More Bethlehem pics

pictures from Bethlehem

here are some shots from the Bethlehem trip: an example of some of the devastated looking shacks we saw on the side of the road; a group shot of me and Olivia with our wonderful host-mamma Linda and her son Basel, and a couple of the house that was our last stop: a peace center built on the site of a home that has been demolished four times by the Israeli army. the man who built it talked to us about his trials, trying to build a home for his large family and having it repeatedly knocked down, once a year after it was built but only a night after he finally moved into it. His courage is amazing, as is the compassion of a number of Israelis who've joined him in fighting the unjust policies of their own military, and in helping him to build the house over and over again. I'm embarrassed I'm forgetting his name. Anyway, the place was beautiful in spite of the abject poverty all around it, in the edge-of-Jerusalem neighborhood Anata. Just across the deserted, rocky valley, the main view is of a large prison which houses Palestinian men- another place, by the way that had been made forbidden for Palestinians to build on for it's being "environmentally protected," like a national park, only to see Israel building something monstrous on it...
anyway. sort of out of the mood of all these Thanksgiving pics, huh? that's life here, I guess, but I think things are- slowly, slowly- moving in a good direction. Amir Peretz and Labor, Sharon leaving Likud, Europeans condemning the annexation of lands in East Jerusalem (came out in yesterday's NY Times). We just all have to have patience and compassion for this process.

me and Itush

Mommy, Hadas, Baby, Yosefa

I've decided I'm not having a party without a baby present ever again. Omri and Itamar just made everyone so happy!
The funny thing is that Hadas makes that face at all of us many times during rehearsal. Today she stuck her violin scroll almost entirely in her mouth. And she always finds just the right time to do it, too! I was almost crying this morning, I felt so homesick (seems to always happen in our Juliet Letters rehearsals! I don't know why, the music is so good... maybe it's cus of all the jokes in Hebrew getting tossed around. anyway...) but Hadas just opens her eyes like that and goes "la la la!!" or sticks her bow in Tali's ear... and I lose it. I like imagining us teaching a class full of conservatory freshmen, being like, "you know what would make that measure in the Haydn so much better? If you just went like THIS at the second violin," making a face like a 4-year old about to eat a piece of chocolate cake.

father or baby?

That's Alex, Hilla's husband, with Omri's pacifier. Thinking this should be our official quartet headshot.

thanxxgiving madness

These would be some Israeli crazy people who showed up at my house begging me to explain to them just who the pilgrims were, and why April showers lead to Mayflowers... well, anyway us americans made a brief attempt to act like it was thanksgiving, but really it was just a raucous fun party. with children!!! (That's Itamar, Hilla's 5-year-old) at least we all ate ourselves silly, like a real thanksgiving.

Catshow

I tried to make a link to the Catshow Snapshots page on myspace, but I think blogger and myspace must be enemies, cause just like it did to me when I tried to make a link to Marc Riordan's trio page on myspace, no dice- won't take you there if you ask it to. So here they are, in case you want to see the band that made me so super happy in Boston, one of the toughest things about not being in the states:
www.myspace.com/catshowsnapshots
and while you're over there, check out the trio. Marc and I played together at NEC in Joe Morris' ensemble and in other groups, and he's a really awesome drummer:
www.myspace.com/marcriordantrio
I'm trying to start a page for the ICSQ but I put our birthday as Feb 14, 2005 and now it won't let me no matter how many times I try to tell it I'm older than 9 months! It keeps saying Myspace is for users 14 and over, and it thinks I'm trying to scam it. grrrrrr. Well, once I get through there will be a place you can listen to us until the website is finished (which I'm seeing being done in, oh, 2008 or so)

Bet Lechem 1 (Bethlehem- two days there)

So far since making aliyah, I've had a real hard time feeling "Israeli," to the point of blowing off the question when people ask me how it feels. I'm american, a Jersey girl, a New Yorker, a musician, a traveler, anything but Israeli! I'm here for the work.
But.
I feel it now. I just spent two days in Bethlehem on an Encounter trip with 50-something other American Jews, and I see how Israeli I am. I live here, and there's so much work to be done, and me with my special privilege: and American passport, I'm perfectly situated to do something, any thing, even while I'm so frustrated that Israelis just don't see how much work there is, the gaping whole that needs to be filled in, completed and explained to their children. I'm devastated but I'm also ecstatic that I'm HERE! That I know people I want to spend time with on the other side of the wall, that I have family there who were almost waiting for me, and whom I'm dying to host in My home in Tel Aviv, to return the favor, but of course they're stuck there, with absolutely NO freedom of movement, and that's not going to change for a long time. so I have to go back.
We started off at the Hope Flowers school, in Area C (=Israel-controlled) part of Betlehem. Our bus drove on a bypass road, normally used by Israeli settlers, and we walked up a hill, over a huge dirt-pile roadblock, to get in via back way into the city. The school specializes in non-violence and conflict-resolution training. There are students- 4th graders!- trained to be counselors and mediators within their own class to resolve the fights that arise from tense, traumatized children who are not unused to soldiers waking them in the middle of the night. We heard plenty of stories about this kind of trauma. The head of the school, Ibrahim Issa, spoke to us about the hard going since the second Intifada began in 2000, how while they used to have sister cities in Israel, now Israeli children aren't even allowed anywhere near it, so their sister city is Frankfurt. We heard things along these lines many times- how Frankfurt (as an example, since they often have to fly through its huge airport, via Jordan and then via Egypt, to get BACK to places they want to visit, places like, oh, say.. Gaza!) is closer to tham than places 10 km away. Issa spoke to us about how much money they need, how none of the teachers have been paid in a while- but when he spoke numbers, we all were shocked at how small they were really. One woman said she paid more for 4 years of college than the school's operating budget.
We heard a lot of speakers on Thursday. The point of the trip was to listen. If it were to engage in discussion, it would have needed to be many days longer. A lot of the people had problems with what they heard, not on an emotional level, because you couldn't argue with the fact that their situations suck and they have plenty of horrible devastating stories to prove it. But with some of the speakers' use of Holocaust stories and terminology, as if that was the only thing we'd understand as Jews. Things like, "we're the victims of the victims," or "We're the indirect victims of WW2" or "Israel is building walled ghettoes of its own after Jews were made to build their own ghettos in Warsaw and elsewhere..." I didn't feel the same way as those who were offended by these statements, though. I mean, I'm sorry, but we tell these stories many, many times, and loudly, as defining moments for us. The Palestinians, if anything, I thought, were trying to show that THEY have compassion for what WE went through, not to throw it in our faces in an attempt to elicit guilt. The need for a safe place for Jews was clear long before 1939, as were Zionist efforts. The fact is that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced in 1948, and for them the Hagana (the freedom fighters, precursors to today's Israel Defense Forces, or IDF) isn't something to name a street in every town after. Our speaker after Ibrahim Issa was Zougby Zougby, at his Wiam Center for Conflict Resolution and Mediation on a main street in Betlehem, and he spoke to us about how whatever the history and the painful gaps in our respective narratives of the conflict, neither group is going anywhere, so resolution has to be inevitable. But he was the first to say what we would hear many times over on this trip: "The problem is the Occupation."
I saw firsthand, from looking out the window and from looking at maps, how right he was. On land that used to be the only forested part of Betlehem, which Palestinians had been kept from building on because it was "environmentally protected" rose the fortress-looking identical white buildings of Har Homa, an Israeli settlement. It was cleared during the famous Oslo peace accords in '93, and by looking at it, you could forgive Palestinians for accusing Israel of talking out of both corners of its mouth. All around Betlehem (and all of the West Bank) writhes the Partition Wall, usually hundreds of meters from any buildings, often cutting into land owned and harvested by members of the town in surrounds. "See? They want the land and they don't want us," Betlehem residents pointed out over and over. It's impossible, utterly impossible, not to see the blatant land-grab in the twist-turny path of this Wall, which when you stand near, you get a very, very different, yet almost as powerful energy from as when you stand near our beloved Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem. Wow. It's ugly. I'll put some pictures up so you can see. Zougby Zougby rode with us for a little while after his speech to point out some of the newer areas. For example, on November 15- Palestinian "Independence Day," (really made me wonder, the optimism of that holiday!) the checkpoint through which we were planning on passing had been closed, forcing more and more people to use fewer and fewer cross-ways to get to work, family, school, or wherever. Next to this former checkpoint were huge fresco-like graffiti art, with slogans like "To exist is to resist!" which, Zougby told us, had been painted by a group of Mexicans from Chiapas!
The next panel of speakers we had included a woman named Teri, and we all fell in love with her. She was a smart, outspoken heroine out of any number of hard-scrabble movies we've seen, but she's been working tirelessly at her cause since she was 13, and her anger is real. Chairman of the board of the Palestinian Womens Organization, she outlined for us the personal affronts of this wall- how it helped in ruining her marriage, how she had to run after this event to pick up her daughters, whom her husband would have to pass through a small hole in the wall they found so she could get them to their music lesson on time (I asked her afterwards what they played: one plays violin, the other a- shoot I forget the word- a Palestinian instrument with lots of strings that you pluck I guess)...
I'm getting tired of writing. I'll skip to the end of Thursday, the most fresh and meaningful part of this Encounter for me. We drove to "The Tent" restaurant to meet the host families we'd be staying with. I was staying with another girl from Tel Aviv (yay!! we were the only ones- everyone else lives in Jerusalem or studies at Yeshiva), Olivia, a med student at TA University. Linda, our host momma, greeted us with huge, enveloping eyes, and an immediate eagerness and happiness that "we were hers." We sat at the table with her sister and her two sons, and chit-chatted. She loves to party, knew everyone in the Tent (which really looked from the inside like a real Bedouin tent)... when the waiter came to take drink orders, she looked at me conspiratorially and said, "you want a beer, right? I want a beer. Let's drink together!" And as he went away to retrieve them, she held her two index fingers together and said to me, "You and me, I can tell, we're like this... we're the same in here," and then she touched her heart. "We like to enjoy life." The only way I could answer was to hold up my hand, and say, "Linda, we really need to high five right now. Do you know what that is?" "Like what you do with little kids?" "Exactly," I said.
Linda's a nurse, and teaches health classes to schools all over Betlehem and Bet Sahur, the adjoining village where she lives in an apartment building (owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, she told me- I never asked which sect of Christianity she belonged to) with her two sons, Ouhad and Basel. Her mother's name was Amelia!- she was born in Santiago, Chile! Linda's sister, Lemya, sat to Olivia's right, and Linda to my left, so we were bookended by them, and on either side of them by their sons. At one point a drum started going around, and Lemya picked it up and just rocked out on it. It was.... a mazing!!!! Olivia and I were dancing in our seats, our booties moving as much as they could as we chowed down on a rainbow of salads. Linda and her sons chanted songs, and soon had our whole corner of the Tent singing too, then Linda herself took the drum from Lemya, and rocked my world even harder!! Noah and Yedidya, two guys from our group who were staying with Lemya and so were also sitting at our table, shouted to everyone from the group to come over and check it out, bragging, "We're staying with the rocking Bubbe's!! We've got the coolest families." the chanted songs everyone was singing reminded me of that great scene in Monsoon Wedding when all the women sit together having their hands painted with Henna, singing and chanting call-and-response hilarious tunes. After a while, I couldn't take it anymore and had to stand to dance. Linda shouted at me that when we got home she was going to teach me how to REALLY dance, that hip-shaking bellydancer thing that 8-year old Palestinian girls all around me were executing with house-bringin-down spirit and precision, and I felt like Mr Rogers trying to hula-hoop imitating!
When we got to her place, though, the mood was much more somber. Well, no, there was still dancing. Basel, who's eleven, whispered something to his mom, and she translated that he wanted to show us the four traditional Palestinian dances, which he did. At 12:30 at night in his kitchen. I was most definitely mentally photographing that moment! All over the apartment were huge paintings of a man with a mustache, most of them with Arabic at the bottom of them- clearly tributes. I haltingly asked, "Is that your husband?" (Later, Olivia and I shared with each other that we both were afraid that maybe he was a victim of the Conflict) Yes, it was: Elias Jeraysay. He died in 1999, but not in the Intifada or anything conflict-related. It was a flash flood that took him, and two Jewish friends he was hiking with in Ein Gedi, that beautiful oasis we visited on the Livnot trip. She pulled out a yellowed newspaper: and there, on the front page of "Le Monde," was the story. Olivia and I sat and read it, she helping me with the French I didn't understand. They all had been members of the Alternative Information Center. He'd been in government- and in jail. For seven years. She tells her sons stories about his life all the time. And as of this May, she's in government, too. She ran for "the municipality" (I think it's like City Council) and won.
I'm going to write more about Linda. I promise. She's deep in my heart and clear in my mind. But I'm written out now. I need a break. So... more to come.

Haley (also my niece!)

And the other was "hotel dress." these were presents from my mom for the twins' fifth birthday last month. The sandals were from me (from Israel- yeah, I'm patting myself on the back!) and I'm just so psyched that my sister sent me these pics I had to put them up to show them off.

Samantha (my niece)

One of these is "sparkly dress"

baby, aunties

This is us with Hilla's little Omri, when he was seizing his second day of life full-force by... sleeping the entire day, it seemed! I didn't see his eyes open until his Brit-Mila, and even then he was oddly sleepy! Well, by now he's a big healthy, month-old. When I hold him he reminds me of Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride, and I keep saying to him, "Incontheivable!!" trying to push that on him as his first word rather than some Hebrew gibberish. I can tell he's already starting to form the syllables.

Stuttgart

I sometimes check in with the Village Voice horoscopes by Rob Brezsny at his site,www.freewillastrology.com. This week for Aries wasn't super encouraging, but definitely seemed to come true: "I doubt that you yourself will be the beneficiary of a windfall or a stroke of uncanny luck, but there's a chance that someone close to you will, and his or her good fortune will rub off on you," Brezsny wrote. When we got into our hotel room in Stuttgart Thursday night, O, the cellist subbing for Hilla, saw a fax on the desk. It was from her boyfriend here in Israel, and it was the first time he told her he loved her. She, as you can imagine, was ecstatic, speechless. I imagined that she didnt see another word of that page-long fax, was just reading those three words over and over. She apologized for dwelling on it in her surprise and happiness, but I told her to hush, I was just lucky to witness it! The next day D and S, two american friends of mine, came down from Berlin to spend the weekend with me. Forget that horoscope, I am the luckiest girl in the world!! That these amazing, fun, gorgeous friends of mine traveled so far, independently of each other, so we could have the funnest extended girls-night ever in Stuttgart gives me the warm fuzzies no end. They didn't know each other before coming, but because of my rehearsals and performances with the Opera, they had to basically babysit each other, and before I knew it, were acting as if they'd known each other forever! I was reminded of the windfall Brezsny mentioned as S recounted the adventures of the just-beginning love affair that may take her to Paris or some ski village in the Alps for the winter- after she spends two weeks in Nigeria for her friend's sister's wedding! She lives the life many of us dream of. And it's only when you live like that that these movie-worthy international romances. This guy is a photographer for National Geographic, but also a snowboarding instructor, and told S to either "get a European work permit, and pick a city" so they can live together, or to pick a town in the mountains for the winter so they can hole up together and he can make the bread on the slopes. What??? How do these kinds of offers get made? S, naturally, is having a hard time believing it could be real, but D and I, in full fairy-tale-belief mode, told her to call his bluff, name a place and see what happens...
why am I writing about friends' romances? I meant to tell about this weekend. I guess S was so wrapped up in it, and I was so wrapped up in seeing old friends that I let her carry me away with it, too. D and I read duets, the same we played almost ten years ago when we did a duo recital at SUNY Purchase. So amazing to use each other as our musical measuring-sticks. To enjoy the power and control and sweetness in each other's playing, and then realize we're musical sisters, and were keeping up with each other the whole time! I'm being cheesey, but it just meant so much to me to play with her again. We played in a quartet together in high school, and always sort of flirted with tthe idea of doing it professionally, and here I am! Taken. And she is, too, in Berlin, by the scene, by the city that was made for her... But, sigh. Seeing her schmooze with my quartet after the performance, I felt like I'd taken a boyfriend home to my parents.
I'll have to fill the rest in tomorrow. I'm drifting. Good night and good luck (really need to see that one!)

picture

thought I should put up a pic of this site's namesakes

quartet dream

I had this great dream last night, so good I woke up laughing.
There was a bar-b-que held by a bunch of string quartets in honor of two composer friends of mine, John and Judd. They both had written such great string quartets that we wanted to celebrate them for revivifying (or something) the form. It was my quartet, the Orion, the Pacifica, and the Colorado. Pacifica brought the beer, the Orions brought the meats (lots of big German-looking hot dogs) and we brought the good Mediterranean bread and condiments. The Colorados represented themselves with lots of jars of the smoked trout paste they had developed together as a quartet. The jars had white labels with all their smiling faces printed on the front in blue (Israeli flag, anyone?) and on the back little testimonials from each of them with individual pictures of them: the violinists as a couple. Their quote was how this smoked trout paste had brought them together as a group and also added romance to their relationship (I don't think they're actually a couple). The cellist, Diane, raved about how much her little kid students loved it, but the violist's was the funniest of all: how she'd had problems with depression, but this delicious smoked trout paste had put a new kind of joy into her life, and she recommended it for anyone suffering from mood disorders. Everywhere we went at this barbeque (it was in this big sprawling backyard that looked a lot like my Aunt Susan and Jay's place in Connecticut) there were open jars, but none of us had any idea what to put it on. Definitely not the hot dogs.

rainy season

Trying this out. I'm sick of all the problems with the old site, as much as I loved the off-the-beaten path of its name. I had to resort to using my cats' names to title this one, for lack of anything else available that at all simply described me. Anyway, I'm off to a run-through with the dancers, last one before we go into the theater for the big opening... I get all these nice free clothes from the costume designer. Nice gig.
It's started raining here, finally, which means winter has begun in Israel. I keep thinking of the shots in the Michel Gondry for the Foo Fighters' Everlong: how the camera seems absolutely soaked, and every dream-sequences takes on a rainforest-y richness. At night I lie in my bed listening to the rain beat so hard against my window like an orchestra of drums. It's so nice and filling after all these months of dry. I understand why people pray for this.