Brief Postcard From Israel

I'm here--after a day and a half of flights and an odd compressed arrival. It's fascinating to me how already on the way to somewhere, a cumulative sense of the destination creeps up. My third flight was from New York direct to Tel Aviv and at the gate, I was already getting feelings of Israel. It wasn't just hearing Hebrew--and Russian too--around me, or the Hasids davening at a blank wall around 6 o'clock (with one incongruous, baseball capped young man co-opted to complete the minyan, glancing out from the side of his eyes, embarrassed, swaying half-heartedly). Everyone was interested in what everyone else was doing, dispensing unsolicited advice.There were so many babies! So many. And since I was last here, my grandmother has ten more great-grandchildren.We're all at that age, I guess, so there are a bunch of spouses and babies I'll be meeting, seeing my cousins in new lives.

Aside from this cultural flavor that was instantly familiar even before I reached Israel, a lot has changed since I was last here, mostly around my grandmother's aging. I'll write more about that later, maybe. Meanwhile, the surroundings are reassuringly familiar, with an admixture of torrential rain. There was an inch of rain on the runway when we landed, and pictures on television of cars practically swimming in a few places.

I'm looking forward to getting out and seeing what else has changed, but so far have only gone as far as taking the trash out. Here's how it looks from outside my grandmother's apartment.

There are always feral cats here, and one of them (a healthy looking specimen compared to the cats of my childhood) is hunkered down outside my grandmother's next-door neighbors'.

Near the dumpsters, I saw this beetle carrying a dead cockroach. Not the same one I took out in the trash! People who think dates look like cockroaches: you're wrong! I can testify to this, in a land where the dates are ripening on the palms right now, and where every evening there are cockroaches on the stone-tiled floors.

I should go for now, but now I know that I can sit in the far corner of my grandmother's salon and pick up wifi. So much in the airwaves...my Hebrew is rusty, my grandmother and uncles speak Arabic half the time, and then I write in English or talk with my mum in English some of the time, and there's even more confusion.

Much love to all!