Foo Fighters Israel | The Davy Grolton Band - Times Like These

Rest in Peace Taylor Hawkins. What a tragic loss - I'll miss seeing him goof around with Dave Grohl, geek out over Queen, and play the drums with all his heart. ♥

Arik Eber - 1990/Who am I, what?

Purim festivities have finally concluded, after an extra-long weekend (which started on Tuesday!) filled with work parties, street parties, and house parties. I wasn't really in the mood to celebrate, citing the gloomy current events, though to be honest, I'm not really a Purim person in general. But a good friend of mine who has family both in Ukraine and in Russia invited me to a party she was hosting on Friday and I immediately said yes because I realized that she needed a break from the war and just wanted to dance a bit (we danced a lot). She belongs to what's known here as generation 1.5 - those who immigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 90s when they were kids. Many who belong to generation 1.5, such as Arik Eber, made statements against the Russian invasion, no matter where in the former Soviet Union they were born, though there are others who are taking a more neutral stance, especially if they have friends and relatives in Russia who are suffering from the international sanctions. Everyone realizes that there's going to be an influx of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine, and I can only hope that they'll somehow have a smoother landing than the 90s wave (we'll see...). Arik Eber is quite known in the poetry slam circle and I'm very happy to see his work highlighted by the Tel Aviv Review of Books, with excellent translations by Alex Moshkin and Zackary Sholem Berger.

A boy's choir from Israel arrives at the Grand Choral Synagogue in St. Petersberg

This is how 1990 began

I don't remember any of their songs

And that's not the point really

What I do remember is the chewing gum

Bazooka

That they handed me

I'd never seen anything like it

A comic strip that absolutely nobody could understand

What's funny about it

I chewed this gum for two weeks in a row

Chewing during the day

Then carefully laying it on a shelf at night

A ritual I repeated with all chewing gums

Which were then

A truly rare

Commodity.

They took away my dog

A Rottweiler named Chase

Sold it to a security company

For a long time I'll be shaken by the thought: what did they do with that benevolent creature

Although we got him for protection from the antisemitic mob

Actually he'd lick anyone who'd enter the house from head to toe.

Dollar

My dad's friend gives me a dollar and says

Hide it in your shoes when you go through customs

Traitors are not allowed to take foreign currency out of the country

I'm frightened

But succeed in the task like James. Fucking. Bond.

Actually, we were supposed to move to the United States

But it closed the door right in our faces

Imagine

How easily

I could be American right now

Doing spoken word in Wisconsin or something

A friendly clerk at the Ben Gurion airport decides

That the name my mother gave me

Isn't suitable for the Israeli climate

So he writes on my ID card instead

Ariel

Why not Arnon

Or Arie

or

Boaz

Why not Boaz?! Boaz is a good fit for me, no?

Or something practical like

Aaron

With Aaron I'd probably be a star student in the religious school where I spent second grade

Not because my parents believed in the Jewish God or anything like that

But because that school was just across the street and free

And that's perfect for a Russian boy, poor and stinking

There, for the first time in my life I heard the phrase:

Stinking Russian

By the way, do you know why Russians stank in the early 90s?

I have a theory

As you know, they took all their furniture

All of them

And stuck them into tiny containers

In unbearably humid conditions

And shipped them across the continent for six months

Offloaded them in some port in Haifa or Ashdod

Then all this half-rotten furniture was crammed into tiny apartments

What the hell did they expect?

The stench stuck to everything

Like communism.

We didn't think it would collapse

My father would tell me a few years later

We thought it was just a lull, things would get back to normal,

We had to take advantage of this slit in the Iron Curtain

He was wrong

Communism crumbled

The nimble-fingered and quick-witted managed to seize a juicy piece of property

belonging to the state

Some of his good friends got

Incredibly rich

My Dad

Cleans a pool in Neve Yaakov in East Jerusalem

My mother cries

For his two academic degrees

For her medical studies

For the elegant buildings of St. Petersburg which she left behind

Because of the heat

Because she can't talk to strangers on the street

At the sight of her two sons

In gas masks

In a "sealed" room

Dreading death by gas

That's how 1991 began.

1990

At eight: cut right out from the Soviet Union

And pasted into Israel. What could I do?

I, a Russian boy, in a religious school

Who was told that God rules

But just as I learned how and when to pray

My parents decided that God was not the way

First they say religious, then they say not. For God's sake!

Who am I, who am I, who am I

Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?

In middle school I took another look around

Confused, what can I do if there's no God to be found

I realized that in Jerusalem to be popular and cool

I had to be more like the Morrocan youth

Morrocan is code for all Mizrahi Jews

Morrocan, Iraqi, all the same to stinking Russian tools.

Let's drop that, not relevant right now.

Look at me: a Russian listening to Eyal Golan

Faded jeans, gel in his hair,

Platform shoes, I tried but no one seemed to care

I always stayed a foreigner, strange kind of stranger.

Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?

In high school I tried to get back to my roots

"Belamor" cigarettes and Russian swear words

I hung out with the slackers, smoking out back

Wearing a tracksuit, accent so fake

But I failed to fit in, blend with the masses

My Russian vocab was zilch, what were my chances.

In the army I finally realized what's what

In the bed of elite girls I screwed my way to the top

The canon was revealed to me in all its glory

I swallowed it without gagging, no worry

Two servings of Leah Goldberg, Alterman and Oz

I became an Ashkenazi without any flaws

I rested on my laurels

Thought I found out who I was

'Til somebody blurted out: Nah

You are just an Ashki-passing Russian from nowhere.

Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?

I searched far and wide for who I was

Until I finally found a clear response:

I am Russian

I am a Russian Israeli or Israeli Russian or Hebrew-speaking Russian or Russophone Israeli or Israeli whose mother tongue is Russian

I mean, whose mother talks to him in Russian and he answers her in that language

Unless he wants to make a point and then he switches to Hebrew to make that point

Because, for real, Hebrew is his language

He's an Israeli, the case's closed, enough already! The guy's Israeli!

But then again: what is Israeli?

Who am I, who am I, who am I, what?

I highly recommended checking out this week's episode of Unholy: Two Jews on the News.

Aliza Azikari - Your letter has arrived

I'm not a fan of historical comparisons, but as I've been anxiously following the war in Ukraine I couldn't help but think of the Six-Day War, and how it led to a surge in national pride. This led me to an article on songs that were written during the tense waiting time before the war, during the war, and after the victory. I was familiar with most of the songs on the list, especially "He who dreamed" (Mi sheChalam), which has become a somber anthem for fallen soldiers, but I had not heard of this song, sung beautifully by Aliza Azikari, at all. I was struck by the sensitivity of the lyrics and was curious to learn more about Miriam Yalan-Shteklis, the woman who wrote them. I found out that she was born in the town of Potoki, near Kremenchuk, Ukraine and she studied psychology and social sciences at the University of Kharkiv, a city I had never heard of before this senseless war. She immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1920 and published her first poem in Hebrew in 1922, eventually becoming Israel's leading children's poet. As her JWA encyclopedia entry states, "alongside poems filled with hope for peace and redemption are lyrical-confessional poems about the fears and emotions of a child trying to come to term with his/her identity and living in society." It's not easy to know how to comfort a child during a war, but the father in this song manages to do just that, and something about the way he reassures his daughter made me think of Volodymyr Zelensky's courageous and heroic fight for his country's survival. I can't even begin to imagine what ripped-apart Ukrainian families are going through, and I hope with all my heart that they will be reunited soon. 

Your letter has arrived, thank you very much, my daughter

How good it is that you know how to write

How good it is that you can read my letters

I kiss both your eyes, my girl

Both your eyes, my girl

Always remember: I am with you all, you are all with me

Because there is no distance in the soul within

Take care of your little brother, take care of mother

And I'll return to you soon, my girl

I'll return to you, my girl

Be quiet, also be sure, my daughter

The fathers are guarding our borders

Our hands are strong, our hearts are strong

I kiss the light of your eyes, my girl

The light of your eyes, my girl

I kiss the light of your eyes, my girl

The light of your eyes, my girl