New Year's Eve

Some might say it's a little early for new years, but we Jews have been having our new year in the fall from some 6000-odd years, so I'd say there must be something to it. I went back to Bat Yam for "Erev Rosh Hashanah" -- the holiday which could be literally translated as New Year's Eve. Bat Yam is the house where my mother moved when she was a small girl and where her mother, my grandmother, still lives with most of the same furniture and decorations still intact. My cousins and I ate around the same small table which I imagine has seen this holiday celebrated for well on fifty years now. The food, chicken soup followed by boiled meat and mashed potatoes, I imagine has remained similarly intact.

I should note that the Chicken Soup, served this time with knedelech (Jewish Dumplings), remains the best rendition I have ever had. My mothers is a close second, though due to my father's distaste for the soup of our people ("hot water poured through a chicken," he calls it) I seldom get it. Second Avenue Deli in New York has a distant, but passable, third place.

Being back in that small apartment on that completely unassuming street in Tel Aviv's subsurbs brought back waves of memories, most from when I was quite young. I spent a few months when I was about eight years old living in Israel with my mother, in that apartment, and even attended some sort of Kindergarten or day camp. I remember walking the long distance (about 50 meters) to the end of the block where the bus would pick me up to take me every morning. I recall spending the afternoons with my grandfather in the center of the long "shderah", or boulevard, which ran near the house, riding a bike and being shown off to his friends. I recall watching the one channel of TV which was available, and hearing my grandfather complain about degredation in the quality of the signal since the towering high rise (8 stories) was built across the street. I also recall a severe bought of stomach illness I once had in that home, a memory which has been become all too vivid, with a return this week of the painful cramps and urgency I remember.

I'm a quarter of a lifetime from those memories, yet they feel to be a very integral part of me. I've always had some tenuous attachment to this country, in no small part because of my mother and her friends, but also because of those many trips here. My mother always says she brought me to Israel for those few months to see what it would have been like to have had a life in Israel instead of the one she chose in the United States. A side effect, probably not entirely unintentional, was to show me and my young sister what our own lives in Israel would have been like.

In the 80's, I would not have been old enough to had formed a firm opinion about life in Israel, but enough memories were formed to draw me back for a clearer picture. Coming to work in Israel, managed as part of Europe by my firm, was a clear draw in bringing to work in London, our European headquarters. I am pleased that my first project has sent me here, where I can be with my family and try to flesh out a bit more about what it means to live in this very unique country.

I've been here now for two weeks, and all I can say with any certainty is that the country is unique -- and that that uniqueness is tied more than anything with the nature of the Israelis themselves. Industrious, arguementative, diligent and probably the most impatient nation on the face of the planet. I am not an Israeli, and will probably never be, and such will never truly know what it's like to live in Israel, but I am enjoying learning nonetheless.