Saturday, March 9, 2024

thoughts

 What to write about now? Should I write at all or stop and stay with the thoughts in my head?

These are such complicated days and probably some kind of historical event that we will only be able to understand in a long time, if at all.

There is the day-to-day life, which is for the most part the normal life of each of you, the house, the shopping, the cleaning, the cooking, the family, the garden, the cats. and more. In the background of everything there are always still the sharp senses that must be alert to every different sound in an application on the iPhone or an alert on the television, still have to be careful.                                                           There are the people that each of us knows one or more of them and they are still in the tunnels of Hamas, some of them are dead, old men, young women who are abused there and very young people, they are the children or grandchildren of someone many of us know because we are a very small country.                      I also think about my Facebook friend who I recently discovered that we both went to the same kindergarten in the small neighborhood where I lived until the age of four and our fathers studied in the same grade in the same neighborhood. Mira was sitting with her son and her husband for lunch in their small moshav in the north of the country and a Hezbollah missile hit the house killing her and her son. I learned about it from the Facebook group of that old neighborhood. My father wrote three books for teenagers about the same neighborhood, they became best sellers. One of the books is called "Shooting on the Neighborhood", because there were always wars and shootings here. Even when he was a child, and this year he should have been a hundred years old...                                                                                                       

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Spring came in the middle of winter






 It's all blooming in my garden now. They come every year and I'm always as excited as meeting old friends.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

after fifty years

 Last week I had a strange visit. After fifty years someone in the army decided to open old files of soldiers who were killed in the Yom Kippur War and that's how some of my husband's belongings who was killed in that war came to me. Not much left, three photos, a military driver's license and a reserve order.                                  I often thought to myself how things would be if there were social networks, the Internet, and everything else. There was no television then and telephones were also rare. A landline phone of course. Who thought of an iPhone.

Rumors passed between people and it was very difficult to get real information. When he did not return from the war, I was very, very young with a baby girl, I started looking. Most of the soldiers who were with him in the Suez Canal were killed and the rest were taken prisoner.                                                                    The newspapers published pictures of groups of prisoners that were in Egypt, the pictures were in black and white and blurry and I tried to identify him. I did not make it.

When the captives began to return from Egypt after a few months, they returned in groups in small planes. I was able to get information on each group that returned and so I stood there by the planes when wounded and very sad people got off, he was not among them. On the way back home I listened to the radio where they read the names of the people who returned that day. I hoped that maybe I didn't see well and he returned anyway.

When the last group arrived and he was not among them I understood.

How different things are today.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Anna's story

 I don't know why exactly the story of Anna, one of my grandmother's ten sisters, has been asking to be written for several days. It's been going on in my head for a few days since my granddaughter played the song about Alabama when I was driving her to school. I found myself telling her about the fact that we have family in Alabama, something I discovered during the days of the Covid closures when I found and united all the descendants of the sisters and the brother in the whole wide world, where they were scattered.                                                                                                                                                                           One of the sisters, Ida, lived in Oslo with her husband Jacob where they ran a Jewish orphanage, apparently, Jacob had a brother who lived in Mississippi and 


had a farm of some kind, he sent Anna a picture of his brother and a picture of Anna's brother. They liked each other and it was decided that Anna would travel from Leipzig in Germany to marry Jacob's brother in Mississippi. In 1922. The brother sent Anna first class ship tickets but she changed it to something simpler and gave the remaining money to the sisters.                                                                                                                                                                          They got married there and had two children, Simon who was killed in World War II and Esther who was a well-known folk singer there.

From the letters found by her grandchildren, it becomes clear that she was very unhappy there and wanted to return to Germany shortly after arriving in Mississippi, but the brother in Oslo wrote to her and convinced her to stay.                                                                                                                                                                At some point they moved to Alabama where the family has remained until today. The granddaughter Diedra, with whom I am in contact after I found her, says that one day she was walking with her mother in the small town where they lived and her mother complained that she felt very lonely with such a small family. Deiadre suggested that they enter a small restaurant that they used to go to in the past, where she suddenly saw a group of people and said to her mother, "They look like us", a short inquiry showed them that it was a family gathering of family members that they also had relate to  and they didn't know about. And so her mother suddenly felt less lonely.                                                This is the story. Maybe I've been thinking about it a lot lately because I wonder about the choices we make and how they determine our destiny. What would have happened if my grandmothers had chosen to immigrate to Australia, South Africa, America or anywhere else in the world like some of their sisters did. Of course, underneath all this lies the anxiety, what will happen to us here.

And there is also the romantic story of a girl traveling with a picture of her future husband, for several weeks, into the unknown, to the Alabama of 1922, another world.                                                                                 Jacob the brother who sent the photos was taken from his home in Oslo along with fifty other Jewish residents of the house in Oslo, they were taken on the ship "Gotland" whose terrible story can be found on Google, and died in a concentration camp. The woman Ida, my grandmother's sister, was left behind because she was disabled. Of course I didn't tell my granddaughter that. Only the romantic part of the journey to the husband.                                                                                                                                                                                         

Sunday, January 28, 2024

This also happens here


 I went to pick up my granddaughter from school because my daughter thought she was crying on the phone. It was a mistake but the girl was happy to see me and we decided to take advantage of these late morning hours for some shopping that we haven't done together in a while. She already went shopping with her mom this year in Barcelona and twice in London and I thought the days are gone when she was so happy to spend time with me in the small shops of our small places. I was wrong.                                                   The picture here is from other days, she will be 14 next week and we went to buy a ukulele because that's what she wants for her birthday. She got into the car and immediately connected via Bluetooth to her phone and the whole way we listened to music from the sixties, I praised her for her technological ability and good taste in songs, I knew all of them. I think the Tiktok girls today are going back to the old songs for some reason.                                                                                                                         The pleasant young seller in the store said that in two hours a ukulele delivery would arrive, we said we would come back and went to other stores, today's girls buy things that I and others bought in our twenties, if anything, mostly beauty and makeup, and so we moved from store to store when I pay but she operates the cash registers For self-service that I don't dare to use them normally.                               The ukulele did arrive when we returned to the store and it was happily bought. The day before I didn't know what a ukulele was, when my daughter told me it was what the girl wanted for her birthday I thought it was something like the Australian didgeridoo and I was amazed.

It is indeed a cute musical instrument and pleasant to the ear.

Friday, January 26, 2024

The story of the garden gnomes


 The garden gnomes arrived here from Germany at the end of the seventies or maybe the beginning of the eighties. When we went with the children to visit their German grandmother, a world that I did not know opened up before me. Here everything was still young, simple and modest and Europe was a world of wonderful things.
Ikea, who even thought such a wonderful place existed, there was a ball pool where you could leave the children and I was exposed for the first time to beautiful and simple Scandinavian design. and meatballs.                                                                                                                                                                       That's where I discovered the garden gnomes. I had never seen these before and they immediately captured my heart. Maybe it was my genetic memory from previous generations who lived there and also knew them. They looked lovely to me. I brought a few of them with me, I think I bought one on every visit, it's been more than forty years and I don't remember anymore.                                                    They moved with me from house to house and even lived for several years in the lowest place in the world, near the Dead Sea. For many years I neglected them and was busy with other things, only recently someone who understands some things told me that they are numbered and have some value, but they already look too tired.Although they keep smiling.                                                                                                        They have seen a lot in their lives. The cats fought near them, dogs stole them sometimes and I had to look for them in the neighbors' gardens, they heard alarms and saw missiles flying right in front of their eyes but always kept smiling.                                                                                    When I read about the movement to free the garden gnomes in Europe, I was afraid that here too there would be someone who would adopt the idea, but happily it didn't happen.                                              For the purpose of the photo, I put them on an ancient stone that has been here for hundreds of years, among fragrant moss plants and next to plaster mushrooms and some artificial flowers that testify to the terrible taste I have recently developed. Yes, sometimes I plant fake flowers in pots just for the color. The garden gnomes don't care.

Saturday, January 20, 2024

They keep coming



 This morning I found another feather. I know that in a rural area like mine the chance of birds simply losing their feathers is very high, but there is always a chance that some angel has also passed by.                               When I couldn't find the picture of the feather, I remembered another superstition about black cats, (in the meantime I found the picture), when I was a child we were afraid to pass by black cats, some said it was dangerous to cross their path and some said you shouldn't pass by them, as a little anxious girl I chose Either way, when I grew up and learned to love black cats I discovered that the Japanese believe they bring good luck. Here in the picture is Philip the cat in a lookout position at home.