I owe you two parts Turkey and three parts Dubai. Don't let me off the hook. Unfortunately, I've got more pressing matters right now...like the mini-biographies I'm working on. Here's another bit:

My paternal grandfather, who never seemed to smile in pictures, kept his German surname when he arrived in America. Lewy. It was an odd and chalky name to American ears. And I grew up not knowing a thing about the name or the man who had so hastily packed it into a suitcase the morning after they came for him and the maids said he had gone out for the night. And as I grew up with his name clumsily attached to my Zeyda’s with a hyphen, everyone by instinct would correct it to Levy.

My grandfather, who had been a wealthy doctor in Berlin, pressed hard to secure safe passage out of Germany for all seven of his sisters as well as his wife’s family. This didn’t make him a rescuer, but a pilot light for the cold chambers where he compulsively followed the news of his former Germany and of friends and family first distant then departed.

There is something sadly poetic about the non-German world who believed my grandfather’s name was a typo. Neither France nor America were home enough to him. Moreover, there wasn’t even a name for what he had endured. It wouldn’t have been quite right to call him a survivor because he never went to the camps. Despite escaping, his life was never returned to him. While it ended in America, it could just as easily have been Bergen-Belsen. His American exile turned out to be a terminal disease, a reckless, failed pursuit at a re-creation of Berlin. And it was a thirst that killed him, slowly, perhaps because my grandfather’s life in America had been as a healthy body in a foreign host instead of the other way around.

Just stumbled upon some awesome footage of TFR Board of Trustees Member Leonard Cohen hitting on a German girl in a 1971 documentary.

31/7/10
Istanbul

We sat in an outdoor cafe, which was more like a patio once meant for something else and while he sketched the view across the Bosporus, I read aloud from a book I'd picked up that morning during a sojourn through Beyoğlu. It didn't strike me as odd that he asked me to read aloud; our friendship always on its countenance was interactive. As alchemy does its work, there were few sentences more appropriate than the [first] one I read aloud on the opening page of the book:

A general explanation of the world and of history must first of all take into account the way our house was situated, in an area once known as `French Point,' on the last slopes at the foot of San Pietro hill, as though at the border between two continents.

Calvino in his book was overcoming a lament on the frailty of recollection to make a diminutive place, like the patio on which we both drank Turkish coffee and lemonade in stout plastic chairs, endless in its horizonal opportunity.

People that passed, native and voyeur alike, looked at his work and then gazed back at the same panorama, lamentful possibly at the frailty of recollection, or perhaps, fleetingly engaged with knowing if they saw things the same way.

Friends,

I am off stealing yard signs for the heated 'ag commish' race in Alabama. If there's not an exciting story there, I promise I will write you soon about Turkey and Dubai. In the meantime, enjoy this and pray for our United States.

...I’ve listened to historians explain how the Csarist army conscription/pogrom narrative from my grandfatjer’s generation is really a perpetuated myth. An overblown tall tale. How closely Morris Bober’s flight from Russia in Bernard Malamud’s book The Assistant resembles the story of Zeyda’s escape does not deter me from thinking of the story again and again as an evergreen well of pride in my American character.

In the story there is a young man who needs to leave. If he’s caught escaping he is killed, if he stays, another type of death awaits. Hiding beneath a bale of frozen hay (growing taller and more frozen with each retelling), he rides all the way to the port at St. Petersburg to take passage on a ship. He alights at a port where Old Glory waves him in. He’s left everything and everyone behind. He’s takes a new name coded with priestly DNA and a Yankee swagger. He opens a business, builds a life, and through the small berth where he first docked, an American family eventually springs. He leaves America only twice in his life, both times to visit Israel.

Zeyda’s story—of the stranger in hunger for a haven—humbles me most because of how it mirrors that original American narrative (sans the slavery and Indian slaughter) that compelled the some of the first pilgrims to come over. Through him, I am able to subvert the cynicism I feel about the true weather of the New World and what it represents as an idea. Had I been given more time with him, I might have felt more American growing up. More grateful. Until the summer, I’d never felt like each place I saw as an American, I was waving to him from there. From the margins of the timelines, the edge of the twentieth century back to the nineteenth, I’d never before fluttered back to him like a scrap of paper taken by the wind...

I am really sad I wasn't in New York when Mayor Bloomberg gave his speech in eloquent defense of the proposed mosque and community center near the World Trade Center site.

If you haven't been following, most New Yorkers are in favor of this project while the bigoted idiots (or just the dithering assholes at the Anti-Defamation League) are roundly opposed.

Well, fuck them says Mayor Bloomberg. Not literally. Here's a bit, but read the whole thing here. This one he wrote himself.

"On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked, 'What God do you pray to?' (Bloomberg's voice cracks here a little as he gets choked up.) 'What beliefs do you hold?'

Good to be home.

For further reading on this topic, see here. (New Yorker)

The day’s end came while we were gunning back to Ramallah. Along with the wrenching of the van—with the same erratic gusto as before (substituting techno music for Koran verses)—I felt enervated and unsettled by the intensity of the day. To have dipped so deeply into foreign space, the furlough from Israeli hand wringing and the depth and weight and scope and burden of Palestinian aspiration...dreams are heavy, overly so, like tree branches sagging with winter ice; reality has narrow shoulders, its body can’t support the wings.

The day had been filled with hopeful reports from Jenin; the sprouting of culture (see post below), the focus inward toward fortitude instead of outward toward enmity. The refugee camp had been the last stop. We arrived by taxi, viewing block after block of decaying building, a sturdy place here, a hovel there, martyr posters pasted to walls or hanging above like placards on a pavilion, beside a workman’s garage, a field of rubble.

Our tour guide was a filmmaker at a theatre in the camp. He was 24 and quite angry. His English was fantastic and his prose was layered in double and triple and contradictory meanings. His home in the Jenin camp, his youth there, bore his craft, unlocked and sprung it. Jenin was not Ramallah which was false and bourgeois and filled with empty half-gestures.

Jenin is where real art lives, the way that Brooklyn talks to Manhattan, but with something real at stake. Jenin was also too small. Its mind had to be opened while its customs kept intact.

“Give us your money and shut up,” he shouted at one point, talking about the Europeans who were all poseurs in affiliating with his causes of art and revolution.

In a room with his actors, they ran through the list of their fellow artists who had died in 2002 during the Battle of Jenin. Five had died either defending the camp (fighting the Israelis) or as martyrs (suicide bombers), one had gone to jail. One had spent twelve days in a room sleeping beside the body of his dead father; our host, to relay the dimensions of a commonplace experience in Jenin camp, described how he had once carried someone’s finger in his pocket to a hospital.

We left him, thankfully, shortly after watching play rehearsal. In this scene, the Palestinians are scattering to Jordan having been displaced by the Nakba (disaster) of Israeli independence. A single violin plays. They wander through a famous desert bereft.

***

We have time before the van departs and we go back to Ramallah. We stop in a sweet shop for more Arabic coffee (cup seven of the day) and some kunef. There are two kinds. We ask the owner to pick. He chooses both. We eat the dessert, they have a spongy-sweet-honeyed-dissolve which, like dreams, one cannot describe without sounding completely idiotic. It’s a century-old recipe, the owner tells us, only the men make it.

The men in the shop say they are excited about the new cinema in Jenin. They say that want Israelis to come to Jenin, to talk to them, to see what it’s like.

“Speak Hebrew with me,” one man says to the imagined Israelis, “not English, not marhaba (‘welcome’ or ‘hello’ in Palestinian Arabic).” When asked how he learned Hebrew, he responds “prison.”

He adds: “If he [Israelis] come to my house, he’s my friend. I won’t kill him.”

The men in the shop debate the relative merits of Barack Obama. One man is unconvinced, another is still smitten. “At least Obama is a person,” says the unconvinced man. “Bush is an animal, not a person. George Bush is a monkey.”

***

On the van, I am the target of some jokes by the people in the row ahead. The row is a mother, two brothers, and a sister (or possibly a cousin). They have crushed four people into the three seats for the two hour drive, a drive later extended by an hour because of the same settler violence we encountered on the way up. They are laughing at me because I don’t speak any Arabic; one brother is trying out little English phrases on me but turns around to laugh before I can say anything back.

The drive continues to knot my stomach with twists and lilts. The ride back is always a form of nausea.

My friend and I wonder aloud for advice on how to get from Ramallah to the checkpoint at the late hour. The row of people previously making fun of me offer to take us to the checkpoint; they are on their way to Jericho and can drive us. We accept. We all get out of the van in al-Bireh, which is a suburb of Ramallah and walk with them to their apartment. I am anxious to get back to Jerusalem, but soon enough, we’re invited inside the house where we wait for a brother with the truck to arrive.

I sit on a white leather chair with a stuffed fox fur on top. I don’t notice the adornment at first and its dead face startles me. They laugh again when I reel back. I try on the dead fox, wrap it around my shoulders, and stand up to model it. They laugh again. My friend takes a picture.

I’m offered fruit I’ve never had before. I don’t remember the name, only that it was heavily seeded and had the consistency of a lychee.

The toilet in the bathroom doesn’t flush. The faucet produces no water. When I come out, the mother explains that in this neighborhood, Palestinians only have water four days a week because Israel controls their water supply. The name of the neighborhood, al-Bireh, means “the water well” in Arabic. She hands us apples which she thinks come from America. My friend points out the Hebrew sticker and says they are Israeli and the woman replies they would grow apples too if Israel didn’t steal their water.

At the checkpoint, they let us out. We’ve been invited for dinner later in the week, but we both must decline. We thank them and for some reason, they thank us. We overpay for a cab back into Israel.

***

At the checkpoint, I produce my passport. It’s a new passport, completely unblemished. I ask if the cabbie if they are going to stamp it. I am heading to Istanbul and Dubai next and don’t want an Israeli stamp to limit my travel there. I’m told they don’t stamp at checkpoints. We pass through without a problem.

On the road to Jerusalem, I thumb through my passport and find a stamp. It’s not from tonight, but from when I first arrived five weeks before. After landing, I had handed over my passport at visa control and told the girl there that I’m a journalist. She nodded. I told her that I didn’t want a stamp. The girl nodded again. Said okay. Then she stamped it anyway. I didn’t realize it now. I hadn’t thought twice about it. I hadn’t even looked.

Not that any of this sojourn has had any real altruism behind it, but I hope you'll excuse me for a few days while I explore Turkey and visit Dubai with an old friend, likely not having many moments to write.

Updates to follow.

Enjoy people.

TFR Shoutout:Daniella Cheslow, journalist nonpareil, who accompanied me to Jenin.

I boarded the van from Jerusalem to Ramallah a little after 7:00 in the morning, it was cold in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time which is to say that it was welcome and the breeze felt like grapes if you can wrap your head around that. The cars heading in the direction of Jerusalem were jammed in line at the checkpoints, but we were, in essence, making the reverse commute into Palestine and didn’t hit any traffic.

Just outside the limits, there was a sign which had been painted by hand that read To Ramallah in Hebrew, it was followed by a small circled X above the word Israelis, also written in Hebrew, which clarified who was not allowed inside. Beyond the sign sat the security wall, in its high concrete form. There were intricately painted pictures of Arafat and Marwan Barghouti among the normal slogans of graffiti on the wall. We passed an Olive Garden/Popeye’s, a sign for an art exhibit called Nakba at 62, the Arabic phrase for “disaster,” which refers to the founding of Israel without naming it directly. I had forgotten that Israel had turned 62.

My friend and I had arrived in Ramallah and we wound our way up a narrow passage to a garage where we found the van to Jenin. From the overlook, there was a sign in English that read “The Right of Return is a political red line that cannot be crossed,” which was, not surprisingly, written in red.

We were the two of the last passengers in the van and so it wasn’t long until we left, exiting Ramallah and heading north through the rocky hills. It still felt early and the ten of us--eight Palestinians, two Jews--were all starting to fall asleep in our own way while the stereo deck played a CD of a muezzin who was chanting verses of the Koran. The voice was firm and clear, slightly beautiful and austere like a glass of tonic water. The sound of his voice would continue for the next three hours and added to the ride a strange, slightly hypnotic energy.

On the roads we passed signs for Jewish settlements like Tel Shilo and Eli. Signs in Israel and the West Bank are written in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, but on these signs the Arabic had either been crossed out or covered by stickers. I found myself smirking because I assumed it had been done by Palestinians in some small exhibitive rejection of the settlements that were encroaching on the land for their future state.

We were now forty minutes deep into the West Bank when we passed Ariel, one of the last massive settlements of the block and there were young religious girls waiting for a bus, standing in long dresses, looking removed from the conversation we were having about them inside the van with our eyes. My friend woke up and explained to me that the crossed out Arabic on the signs to the settlements were actually done by the Jews who wanted to make sure the Palestinians knew they weren’t welcome there. This instantly made more sense to me.

An hour into the trip, the highway artery became clogged. I had been trying to sleep but in the back row of the van, I felt every jarring slip of the van which was being driven like one skis downhill, wide turns to pass others mercilessly, little interest in braking, lots of cutting and weaving. The two-lane road often became three lanes when someone passed without looking ahead and the oncoming driver simply moved to the side of the road. There was no honking and no fear of collision, just a general understanding that there was space for three where two normally go.

At any rate, the road was becoming congested and we realized that all the cars ahead of us on the road were turning around and coming back our way. We were just short of the town of Nablus. We eventually saw three soldiers ahead on the road motioning everyone to turn around and go the other way back. We had no idea why. Anyway, to turn around seemed like it would extend the trip by a lot, we’d been going on the road for a while without any diversions and we had just entered a village.

Just in front of the three soldiers there was a small road that they weren’t blocking. Our driver made towards the road and the soldiers waved him to turn around. We were now close enough to see their faces. The driver made a gesture to show that he intended to turn left at the road. One of the soldiers quickly brought up his M-16 to level and pointed it at us; he then jerked the barrel menacingly as to say turn around and, of course, the driver did. All of us in the car clucked our tongues in disbelief at what the soldier had done.

My friend asked if the soldiers were Israeli or not. She couldn’t tell; neither could I. The chorus confirmed they were Israeli and then we all speculated about why the road was blocked. One said it was probably the settlers throwing stones at the Palestinians. This seemed slightly knee-jerk; it very easily could have also been the other way around. Beyond the road from which we had just turned, we noticed a small haze of smoke. One of the passengers said it must have been a settler burning down some olive trees. My friend asked why it couldn’t just be someone burning their garbage, which is the practice here.

(Later, I’d find out that it actually was Palestinian fields that had been set afire by settlers. The army had demolished some illegal outposts built by the settlers, the settlers had burned down Palestinian fields in response, then clashed with Palestinians, clashed with Israeli soldiers, slashed the tires to two of their military cars. Something about this information felt irrevocable.)

The driver took us out through the village and onto a few smaller roads. I’m not sure we ever met the original road again, but the detour added an hour to our trip. The passengers were more garrulous now; my friend who spoke some Arabic helped translate, but we entered a more serious discussion with a clinical psychologist named Wael from Kafr Dan, just outside of Jenin. He talked about the stigmas associated with psychology and therapy in the Arab world and how a number of people here were walking around damaged, not being treated for PTSD. He asked us where we were from and we both said America, but had little to say more about it than that.

Wael had trained in the States and worked with the Arab American University in Jenin. He spoke English well. We arrived in Jenin, which looked smaller and felt more commonplace than I expected. The city, being notorious for a number of terrible things, seemed enervated now, like the fatigue following rehab. The driver let us out early because we were running late and our destination was closer in than the final drop-off point. Wael got out of the van with us and walked us the way to our first interview. Going with him made the transition easier, we were starting to get the odd looks from the people we passed: standing in small shops, sitting in plastic chairs on the sidewalks talking, drinking black coffee in what looked like large thimbles in the morning heat. A few called to us excitedly. With Wael as our shepherd, our presence there gained a small legitimacy. When we arrived at the venue, he stuck with us; we knew he had other places to be, but he wanted to tag along. He stayed for coffee and helped translate for the hour.