Regular readers of On the Face know that I don't write about politics. I still don't write about politics. But sometimes things just drive me crazy because they are so illogical, pointless and, well, stupid. Like the decision taken by the British Association of University Teachers to boycott two Israeli universities.

Etgar Keret sent me the link to his article about the decision, published last week in The Guardian. As usual, he is incisive, pithy and brilliant at cutting through the bullshit.

Here's an excerpt:

Today, the Association of University Teachers will hold its annual council meeting in Eastbourne, during which a motion will be put forth to boycott three out of eight Israeli universities. The timing, as always, is perfect. The Middle East is never exactly blissful, but now, of all times, when the agenda features disengagement and the slimmest prospects of new solutions - now is apparently the right moment for calling out the cavalry of British academe, those valiant and dauntless professors who will not think twice before boycotting Israeli mathematicians or Latin scholars. With a well-aimed forceps movement, they will prevent such researchers from publishing their learned papers on topological distortions in space, and may even, if they're lucky, manage to foil cooperation between biologists who might, heaven forbid, discover a Zionist cure for cancer.

Shraga Har-Gil was born in Germany in the 1920s and emigrated to Mandate Palestine as a child; during the 1940s he joined the Haganah, fought in the 1948 War of Independence and was badly wounded in battle. He married, had children, became a prominent journalist who wrote for the Hebrew daily Ma'ariv, divorced and lives today in Tel Aviv with Ulla, a non-Jewish German woman who is 18 years his junior.

Ulla Gessler was born in Germany in 1944. She married briefly during the 1960s, had children and divorced. She was deeply involved in an organization devoted to reconcilation between Germans and Jews, and that is how she met Shraga; he was invited to address the organization in 1997, and he and Ulla simply clicked immediately. They fell in love, and ultimately Ulla moved to live with Shraga in Tel Aviv.

Around this time, Shraga's son Amir - who has directed several prize-winning documentary films - began to make a film about his father. The idea was to document Shraga's fascinating life story, which parallels the birth and development of the State of Israel. Ultimately, however, the film became a documentary about Shraga and Ulla's love story. It is called "The Art of Living."

About halfway through the film, Ulla tells the following story:

In 1999, about five weeks before she moved to Tel Aviv, Ulla decided to investigate the issue of financial compensation for the factory in East German territory that had been owned by her father and grandfather before and during the war. She telephoned the municipal archives of the town in which the factory had been located, and was told by the archivist, "You will never receive any money for that factory." Why not? asked Ulla. "Because," said the archivist, "That factory manufactured the cannisters for the gas used in the Nazi death camps."

At that point in the film, Ulla's voice catches. She says that she immediately told Shraga the terrible story about her father, and that Shraga's response was, "Don't tell anyone." The camera pans over to Shraga, who is sitting in a chair near the window of his apartment, and shows him smiling with pure embarrassment.

When I met Ulla for coffee a couple of weeks ago, she told me that she had always felt a strong sense of personal guilt about the Holocaust, even though she was only a baby when the war ended and her parents had never discussed the subject. She said that the telephone conversation with the archivist was the realization of her deepest fear, and she sat and cried for hours after hanging up the phone. But in another way, she said, knowing the truth was the beginning of her journey to emotional freedom: freedom from that haunting sense of guilt; freedom from the unhappiness - a distant father, an unsuccessful marriage - that had dogged her all her life; and freedom from the past.

She was disappointed when Shraga told her to keep her discovery a secret, she said, and happy when it came out on film. The making of that film was another step on the road to emotional freedom.

But what really set her free was her love story with Shraga, and the life she has made for herself in Tel Aviv. Shraga, she said, taught her to love life; he is the first man she ever really wanted to be with. She moved here to be with him, but discovered that living in Tel Aviv was another step to freedom. She loves the beach, the cafes, the theatre, the concerts. She loves her weekly classes in Israeli folkdancing, and the circle of friends she has built for herself.

Recently her book, Fifteen Portraits of Israeli Women, was published in Germany. It is a collection of interviews with Israeli women such as Yehudit Katzir, author of Closing the Sea, Ruth Almog and Yehudit Arnon, founder of the Kibbutz Dance Company. I interviewed women with whom I identified, said Ulla, and I let them talk for themselves.

Meanwhile, Shraga has written a film script called "The Jew and the Daughter of the Murderer." It was inspired, of course, by Ulla.

Watching Ulla and Shraga together is really a pleasure. Their love is not sticky and sentimental. It is quite obviously based on enormous mutual respect and caring. And they take genuine joy in each other's company. Shraga has a wicked sense of humour, and tells marvelous stories from the perspective of a slightly cynical veteran journalist.

Here is what you should know about Ulla: She is one of the warmest, bravest, most generous and open women you will ever meet. She glows with happiness and radiates contentment, because she has found love, freedom, intellectual stimulation and self-acceptance at a relatively advanced age.

Next year, on Shraga's eightieth birthday, he and Ulla will be married. Ulla's married name will be Har-Gil Gessler.

"I am comfortable with my name now," she said. "I know now that I am myself, not my father."

So there I was, sitting in the graphics department and putting together yet another supplement under yet another yucky deadline, tired from overwork and the knowledge that I still had another huge project to finish over the next few days. And everything was going wrong - computers were crashing, articles were lost in cyberspace and tempers were short.

Then Chani, lovely Chani who never forgets, called to wish me a happy birthday.

Smadar, who was doing the graphics, overheard our conversation and said, "Oh, it's your birthday! Mazal tov! Is that why you're in a bad mood?"

Startled, I said, "No, I'm just really tired and pissed off because there's still a lot of work to do. Why should my birthday put me in a bad mood?"

"Well," said 24 year-old Smadar, "You know, 'cause you're getting old."

...for accountants and journalists.

It seems that a whole lotta work caught up with me all at once. I'll be busy churning out Passover supplements and articles until Wednesday night, and probably won't have time to write until then.

Then again, you never know. ;)

At the literary event I wrote briefly about in February, Etgar Keret told the following story:

Before addressing the audience at a recent literary event in Paris, he and Arab-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua each worried to the other that the people who had come to hear them speak would be hostile. Kashua told Keret that there were sure to be a lot of right-wing French Jews who would accuse Kashua of being a terrorist; Keret responded that, since France was full of anti-Israel sentiment, there would no doubt be people waiting to attack him for being a baby killer (this happened to Keret in Italy).

Both authors scanned the audience, convinced that the woman with the sharp chin would be the one who would wait until the end of the question and answer session to attack one of them. But would she prove to be to the anti-Israel ideologue, or the right-wing French Jew?

The sharp-chinned woman did not wait until the end, though; she was the first to raise her hand and stand to ask a question.

"I've been sitting here, watching and listening to you both for over an hour now," she said, "And I'm confused: Which of you is the Arab, and which is the Jew?"

My washing machine died last week. It was nicknamed El Diablo, for its ability to shake, rattle and roll; in fact, I used to schedule my phone calls around the spin cycle - it was that noisy. The repairman took one look at it and said the cost of fixing it was about four times the machine's value, and wondered aloud how it had continued to work for as long as it did. Okay, it was 12 years old and its previous owners were a family of six, so I guess you could say that El Diablo lived a good life.

So I went to an appliance shop that I trust, and the owner told me that a certain German-made machine was the best value. I cut him off as he extolled the machine's many functions with a brusque "Great, I'll take it." It washes, it spins, it holds 5 kilos, it's not expensive, it has a five year warranty - what else do I need to know?

When I told Karen that I'd bought a new washing machine, and that it was from Germany, she said that she wished she and Ezi had bought a German-made oven instead of the French one they chose for their newly (and gorgeously) renovated kitchen. The French oven, she said, looks great but doesn't work very well. Yeah, I said, their food isn't very good but the Germans really know how to make good ovens.*

Then we both heard what I'd said, and we started to laugh.



*Germans, ovens, Jews - get it?

So I'm swamped with work, and doing all sorts of interesting things that I don't have time to blog about. I'm also working on Part Seven - the Tokyo chapter. There are so many little anecdotes in my diaries that I'm pretty sure I'll only have space for a few highlights. Here's one that might - or might not - make it.

About a week after I arrived in Tokyo, there was an earthquake. I was at work at the time, and my office was on the twenty-fourth floor. The floor trembled, and the building literally swayed from side to side; heads popped up from behind cubicle dividers, and there was a murmur of disquiet. I had one of those moments of pure fatalism: if this was the big one, there was clearly nothing I could do to save myself from a high floor of an office tower.

But then the swaying stopped, and everyone went back to work.

Later that day, one of my new Japanese colleagues asked me where I was from.

"Isra-er?" he asked incredulously. "Ha! Vedy danjeru, no?"