Sunday, June 14, 2009

The singing mobile lending library



For the past 25 years or so I've been singing in a classical choir. It's changed hands quite a few times and now it is called "Kolot haNegev Choir" and is based in Beersheva.


One of the "perks" that emerged during the years is that the trip to the choir has become my mobile English lending library. The couple who pick me up and take me home are both English and live on Kibbutz Alumim which is near my Kibbutz, and they they are my main book suppliers.

I get my book package in the car - if it's light outside I avidly go through the package to see if I haven't already read the books, and if it's dark, well, then I have to wait until I get home to see what delicacies I've received.

Since I rarely get to the city, we have a sort of "lending library" going on between us and I get books from them whenever I ask. This means, however, that I don't get to pick up the book, read the cover, decide if I like it or not and want to buy it. It means that if I want to read, I read the books they give me - and many times these are books that I would never ever have considered reading!

It was difficult for me at the beginning to get used to this, but I've found that I am a much richer person for it, and that my reading habits have changed over the years because of this. It's a lot like getting presents for your birthday. You know you're going to get a present but you don't know what it is. For me, every book package is like a birthday present. I dig in and wonder what I'm going to get this time.

I'm always amazed when I finish a particularly good book and think - "if I had to choose that book I would never have even picked it up". I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the books I returned saying I couldn't read them. Some, I might put aside for a while and read later, or start, stop and then return to the book. But for the most part I read everything they give me, and I take my hat off to them for the "mitsva" they're doing and because of their good taste in books!


The choir pictured above is the Kolot HaNegev Choir under the baton of Esther Abramson - this was photographed during a performance at the Felicia Blumenthal Hall in Tel Aviv. Yonit Young is the photographer.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

American-Israeli and Israeli-American

I read Bayle's post :"I want to be there" where she writes about being in Israel 35 or so years, but still doesn't feel totally integrated into the Israeli culture, and it gave me a lot of food for thought together with a good bellylaugh!

I've been in Israel almost 4o years, but to Israelis I'm American and to Americans I'm Israeli. When I go to the States (which is very rarely) I get "Oh, how well you speak English - where do you come from!!".
They say I have an accent. But the Israelis also say I have an accent, and it's certainly not Israeli with the way I say the letter "r" - especially "Drora",and "Zaharira"!

I can't begin to tell you the amount of people who start to speak to me in broken English because they think people who have an American accent don't know Hebrew. Do people speak French to people who come from Morocco, or Tunisia, or Algeria and have accents, or speak Arabic to people who come from Yemen? Then why in the world do they think that people who have an Anglo-Saxon accent are illiterate and can't speak Hebrew?

My conversations with other "Anglos" take place in the "Hingloo" language. For those of you who have not heard of this language, it is half English and half Hebrew depending on the person I'm speaking with and which language I started out in in the first place! I find it very difficult to speak a full sentence in either language without running to the dictionary in the middle to find out how to say such and such a word, yet I know the word perfectly well in both languages! ! And of course there are words in Hebrew which are just not translatable in English and visa versa.


I'll close by referring again to Bayle's post, especially the clip from YouTube - "Here is there and there is here" from the Muppets because that pretty much sums up my situation as an Israeli American and American Israeli!

Monday, June 1, 2009

Pets and strays

When I was a kid in NYC the only pet I had was a parakeet, so when I came to Israel I wasn't prepared for the amount of pets roaming around the Kibbutz.

At the beginning we started out with cats. One of my friends gave me a cat and assured me it was a male (what did I know?) so we named it Oscar. Well, Oscar as you have already guessed, turned into a female Oscar, and we had kittens (tongue in cheek!) and for about 8 years we kept kittens until one day one of my children asked if she could have a puppy. NO! was the consensus, so of course she brought home a puppy. And that puppy stayed "one week" in our house until she could find it a home, which in reality was 5 years until somebody disappeared the dog (no, I didn't make a mistake in grammar!).

However, after that the house didn't feel quite the same, so my husband went to the Israeli SPCA and came home with a mongrel white terrier, a wonderful "doormat" of a dog, just what a house with 4 kids needs. We had the dog a long time, and when she died, I sent my husband to get another dog and told him "I don't care what you bring home, just don't bring home a pinscher" - unfortunately the only thing he remembered was the word "Pinscher" and came home with a beautiful little dog - a pinscher. There were only two small problems - we couldn't eat anything because she would jump up and take it out of our hands and she would deposit little presents on the floor no matter how many times we took her out. We eventually had to return her to the SPCA and traded her in for ...another white terrier.

After that dog died I said I didn't want any more dogs, enough was enough, but one day a very cute white-beige terrier showed up on the grounds of the school near where I work - meaning she was thrown away by whoever owned her before. She came to "visit" where I worked, must be fate or kismet or something - I took one look at her and fell in love with her, but I put her back outside saying, no, not again. A few hours hours later, my son on his way home from the Army called and said "Mom, I hope you have room for a dog in the house" and I knew that he had met the same dog I saw earlier in the day. So that's how Mocca arrived in our house.

The bigger issue is how people can throw away animals in the first place - how can they take female dogs/cats, not neuter them and then throw the dogs away when they get pregnant - or throw the animals away if they have to go abroad - or just don't feel like taking care of them any more? What kind of lesson are they teaching their children?


Tell me, how can anyone throw a dog like this away?