What do you do the day after a terrorist attack occurs in your city? Well, the sun was shining, it was 18 degrees (Celsius, you Brits and Yanks) and it was a Saturday. So I went for a walk, and people were out with their dogs and playing with their kids and riding their bicycles and strolling hand-in-hand with their loved ones and laughing. And I met friends at a cafe, and we talked about books and movies. We didn't talk about politics, and we didn't talk about the bombing.

But it was there, hanging over us, unmentioned but present.

Then in the evening my friend Chani called me, and we talked about work and her son's upcoming bar mitzvah. Suddenly I told her that I'd let my guard down. I had lost the ability to shrug off the bombings, and I didn't think I had the energy to deal with the rollercoaster of emotions again - the adrenalin rush and the grief and the fear.

But most of all, I am afraid of the numbness. Because when unspeakable events occur on a regular basis, survival mode kicks in: you can't deal with those constant questions about meaning, so you don't. You become numb. And that means that you lose a bit of your humanity. Because if you cry over every person who is killed, then you go cuckoo. But if you don't cry, then you've lost something important. Empathy. Humanity.

How long does it take for people to become tired of killing? It took the Lebanese - what - 17 years? And the (former) Yugoslavians - eight years? I guess four years isn't enough for some people.

But it's way more than enough for me. I'm tired.

I'd almost forgotten what that sound meant, but not quite. When I heard one siren, then two, then three and finally more than I could count, I knew. A terrorist attack, again.

So I turned on the television, sent an Instant Message to my sister in Toronto and checked to make sure my friends were all okay.

It was just a dumb karaoke club, where people get together to sing popular songs and have a good time.

And now there are 50 wounded and 4 dead.

I don't really have anything else to say.

UPDATE - THE MORNING AFTER: Allison makes it unnecessary for me to write anything more. Go read her thoughts. I wish someone would change the script, too.

Israel21c has started a group blog called Israelity - "life beyond the conflict." A bunch of us Israeli English-language bloggers will be contributing little slice of life anecdotes about everything except war and politics.

Harry has already written about one of my favourite Tel Aviv restaurants (conveniently located a mere five-minute walk from my apartment, and open 24 hours),Imshin has composed an ode to the new Israeli train system, and Allison posted a link to a great NPR interview with one of Israel's most popular young musicians. My first post is up too, so go go go!

The day after the literary event I wrote about in my last post, Etgar Keret and Sami al-Kilani, one of the Palestinian authors who participated in "Voices from Two Sides of the Bridge," were interviewed for National Public Radio (NPR). You can listen to the interview here. (Keret's name, by the way, is pronounced EtGAR KERet, not Edgar KerET).

Sometimes it's really great to get out of the city...



Especially when the purpose of leaving the city is to attend a fascinating literary conference of Arab and Jewish writers called "Voices from Two Sides of the Bridge."


On the left is Etgar Keret, one of Israel's most popular young authors; on the right is Samir El-Youssef, a Palestinian author who grew up in Lebanon and now lives in London. Etgar and Samir met at a literary conference in Europe, became friends, and co-authored a collection of short stories called Gaza Blues. Their friendship and their writing reflects their shared belief that the human connection is more important than politics. Both abhor victimization, because it dehumanizes; both write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of its absurdity. For more on Gaza Blues and Samir and Etgar's philosophies, read this review.

During the lunch break the 200-odd people who attended the event - Arabs, Jews, Europeans, editors, journalists, writers - shmoozed while sitting outdoors under the unusually warm winter sunshine.


So perhaps there is hope for the future of this region, and it's not all....

Excerpt from an online chat with my sister:

Lisa says:
I saw Mordecai Vanunu
adina says:
?
adina
says:
wow
adina says:
and?
Lisa says:
at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem
Lisa says:
Nothing
Lisa says:
he just hangs out there
adina says:
:)
Lisa says:
but I had to tell you!

I don't go to Jerusalem very often, but when I do I usually stop by the American Colony Hotel on Sheikh Jarrah Road. The lobby is always full of journalists, foreign workers for NGOs, and multilingual Palestinians who make their living as translators, drivers and guides. For me, the atmosphere inevitably evokes Graham Greene novels.

Summer dining in the shaded courtyard, near the tiled goldfish pond, is always a pleasure; the setting makes up for the mediocre and overpriced food. And there's usually an interesting conversation to eavesdrop on. Once I sat near a blonde guy who looked utterly foreign in his carefully pressed chinos and polished brogues; he was reading Haaretz in Hebrew, spoke Arabic to the waiters and stood to greet the person who joined him in Swedish. What was his story? I wondered.

A couple of nights ago I went to hear a talk given by Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer and novelist from Ramallah who is probably best known for his memoir, Strangers in the House . It has been published in Hebrew and English, but not in Arabic. (When asked about this anomaly, Shehadeh claimed not to be bothered that his novels don't reach an Arabic-speaking readership, and added that most educated Palestinians speak English well enough to read him in that language. He refused to be drawn out on the nature of the political controversy that has prevented his book from being published in the West Bank).

I arrived an hour early, so I used the time to buy a couple of novels in the bookshop, and sat on one of the wing chairs in the lobby to read them over a cup of tea with fresh mint. And that's when I saw Mordecai Vanunu. He walked quickly, with his head pulled down between his shoulders - giving him a turtle effect - and his eyes were a bit darting. He looked at me for a split second, then rounded a corner and disappeared.

I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed him, but it seemed as though I was the only one who thought his presence was anything beyond ordinary.

Remember the Achbar Ha'Ir cover I mentioned in part four of "How Lisa Came to Israel"? Well, I found it in the archives - and it's rather different from the way I remembered it. It seems that I confused two different covers - there's another one that shows the fighting in the background, and I guess they just merged in my memory. I got a few other details wrong, as well. The message is the same, though. So I've scanned it and posted the cover below - as well as another two that I thought were interesting.



The words on the rolled up newspapers in the basket beside the television are "war" and "unemployment." The picture above the newscaster's head on the television is of a gas mask, and the man lying on the couch is reading Amos Oz's novel/memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness.



The woman on the left is watching an Israeli soap opera. "He's going to find out that he's not her father," she says, as a tear rolls down her cheek. The man on the right is watching Israeli fighter jets bombing a Palestinian town (identified as Palestinian by the mosque, front and center), and saying (roughly) "When is this going to end?" Note that the television showing the soap opera is much larger than the one showing the bombing.



By 2003, when this cover appeared, the presence of security guards at practically all places of business was taken for granted. There was a minor flap when restaurant owners started adding a charge of about 25 cents per patron to the bill, in order to defray the cost of hiring security guards. Later the Knesset passed a law that made the additional charge voluntary, like a tip. There was also a bit of a scandal over the fact that most of these security guards were risking their lives for very low pay, and some restaurant owners tried to compensate them by feeding them well.
The word on the security guard's cap is Hebrew for "security." The restaurant is called "Beatrice, French Bistro," the little sign hanging from the door handle says "open" and the menu to the right lists "desserts."

As I was reading that excerpt (which hit a little close to home, as you
can imagine as I sit here in my leafy suburb writing about my trip to
Istanbul...)

that Kobi Oz Tippex song started going through my head "Yoshvim B'Beit
Cafe" -- basically sums up what you are writing about it!

To me, that song completely encapsulates that era.

-comment posted by Allison in response to my previous post

Usually spelled Tea Packs in English, but pronounced Tipex in Hebrew, the band headed by musican/author Koby Oz came out in 2001 with a song called "Sitting in a Cafe." As usual, Oz had his finger on the local Zeitgeist: with this song he managed to capture perfectly the way most of us were feeling at that time. We couldn't get over our shock at how badly things had gone wrong, and we felt powerless to effect change. We lived our lives, which often meant detaching, but we couldn't stop talking about "the situation." We sat in cafes and listened to music, but there was always this sense of grief hanging over our heads. The song became a huge hit.

I've translated the lyrics, below. You can listen to the song and read the lyrics in Hebrew by clicking here. The "you" in the song is a female "you," by the way.

Oh, and an aside to Hebrew speakers: I substituted English expressions for Hebrew whenever I thought a literal translation would've been awkward.

Sitting in a café

Sitting in a café
Feeling like we’re in a bubble
What should we have done?
Where did we go wrong?
What changed?
Sitting in a café
I order cheesecake
What should we have done?
Where did we go wrong?
This country’s finished

Driving in your Jeep
Listening to the stereo
Outside it’s black and white and mono
Driving in your Jeep
You don’t listen to the radio
For you
It’s a waste of time

Sitting in a café
Talking about the situation
What should we have done?
Where did we go wrong?
Why now?
Sitting in a café
Feeling like we’re in a different country
What should we have done?
Where did we go wrong?
There’s a deluge heading our way

Driving in your Jeep
Listening to the stereo
Outside it’s black and white and mono
Driving in your Jeep
You don’t listen to the radio
For you
It’s a waste of time

You’re tripping *
You’re calling me Romeo
Outside there’s a heat wave but for you it’s a cold and rainy day
Driving in your Jeep
You don’t listen to the radio
You don’t know how bad I feel right now

Sitting in a café…

* "tripping" in the slang sense of being on drugs or losing your mind

A week of silence is a very long time in the blogosphere. Especially when a long-promised post is so very overdue. So I lost the 2,000-plus draft of Part Six. It was gobbled up by blogger and yes, I have learned: never, ever save the draft of a post in blogger. And meanwhile I was in such a bad mood over the past week - for a number of reasons both defined and undefined - that I just couldn't seem to find the will to re-write it. I finally sat down tonight (this time writing in Word), and I'll post the "teaser" below.

But I'm going to have to leave it there for another day or two, because it's well past one o'clock in the morning and I have to be up at six. Given my well-known tendency to keep vampire hours, you can be sure that I've got a compelling reason for dragging my carcass out of bed when it's still dark (and cold). I'm going to be attending an all-day literary forum of Israeli (Jewish), Palestinian and Arab writers - some of the latter from countries that are not exactly known as lovers of Israel.

It's all rather cloak-and-dagger. I cannot reveal the location of the event, nor the names of the participants, until it's over. And even though the chairman of the event invited me to attend, I had to supply my identity card number in order to secure a place on the bus that will take me there. It seems that the organizers are worried about attracting the possibly violent attention of "extremist elements." It should be a fascinating day, and if I can't flog an article about it to a publication then I'll blog about it.

Oh, and more news: I called Achbar Ha'Ir, and have obtained permission to search their archives for the cover I wrote about in Part Four. If I find it, and if the editor agrees to let me scan it, I'll post it here. Consider it my gift for your patience in waiting for Part Six.

And here's the teaser:

On an unusually warm and sunny Friday morning in the winter of 2002, a friend picked me up in his luxurious new Audi and drove us to the marina in Herzliya. We sat at an expensive waterfront restaurant that was filled with sleek people who looked very cote d'Azure, dining outdoors under the blue Mediterranean sky. We ate a meal of fish accompanied by white wine. The sun glinted off the gold frames of my friend's sunglasses as he told me about his most recent business trip to Switzerland, and his plan to purchase a pied a terre in Manhattan. After we'd eaten, and he'd paid the bill with one of his many credit cards, we went sailing with a group of people on his friend's yacht. They talked about their plans to take the yacht to Sardinia the following summer.

In other words, not everyone was suffering during the height of the political and economic troubles of 2002. While the queue at the unemployment office on Brenner Street, near my apartment, began to form more than an hour before it opened, and while the number of unsmiling armed security guards at the entrances to shops, cafes and restaurants increased until I felt as though I might as well walk around with my bag permanently open for inspection, there were a lot of people whose money bought them a lovely protective bubble. They lived in Tel Aviv's quiet, leafy northern suburbs, drove to work at one of the city's new office towers and left their cars in the well-protected underground parking garages. They could - and did - frequently escape the pressure cooker that was Israel by hopping over to Europe for a few days' holiday. For the plutocrats, terrorism was mostly something that affected other people. Like poverty.

That's what my blog is called in Italian. Follow the link, it's the coolest thing ever. Some clever reader typed the URL of my blog into the Google.it homepage, then clicked on [Traduci questa pagina] and voila! Okay, there are a few amusing errors: Tel Aviv, for example, is translated as "telefono aviv." But on the whole, and given the fact that I don't speak Italian (but hey, speak one Romance language, speak 'em all - right?), the translation looks pretty accurate.

Try it for your favourite blog and see what happens.

Right, that should keep you all amused until I finish the long night of work ahead of me (the paying kind), and then get back to my labour of love: Part Six. Tuesday night. I swear. Wait for it.

Oh and by the way, my brilliant baby sister just turned 32 today. Go read her musings on growing up, and while you're at it check out Joey's hilarious post in her honour. (that's Adina in the lower left corner of the photo. Isn't she gorgeous?)

It's coming, it's coming. Just let me finish a couple of articles that're supposed to put a few shekels in my bank account, make my editor happy and wipe that frown of concern off my bank manager's face.

And oh allright, I confess: it's not writer's block, exactly, but composing Part Six has not been easy. I feel as though I'm going through the writer's equivalent of protracted labour. Except the baby's head isn't crowning yet.

(Sigh).

Stay with me, patient readers. I won't keep you waiting much longer.

The JIBS
The finalists for the Jewish-Israel Blog Awards (JIBs) are now up on Israellycool. Click here to see the list - there's a whole big world of blogs out there, waiting to be discovered. Voting starts on Monday, February 7. (self promotion: note the category called "Best 'Life in Israel' Blog").

The pressure is on, I guess. Quite a few people have written to ask when I'm going to post Part Six of "How Lisa Came to Israel." This week was a bit crazy, and I'm not much of a multi-tasker - so I've set aside Friday afternoon/evening to finish writing the post. Sorry for the delay...

Meanwhile, my old flatmate Ilanit dropped over unexpectedly this afternoon. She lives in Rosh Pina now, was visiting Tel Aviv and just needed a place to take a nap between appointments. After she'd slept I took a break from writing the article I had to finish by tonight, and read Part Five aloud to her while she ate the dinner I'd cooked. Ilanit's a bit of a Luddite - she refuses to have a computer at home and didn't know I maintain a blog.

When I'd finished reading she stared at me and said slowly, "You know, that's exactly the way it was."

We started to reminisce, and nearly ended up crying. I'm really having a hard time with the realization that we never dealt with what we went through. We just buried it. And continued to live our lives.

I'm working on Part Six of "How Lisa Came to Israel," but it'll take another day or two to complete. The dratted exigencies of making a living again, you know...

The response to this series has been...Wow. Amazing. And totally unexpected. Thank you all so, so much for your thoughtful, warm and intelligent comments, for your emails and for linking to me. I haven't found the time to write back to most of you, but please know that I appreciate your feedback immensely. It encouraged me, it fed my ever-peckish ego, and most of all it inspired me.

You even got me thinking about actually writing a book. (Does that mean that I have to be self-disciplined? Write an outline, organize chapters, do research? Um, yeah).