sew a file" on another senior member of his Party.
The expression is an Israeli slang for smearing one's reputation with false or demeaning mis/information. More or Less.

The Party, a new one, "Shinuy" (which stands for "Change"), has surprised everybody at the last elections when it won 6 seats, 5% of the 120 Knesset seats.

The tape is two years old. Wednesday night on prime-time it was played with the guilty Minister online.

A modern version of lynch.

The man has since apologised. His party is kicking him out most brutally.

A newspaper wrote in huge letters on it's first page:
"In Japan a Minister will commit Harakiri and here the Minister refuses to step down."

Why was the tape brought out right now?
The private detective was hired by the Workers Guild at the Electricity Company. A most powerful guild. The Shinuy Party has disappointed them somehow, or so it seems. Now the story here is called, ShinuyGate.

Years ago we had a similar story, with the Labor Party. One of it's top members was accused of some mischief. The same pattern occured: All his former buddies left him alone and lonely as a mouse. He committed suicide.
I hope we won't have a replay here.

--------

(c) all rights to the picture owned by Jung von Matt, ad agency. Their honest motto is: "Advertising is Desire and Deception."

shown at Heiko Hebig's excellent blog

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White Hair is In

2004-07-06T12:52:00.001-07:00

An Uncivilized guy took the pain to post on a bloggers panel his bitter spleened hatred of Old People.

They should be locked in a house, he states.
Hitler had a better solution.

Wherever we turn, stereotypes abound.
So here is a benign one, based on scientific research:
Maggie Fox at Reuter writes to say "Old People May Hold Key to Human Success".

Some of us have guessed so ages ago, but now anthropologists have crossed findings to back this up scientifically: "There has been a lot of speculation about what gave modern humans their evolutionary advantage. This research provides a simple explanation for which there is now concrete evidence -- modern humans were older and wiser," Caspari said.

"We think with increases in longevity two things happened to increase survivorship," Caspari, an anthropologist specializing in evolution, added in a telephone interview.

Trust Me

2004-07-05T13:13:00.002-07:00

A young Israeli journalist, himself a blogger, called to ask about my Blogging Offensive.
I told him about my encounter last Saturday.
It had to be very light indeed, with the mediator cracking jokes in between speakers.

Coming upstage I whispered, "Ask me if it's true I've met Arik Sharon twice in intimate circumstances.
In the heat of my talk I forgot all about it but he hadn't. I was genuinely surprised by such an intrusive question.
In my childhood and youth my dream was to be an actress...

The audience held their breath. As I got to the story of the second meeting, when asked to guess what, they were sure it had the same outcome as in the first encounter.

Now, it's not that they thought I'm able of such banality, or that they were that gullible.
The audience simply let itself tricked into the side alley of my story, as, after mentioning as an aside the food, I was repeating that "on the second occasion my beauty and decollete were no less attractive".

I've been impersonating a vain woman and they bought the story until the last moment.

Isn't impersonation exactly what Sharon and so many politicians are performing daily from their podium?

During the last elections campaign here in Israel, it was said, and I do not know how true it is but true it sounds, that as Sharon was coached to declare in face of the camera, "I will bring Peace and Security!", at one point, while being masked with makeup powder, he muttered: "I might end up believing it myself..."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read it in Russian;

Facing Novelty, Gmail or elsewhere

2004-07-04T13:20:00.001-07:00

My blog at Blogger was dreaming it's way over there since 2002. Most of my energy was invested in the Hebrew blog, which indeed is a beauty.

Then, you know what happened: Google acquired Blogger and lots of features I, and probably many others, were asking for, materialized.

Meanwhile, I heard about GMail and my immediate response was enthusiastic. I love new things, as long as they do not go against my way of life (the way mobile phones do).

I thought I'll have to wait until Gmail opens to the public.

Imagine how pleased I was when a direct invitation appeared on my entry page at Blogger.

I liked Gmail immediately and am enjoying it to this moment. It's a special opportunity to be involved with a project at its experimental stage.

When the red line, INVITE A FRIEND, started to appear, my healthy goodwill went to work.

Then it reached the level where once or twice a day I would be offered six invitations.

The Hebrew is not yet perfected at Gmail, so of course I offered the toy first to my compatriots, so that more of us will be a asking for the completion of this feature.

I posted a short article on my Hebrew blog and, to my amazement, I got some comments, from very intelligent readers, who did not have yet the chance to sample the novelty, stating firmly that gmail is no good, there are many others like it etc.

On the other hand, some of the people who wrote to ask for an invitation, started posting their enthusiastic experiences.

The invitations kept flooding me so I posted a notice on the excellent Haaretz forum.

What happened there?

Suspicion reigned! How come she's giving something for free. And why the e-mail address, is there a hidden intention to harvest?

Needless to say, Suspicious in Tel Aviv used only nicks.

That was really funny, especially when people who knew me and recipients of my invitations raised to counter attack and war in a cup of tea followed intensely until the enemy was defeated completely.

If you could visit now the forum, you'll find a stream of posts begging for a gmail invitation...

Same at my e-mail arriving via the Hebrew blog. The people who were so negative or suspicious are now mildly asking for an invitation.

This little unintended experiment sheds so much light on our attitudes and responses to new ideas. It's true we do not burn anybody on the stack anymore for such heresy, but still, with too many people the initial response is fear and suspicion.

But now I remember that this is only an initial response. So, if I believe in something, even if it is not that popular in the beginning, why give up. People do listen to reason, not only to demagogues and manipulators.

One person wrote at the forum saying sincerely: "I was also suspicious at the beginning. It really bothers me that this was my initial response."

The Blogging Offensive

2004-07-03T13:16:00.001-07:00

Today was the opening shot of my Blogging Offensive.

No offence meant... just a good fight for a good cause: Make people aware what an excellent tool blogging is in enabling immediate democratic response to reality.

Today I've met with a large group of senior citizens.

Only two persons raised their hands to say they surf the net.

The mediator said: "Ask you grandchildren to teach you how."

"Oh, they have no patience..."

I had no idea what group of people I'm going to meet at that "Sabbath Culture" event, yet senior people are indeed high up on my list. It is one of those groups, if not the major one, who's been told by society, Shut Up!

Gone are the days when the Hebrew "Zakken" (Senior, old person) was a synonym of "Hackham" (Wise).

It leads to Isolation, frustration, helplessness. What a waste of this wonderful human reservoir of intelligence!

I told them how effective the blogosphere was with the Trent Lott Affair, what a great change it enabled.

Then I went to visit my 90 yrs old relative, who refuses even to hear the word "internet".

But she reads Jerusalem Post. Proudly she showed me an article on an 89 yrs blogger: Help Me Bubby.

Not political. Still, an illustration of how empowering blogging can be.

A disobedient thought

2004-06-12T13:02:00.001-07:00

while it's still not legally forbidden...

How many times during the day or a lifetime you've said, "This is too big on me"?

We have so many ways to create change, step by step.

On the occasion of the Hebrew Book Week, let's recall how annoyed and frustrated we are with the mega book-store chains and their bottom line preoccupation and choices.

In Israel one by one we've seen the disappearance of the small traditional bookstore, run by dedicated owners, wise people whose eyes glitter when they talk of their first and everlasting love: Books.

One day I entered a mega book-store and overhead a man asking in Hebrew: "I'm here for a short visit, can you recommend me the great new books?"

Said the lady: "Oh, here are the bestsellers, everybody is talking about them."

Some time earlier she might have been selling clothes, in the same vernacular: "This is the new trend in fashion, everybody is wearing them this year..."

If this "trend" continues, pretty soon we'll find ourselves in a book-store lined up with bestsellers alone, books and clothes.

I do not want to live in a nightmarish global mono-culture.

Luckily, in Israel lately, and for sure throughout the global empire, new book lovers are born daily and some of them are opening their own book stores.

We can help those Davids and Davidas stand up to the moguls by our own daily choices.

When you find yourself in a chain store, standing there with a book in your hand and the money or card in the other, stop for a moment and reconsider. Across the street, down the lane, a soul-mate is waiting for your visit. His or her store shelves are full of treasures.

Let's cherish and support the treasure keepers.