Jerusalem Day always makes me put aside current affairs and deal with the hard and soft city, which despised every trend and fashion, which entered my heart and changed my life, and maybe on the contrary, returned them to their place.
In my early 30s, all of a sudden, without warning, I became a Jerusalem storyteller. It happened the way things do. Demand and supply. Ask if I'd be willing to accompany a few groups of travelers through the alleys and tell them along the way about some characters and guys of yesteryear, Jerusalem Hebrew, cisterns, children's games and the neighborhood oven and... Other things that all passed away long before I was even born.
I told them I wasn't a guide, and they said they knew. They don't want a guided trip. They want stories. I said I was completely not Jerusalemite. After all, I'm from Bat Yam, Ramat Yosef. And when we moved, we moved to Kiryat Ono, which is the most unbelievable Jerusalem. What do you want from me? Stories we want, ya jahsh, they told me. And I admit that there is an element in the word "jahsh" that succeeds in convincing me of high success rates. Something there attracted me, and there was also rent to pay. I needed this job.
I had only a few days to gather stories, prepare them, and build a compelling character for myself. The fear of being humiliated in front of an audience is, as we know, a powerful generator, and indeed the horror of the feud pushed me to impressive outputs. One day I was walking down the street and saw an obituary that touched my heart. The woman died in old age, and she had a name that brought with it distant times and places.
I went into the mourning house, and three hours later I left with a pile of stories, and from that moment I realized that shiva is not just a Jewish mourning custom. It is also, and mainly, a laboratory for collecting stories and memories. I got hooked. Every day I would search and find two or three "sevens". I sat and listened and had to eat hard-boiled eggs a little more than what is recommended in the HMOs leaflets.
In just a few days, I learned more about Jerusalem, Jerusalemites, their language and their wonderful way of telling a story, than I would have been able to learn in any course or seminar in the world. But the wonderful thing is that I suddenly understood my family, my father and uncles who left Jerusalem when they were young, and I always thought there was something strange about their speech.
I didn't understand the tendency to multiply words - "New, new!" or "Get divorced, divorced!". I also found strange their fondness for the curse "tame hell," and I was really laughed at by the original exaggerated phrases along the lines of "free grace" ("Do you see the pants? Free henni!") Or "hellish hell" ("The new restaurant next to the gas station? Hellish hell. And the price they asked for? Let them have medicine, and let them go to Aleph Azazel"). It's the cliché of all clichés, but sometimes you have to go on a long journey just to understand the obvious home you grew up in.
I thought that a culture of storytellers must develop for itself a rich and enigmatic secret language. I didn't have much time left until the first tour, but I was already getting addicted to the craft of collecting. Meetings with smart and insanely funny old ladies and women who never held themselves cultural heroes or creators - but that's exactly what they were to me. The stories piled up and captivated my heart, but something was still missing.
• • •
I grew up as a child of the sea. The elementary school was a few minutes from the beach in Bat Yam, and my grandparents, with whom I spent many days, lived in a shack, right on the beach of Sidna Ali in Herzliya.
The danger was obvious. When your body language betrays the fact that you grew up on the sands, it is very difficult to tell in the first person about your childhood in Jerusalem. Woe to her, to that shame. Who will believe you that you took the pot of Hamin to the oven of the "Ohel Moshe", devoured "Hamla Melana" on the rooftops or played stanga with Chernoha. Come on, you didn't see snow in your eyes until you served at the post on Mount Hermon!
And just when I didn't know what to do, a simple idea came to me. Wear that black hat. I could regret that at that very moment I happened to pass by the window of the Foerster hat shop and my gaze rested for a moment on a handsome Basco beret. But it didn't really happen that way, and it's a shame to just lie. All my Jerusalem uncles had old pictures of their heads covered with a black beret, made of cloth or felt, with a little chopchik on top.
That hat, when it rests on your head, you don't look very smart, particularly fashionable or particularly young, but somehow it manages to inspire confidence. What am I talking about? With this hat on your head you can tell about yourself what you want, and somehow no one will doubt. Indeed, once I got myself such a beret, no one suspected me of being my mate.
Worse, I stood in front of the groups of travelers and shamelessly told about my youth during the Ottoman period. I personally met Montefiore, participated in the quarrying of the cisterns and welcomed the first immigrants from Yemen. And everyone nodded in trust and asked curious questions in the second person ("How did you really get along?"). Including that group of teachers from the Tachmoni school in Bat Yam, where I studied.
But this hat did something else. People were just excited to see him. He reminded them of parents and uncles, but mostly reminded them of a Judaism they didn't know exactly how to define, but knew for sure that they missed it and whose absence they were pained by. This hat, which in Israeli cinema is often used as an accessory that signifies "underneath me stands an idiot," caused people to come up to me and tell me things that made me continue to wear this hat even after the tour ended and everyone dispersed to their homes. Personally, this black Basque beret is my favorite Jerusalem symbol.
• • •
Sometime in the '70s, television burst into our house. Soon enough, she gained a strategic place in the center of the living room, and small rituals developed around her. We never sat alone to watch it. It was always in a community and active family circle, with refreshments on the table and lots of comments and laughs.
I had one uncle whose question of what Chaim Yavin was wearing under the table occupied him deeply. As soon as Mr. TV's unequivocal face popped up on the screen, the uncle would quickly determine that under his jacket and tie Mr. Yavin was sitting in his underwear, ventilating what was to be ventilated for pleasure, and reading the news. Other uncles insisted that Roger Moore (who was James Bond, and before that "the angel" Simon Templer) had waist-length hair, and only for the sake of the character he wore a hairy wig.
Grandma Esther zt"l was painfully bothered by the fact that Maccabi Tel Aviv players run and run with the ball, and in the end, when they manage to get in, it turns out that the net is torn and the ball falls again. "Let me, I'll sew for them, like new," she tore us up with laughter, that sweet grandmother.
Years have passed since then and the world has turned around several times, but it is nice to see that every year, when Eurovision comes, we all return to our origins. They burrow like termites in the Italian's tank top and the tefillin strips on the Spaniard's arms. Why did she wear these rags, and why she didn't even wear that. It's nice to discover that there is some tradition that we still keep.
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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