Sad and feel-good; blue and white; dark and light.

Yom Hashoah’s (Holocaust remembrance day) siren is something I look forward to: it heralds a portent of accord in a turbulent sea. I stand on Dizengoff street at 11 am as the nation-wide siren is sounded and watch a girl dismount her bicycle and stand next to it, a seated man get up off of the bench he’d been sitting on, drivers halt to a stop and get out of their vehicles, standing still next to their car doors. In the midst of chaos, insanity, balagan – the nation comes to a standstill and a sense of unity, togetherness, composure, sweeps the air. I take in the emotional gravity as my mind revisits an intensely emotional improvised scene set in the concentration camps from an acting class of the night before and brackish tears well up in my eyes.

The siren; and the sad songs on the radio… These are the days of sad quiet songs on the radio, the songs I love. The songs that everyone knows, that everyone sings along to. The songs that reflect the sadness and the achiness that we find ourselves embracing, relishing even; the songs that expose the slow lulling gloom that provides a welcome relief from the day-to-day motion and commotion. The songs that I look forward to savoring once again the following week, on Yom Hazikaron (Remembrance day for Israel’s fallen soldiers)…

Yom Hazikaron comes a week after Yom Hashoah, and on the heels of Yom Hazikaron (the very next day) rises Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Israel’s Independence Day). One sunny morning in the week between Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron, Sebastian exclaims proudly, as I drop him off, “Ima, look at our new gan!” I look around me and observe a yizkor (memorial) candle placed in the middle of the room and Israel flags adorning the four walls.

Yom Hazikaron gets two sirens. The second, at 8 pm, comes as we are gathered with thousands of Tel Avivians in Rabin Square to participate in the Yom Hazikaron “Song Ceremony”. The siren sounds as I stand there and watch both my children standing still – no itching, no questioning, no fidgeting. We’re talking Liliana! Standing still. No questions. No answers. I watch her, the child I dub “Israel” because she exhibits the noise, the chaos, the craziness, the chutzpah, that bold inner confidence. 

She stands: Quietly. Respectfully. In unison with the motionless nation. What does she understand? Since when does she halt her activities and go with the flow? Is there no learning curve at the toddler/preschool age? Or is the weight of the collective so thick that it sticks to us, immobilizes us? The power of the unity, in these moments, it seems, is equal in its immensity to that of the chaos.

I watch with tears as the smiling faces of the nineteen, twenty-year old soldiers who are with us but are no longer grace the screen, as the bereaved faces of the parents tell their stories of loss, of breakdown, of resignation, and of resolve. And I listen with tears to the poems that these parents need to write in order to process their unfathomable pain, their immeasurable loss.

Poetry? In today’s world? Where is it still relevant? Here, in this small, hardened and vulnerable place, poetry is written, recited, read, and heard. There is something, I suppose, in poetry’s compact, pithy, and direct nature, in its open-endedness -- that is well suited to the painful and difficult experiences that make up life in a nation under siege.

This was a late night for the kids. The usual draining mess of a bedtime ritual had been aborted. No bath, splashes, giggles, pajamas, running, chasing, teeth brushing, a book, another, another, a song, a hug, water, a kiss, another kiss, GOOD NIGHT. Still, because of the late hour, I could feel myself pulling towards the door in an anticipated hasty escape as I was tucking Sebastian in. Layla tov chamudi (good night sweetie), I whispered, turning to the door. And at that moment: “Ima, what is Yom Hazikaron?” I relinquished my efforts to get to the dishes, the computer, the tv, and sat down. It’s when we remember people, Lance offers. “Why do we remember people?” We remember people who died, who are no longer with us. “Why do we stand in order to remember them?” We stop what we’re doing and stand in order to honor them. “Who was that bad man who wanted to kill everyone?” Hitler or Bin Laden? “Why was he bad?”  It’s like we sometimes have quarrels or arguments but we don’t make up, it’s always good to make up and reconcile, I rattled on, trying to turn a negative into a positive lesson, to find the teachable moment etcetera etcetera. Suddenly, Sebastian promptly and assuredly concluded: “I will not die. Even when I’ll be 100 years old, I won’t die.” I smiled a sad smile, said good night again, gave him another kiss, and left the room.

The transition from Yom Hazikaron to Yom Ha’atzmaut is stark. It moves from darkness to light: there is no gray. The following night was Yom Ha’atzma’ut and Sebastian went to sleep to the merry sounds of fireworks. Lance and I sang and danced wildly in the streets. With a few thousand of our fellow citizens.

On Acting and National Reverberations

The eve of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) fell on a Sunday this year. Sunday evenings I have my acting classes. They are my weekly staple, my feel-good constant. True to its nature, the class, like the show, must go on. But in this part of the world – it goes on, modifying and adjusting itself, week after week, in light of the national hues that impart to it their color, their darkness and light. On Purim, appropriately, we worked with costumes and masks. But on this day, a few weeks back -- on the eve of Yom Hashoah – the atmosphere that was generated in service of the work at hand was especially poignant. A series of exercises designed to guide us through an “inner journey” focused on intimacy and parting and yielded powerful emotional responses. The last hour of the class is always dedicated to improvised scenes.  I paired up with my friend Romina and when I turned to my partner with my usual “so what are we gonna do? what’s our relationship? conflict? etc.” she offered, in her typically direct manner, “hey it’s yom hashoah, let’s go with it, all the way.” And so we did. Here is the story we created: We were two friends, together in the camps. The shared history that brought us together is that we were standing next to each other during the transport and watched our children ripped from us, get on the train together. My Sebastian and her Ariel were holding hands. They were laughing and singing. This was the last we saw them. We began the scene with Romina offering me a morsel of bread that she had saved for me, and announcing that she has been “selected” to go to work at the place wherefrom I knew, no one had ever returned. I could not let her go. “Maybe I’ll see them again,” she uttered longingly, as we inhabited our respective characters. “I can hear them singing…” And I rejoined, laughing, “Remember them, my Sebastian and your Ariel holding hands and singing and laughing as they got on board the transport car? Hineh ma tov u-ma-na’im, saba nafal la-mayim…” (here the classic song that begins with how sweet and pleasant it is, is rascally upended when to sit together in brotherhood  is replaced with the playful kid-version rhyme grandpa fell in the water) As I hummed, in character, this amusing roguish version of the song that I had heard my real-life Sebastian sing gleefully, an impish sparkle catching his eye, just the other day, laughter turned into sobs, and in that moment, where laughter and tears mingled, I felt exposed, pure, and entirely whole. The realness of this made-up scene was extraordinary. I realized: not only does the nation wield herself upon the individual, but the individual too, can impinge on the national. Not only did yom hashoah permeate the art of acting, the art of acting also gave shape to the experience of yom hashoah.

I rode my bicycle home that night thinking: only in Israel.  This deeply emotional experience could not have happened in an acting class anywhere else in the world. It is a function of being in a place where everyone shares a common sense of history and destiny. Our acting teacher encourages us to bring in stuff we’ve written to share with the group. On several occasions I have found myself engrossed by my classmates’ readings, processing the political sensibility of some of their very personal writings. National moments here are excavated through the individual lens. 

Racheli once read a piece she had written on the eve of her son’s induction to the army, a visceral response to driving by a memorial site with the name Uri on it, her son’s name, and wondering how the young man with the epitaph had died. Rosie read a piece about her personal and emotional response to the evacuation of the settlements in the West Bank. The inextricable link between the private and the collective in this blistering piece of land is potent. As the nerves and the tensions are pared through the individual lens, and shared, a sense of unity and accord, of intimacy and familiarity, sets in. In these moments, this country, where there are three opinions for every two people, seems to stop, and listen -- before rejoining in opposition. To me, the enthrallment is in the listening – and in the arguing. It lies in the vibrations of both behaviors, in what I believe, can be summed up in a word: אכפתיות echpatiut –– caring.

Zen and the art of Sebastianisms

I think my four and a half year old son can write a book on Zen and the Art of Cleaning the House. Or Zen and the Art of Making a Salad. It’s quite refreshing to see kids get excited about the things many of us consider chores. This week has been an especially exciting, or shall I say “zen” week. “It’s for Passover!” Sebastian exclaimed every time I passed by him as he was sweeping or vacuuming the floor. The ritual of cleaning the home in preparation for the holiday must have been a very effective and memorable lesson at his gan.

The cleaning, and the ten plagues, which he spews rhythmically, teetering between blood, locusts, and vermin, all the way to the climactic slaying of the firstborn (מכת בכורות), to which he adds casually, “all the boys die”. Sebastian’s enduring involvement with the subject of death, in light of the holiday spirit, has been a little less sunny, but no less sensitive and impassioned. The spirit of thankfulness (דיינו; Dayenu -- “it would have been enough”) that is appropriate to the Passover theme of freedom rings in his energized pronouncement one evening during dinner: “How awesome it is (’איזה כייף’) that I wasn’t in Egypt and that they didn’t kill me!”  The deep sense of gratitude that swept over him, presumably, came on the heels of a rather calculated reflection from an earlier evening: “It’s really not fun (’ממש לא כייף’) for people who die.” [To my prod, why? (I couldn’t resist) -- “because they can’t get to know Israel better and go to Canada…”]

Sebastianisms, this blog should be called. I marvel at the stuff he says. The other day, walking uphill after a morning at the beach, he stops, legs slightly spread, and says, looking down: “How is it that our feet are so small and can support us?” My immediate and enthusiastic response to his sensitive query was what has by now become my form response: a simple -- at once aborted and pregnant response -- that is elicited by a sense of emotional awe and intellectual shortcoming at once: “what a wonderful question…!” I walked up the hill more aware of my body, more cognizant of my feet's contact with the ground, and marveled at our amazing instruments and at the harmonious complexity of our physiology.

Later on that afternoon, while sitting on a bench eating popsicles at the playground, Sebastian said: “Ima, listen to the birds. “Just the birds,” he added, “not the children.” I tilted my head, squinted, and strained to discriminate between the manifold sounds surrounding me. I tried to isolate, to concentrate, to listen. This was an exercise in focus, in mindfulness, and I accepted the challenge.

Then came a happy “sound of the children” that I could not ignore. It was rhythmic, spirited, and very very familiar: “Hayom Yom Huledet le-Liliana” (Happy Birthday to Liliana). As far as my two year old is concerned, every day is her birthday. And she declares it. Loudly. Boldly. In song. Hers is a sense of entitlement that is refreshing, undaunted, and positive.  Her vital confidence is buoyant and almost enviable. We all join in song.

Life is too serious to be taken seriously. But life in the home of a toddler and a preschooler also serves up the flipside: play is too serious to be taken lightly. No plastic strawberry is placed haphazardly, no balloon is stapled on casually, no stuffed animal is positioned accidentally.

Sebastian dresses up from head to toe for a pretend birthday party. Liliana hauls the pillows and the blankets for a pretend nap (this one’s fast becoming my favorite of the pretend games; being read to and tucked in by a two year old is a great perk). The point is: everything is deliberately planned; and vigorously executed. 

I’ve been reading other women’s (Tina Fey, Sarah Kay) sharp, poetic, and stirring passages on the subject of “what I want to tell my children”. I ask myself what I want to tell mine. And shrug. I haven’t yet figured it out. But I do know what I want to learn from my children.

I want to inhabit their sense of wonder. To see a snail in the pile of poop in the potty. I want to attain their emotional openness. To go from tears to laughter instantly with the help of a silly distraction. I want to absorb their sense of privilege. To holler “it’s my birthday” in song. Even when it’s not my birthday. I want to seize their joy. To crack up at a silly impersonation. To gush at the beautiful foolishness of little things. I want to live lightly, and play seriously. To approach everything with deliberation. And enthusiasm.

Ponyboy, in S.E. Hinton’s gem of a coming-of-age novel The Outsiders says: “Nothing gold can stay.” Robert Frost’s simple truth has always touched a tender and wistful nerve in me.

 And yet the one thing I find myself wanting to tell my children, is: “Stay golden.” 

A Sunny Death

“Ima, I want kaftorim surgery,” I hear Sebastian calling out in a drone from the kitchen. Kaftorim is the Hebrew medical name given to middle ear surgery designed to treat excess ear fluids.

Earaches are commonplace for Sebastian, misken (poor soul), and visits to Dr. Rosenzweig, Ear Nose and Throat specialist, are routine. On our walk back home after our last follow-up visit with Rosenzweig, my dear child turned to me and pronounced offhandedly: “Ima this whole business with the ears is really quite annoying.” I had to agree. And to add that we’re addressing it and that we’ll take care of the situation and resolve it. I was surreptitiously thrilled when the doctor, after numerous months of visits and follow-ups, resorted to suggesting surgery. I swiftly added to my sweet and fragile gibor (brave hero), that a special fruit shake and a sweet treat were his for the choosing.

“You’ll have the surgery,” I assure him keenly, as the seams in my heart splinter. The sight of this child, face thrust forward, hands pressed against his small and inquiring ears is heartrending. “Wednesday!” I pronounce in a cheerful tone, and the faint smile that forms on his face creases my heart. This kaftorim surgery is looking to be the highlight of our week. I myself have been stealthily envisioning our post-surgery chocolate pizza at the Max Brenner Chocolate Café that is tactically situated directly across Assuta hospital in the Ramat Hachayal district of Tel Aviv. And I have to own up to the enchanting visions of helium balloons and candy and ice cream and flowers that have been permeating my dreams.

Besides kaftorim ear surgery, there are additional proceedings that our four year old is looking forward to with great anticipation.

Dying on a sunny morning, for example. At the age of 100 mind you, but still, the foresight is scrupulous and the expectancy is hearty.

Why in the morning? “Because I need to be wearing pants with pockets so that I have enough room to hold all the things that I want to die with.”

But the time of day is only a single thread in the bound web of deliberation that this child has woven: “I want it to be a sunny day when I die. Sunny days are the only truly perfect days for dying. Because I don’t want my drawing to blow away in the wind, or to get wet in the rain. I really hope it’s sunny when I die.”

He has even picked out the shirt he wants to die in: RED with monkey musicians!

He is attentive to detail, meticulous, and thorough in his planning.

I watch Sebastian’s thought processes in motion and think: I wish I could plan my life as methodically as this child plans his death.

It’s true. I really can learn from him. About the importance of making lists, of writing things down, of taking multiple factors into consideration, of prudence and of prescience.

All valuable stuff in this trying to figure out what to do with my life phase.

“At peepee shel chatul” – “you are cat peepee” – I hear a laughing voice gurgle and break my meditative state. I respond to it and am instantly drawn into the currently popular diversion of back-and-forth directed nonsensical dialogue with a disarming two year old – “at (you are) mooki”; “at pooki”; “at keeka”; “at koola” – allowing the sparkling laughter that accompanies each and every utterance to soften my chest and slide down into my gut before rising and surging into the atmosphere. 

The other child is sensory, intuitive, and rolls from the gut. This is a child who knocks back her antibiotics as she flips headfirst from table to couch.  

I meditate on the importance of both dynamics – the reflective and the intuitive - and on the desire to tread the fine bar between the two.  Surely this is an evolving and ongoing process. Like parenting.

Parenting comes with a steep learning curve. I’m thankful for my two little mentors. They make life sunny.

Food, Glorious Food

“I should write a book about conversations with Israeli taxi drivers”, I exclaimed to Lance upon returning late one night from a one-woman-show at the innovative and experimental Tmuna Theatre. After fixing myself a smooth milky nescafe and a side of chocolate wafers for dipping (a hot drink without a little sweet nosh is unheard of in my family and in this country), I grabbed my notebook and started jotting down bits and pieces of dialogue (rather, monologue) so that I wouldn’t forget the colorful morsels of conversation that were delivered en route. As I wrote, sipped, dipped, and nibbled, the national blended with the personal. And I came to realize there was a pungent common motif here: food, glorious food.

On our way back from a meeting in the southern part of the city (pre-bicycles), our taxi driver speaks loudly and brazenly on his phone, as is the modus operandi here, in an inimitable mix of Arabic and Hebrew: “Yalla, come meet me for lunch at the Hyatt. What do you mean? Nah, “shtuyot”, bullshit, it ends up costing the same wherever you go. Business lunch. Yalla, I’m in the mood for some fish and potatoes. Challas, I don’t want to eat pita and hummus again.  Nu, are you coming?”

On my way to see a show in a rather seedy part of town, my taxi driver motions: “you see this place over here? It’s good, fairly new. They serve these sandwiches… but they pack them with too much meat. Blech. How can anyone eat it like that? I like my meat but come on. So I said to them: do me a favor, give me another couple slices of bread, I’ll pay for it, to make a decent sized sandwich. Something I can enjoy. I want something that I can fit in my mouth, that’s pleasant in the mouth. So much meat like that, it’s not pleasant in the mouth. I told him my grandmother would have said that such oversize sandwiches are “unappetitlich” (unappetizing).

On my way back home, my husky voiced taxi driver with the ponytail (only when she spoke in the feminine did I become aware that this was a woman), asked me if I am hungry and offered me what she called a “biton” (brick) cookie. Her mother’s recipe: A family tradition. No one in the family can refuse them. They’re hard as rock but they’re tasty. Her mother was something else. She misses her like crazy. She visited her everyday during the last ten years of her mother’s life when she was suffering from alzheimers and couldn’t remember a soul. Everyday except for Yom Kippur because you can’t drive on Yom Kippur. I could only mumble in concurrence as I munched and munched and munched on the very solid and very savory slabs of sesame.

I was struck by the fitting tenor of this driving monologue in view of the one-woman-show I had just emerged from, titled “No longer anybody’s daughter”, about the performer’s coming to terms with her mother’s death.

I sunk into the backseat and found myself thinking of my grandmother’s heart shaped butter cookies. And of my mother’s relationship with the beygale.

There is nothing like a post-show beygale (sesame crusted cross between a bagel and a pretzel) that seals an evening at the theatre and leaves you sated with the evening’s experience. My mother’s visit here, to my delight, was filled with theatre events. Time and again, upon exiting the theatre, inspired and moved, my mother’s characteristically brisk gait would significantly intensify. I’d leave it to her to wedge her way between the clambering people answering to the call of “beygale cham” and happily much on a beygale on the way home. The nonappearance of the beygale man on some occasions was so entirely unfulfilling that it called for an express stop elsewhere. On my mother’s next visit, I’ll know exactly where to take her when the beygale man fails to deliver. Since the recent opening of the new Ibn Gvirol branch of the Jaffa bakery-cum-institution, there is Abulafia to salvage the evening.

My mother’s course is often savory. With my grandmother it was always sweet. I remember seeing a movie or a concert with Safta and returning to her apartment to sit together savoring kaffe und kuchen (coffee and cake). The hot chocolate and the cheese Danish that we’d shared during intermission didn’t diminish the craving for sweetness. I think of her often, my Safta, for whom this country was home.

I recall the way her eyes sparkled and the way her hands danced to the sounds of Yossi Banai or Edith Piaf. I picture the way she scooped jam onto a crusty roll -- with a spoon, never a knife. I summon up the story about the time she came back from the kiosk with TWO ice creams because she couldn’t decide which one to get. This was a woman who chose to eat ice cream for dinner. And desert. A woman who was the inspiration for the decadent yet simple “ice cream celebration” dessert featured at our Vancouver restaurant Bridges: loads of ice cream and a heaping helping of chocolate sauce.  A woman whose warm heart and sweet tooth were inextricably entwined.

How I would love to sit with her today and have an ice cream with her and with my children whom she never got to meet.

In our home, “glida” (ice cream) was a close contender to ‘Aba’ and ‘Ima’ as far as baby’s first words go. My little one, age two, wants only to hear songs about chocolate, candies, and ice cream. I am happy to invent such songs and to sing them to her.

 In the photo that I keep of Safta that was taken in December 2002, a few weeks before she passed away, she is eating a sufganya.  When I showed Sebastian, my four year old, this photo of her, he asked where she is. I told him that she’s in a sweet sweet faraway place. He wants to go there. But we’re here. In the now: taking and savoring every opportunity to eat ice cream. 

Of death and lies

“I can’t see. He’s blocking my view,” Sebastian pronounced while we were gathered around the ceremonious table at a friend’s newborn’s Bris. I lifted him up high and prepared to deal with his inexorable questions in the most passable and cursory manner possible. “What is he doing to the baby?” “I want to see.”

This is a kid who wants to observe and comprehend everything.

It’s a ceremony that welcomes the new baby to the world. The rabbi just needs to give him a little injection (incision, same thing) to make him healthy. Kind of like a flu shot or a blood test. Just a little “pique” and it’s over. Now he’s putting sweet juice (wine, same thing) in his mouth to make him feel better.

Whew. I figure the flu shot/blood test analogy will go over well enough. We have just emerged from a week of getting the kids’ blood tests done; two separate heavily involved events that included lots of waiting, counting numbers (of people ahead of us), indulging complimentary neighbors with small talk, tight holding, hugging, and caressing, and tall tales of bravery. By and large, the most mundane events involving the kids are… involved.

After a couple faint wails, the baby was placed in his crib. I watched Sebastian and Liliana join hands and dance joyously with the happy families of the newborn and sighed. This parenting thing is becoming an ongoing exercise in improvisation.

“What does the pee-pee fairy look like?”

pee-pee fairy, for those uninitiated, is a kindred sister to the poo-poo fairy, guiding the night-time transition to dryness:

long wavy purple hair, a pink and green dress with flowers, and green sparkly shoes.

“Why does the picture of the flower not have a stem?”

                        maybe it’s just a decoration, like a symbol, like sometimes we draw a face without the  

                        body right?

 “Why do dead people not have to breathe?”

                        they’re in a place where they can just rest

Questions on the dead invariably come in clusters. Death is a subject of immense fascination as of late. Not because of any real-life personal experience with the matter, mercifully. It all began with reading the poet biographies in Sebastian’s Hebrew children’s poetry anthology. Once he understood that not ALL poets are dead, he started orchestrating a head count of living vs. dead poets (brimming with enthusiasm: “Meir Shalev is alive? יואו! "Yo (Hebrew equivalent of “Yay”,) nine living authors, what fun!!” איזה כייף!

“What airplane do the dead people take to get to their special place?”

                   Um… well, you know, when they die, they grow wings and fly!

WTF???!!!

Put on the spot, in the spur of the moment, I make shit up. Moments later, I find myself disparaging myself: Really? What in the world did I just say? Jesus, I can’t believe I’m lying to my kid.

The spiral effect that twists through the arena of lies takes all prisoner; white, black, and floral patterned rainbow colored lies get tangled in its coiled web.

We can’t maintain this “special surprise from the pee-pee fairy thing every night,” Lance and I concur. Alright, what new lie can we make up about the protocols of the enigmatic pee-pee fairy? And so it goes: on and on, around and around.

With the passage of time, I imagine, we will negotiate the path of rapprochement –dusting off the lies, sharpening their round edges, and joining them with the truth. Time, I expect, will guide us as we -- at turns hesitantly, at turns bravely – wet our feet in this ongoing game of improv, this enduring puzzle of parenting.

The passage of time is something our pensive four year-old seems to grasp keenly; he no longer asks how old will you be when I’m eighty, but how old will I be when you’re dead?” (A lump lodges in my throat and sinks into my heart). To boot: “Aba is almost dead because he’s already forty.”

The other morning I went to get my own blood tests done. A short wait, no conversation strikers, no constant chatter, no one fastened to my body. I have to admit I felt rather alone when I sat on the chair in the clinic, a Russian nurse drawing her needle in front of me, with no child to hold me.

That afternoon, I picked Sebastian up from gan at 1:30 pm as usual, took him home as usual, served him lunch as usual, and then, instead of quickly gathering his (stuffed animal) “friends”, dropping him on the couch (his day bed), uttering the word “schlaffstunde” (naptime), and rushing out of the room to get to the computer, I brought him into my bed, lay next to him, and snuggled.

My dad said to me the other night that the most precious and important thing in life is time. I think he’s right. Time-outs have their place in the practice of parenting. I’d like to usher in the time-ins.