Now That's What I Call a Jewish Neighborhood
Nesvisky, Matthew
NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL A JEWISH NEIGHBORHOOD MATTHEW NESVISKY Hephziba Menuhin radiates a winning charm even before she sits at the piano and plays a note: the gangly, uncalculated walk-on, the...
...Somewhere around here...
...Our next-door neighbor is one of the earliest residents of the old-new Jewish Quarter...
...Workmen must shout to be heard, not the least because each has his own transistor radio at hand, each tuned to his own favorite Middle Eastern raga...
...Amazingly, the house did remain in the Mizrahi family, up until the Jordanian occupation...
...Flaming letters spell out the name of the Jerusalem Brigade...
...Darwish is a well-built fellow in his mid-thirties who sports a ginger mustache, a thoughtful pipe, raggy-baggy clothes and a cunning mix of silence and solicitude...
...Jerusalem doesn't know its own heart...
...Darwish, just arriving home from work, went down after them and also died of asphyxiation...
...The eight months of incredible paperwork and preparation, starting from the day we entered the government lottery for the privilege of buying a house there, have finally passed...
...In the front row, Isaac Stern beams over the turtleneck of his jersey...
...Electric stone-cutting saws whine with the chilling effect of dental drills on bicuspids...
...But angels can dance on the head of a pin and movers can conquer even the Street of the Angel...
...With that established, my wife one day in a whimsical mood paints a large purple cherub on the box, along with the number of the building: 11 Street of the Angel...
...We're pleasantly stuffed and tired, and the nightmare is fading fast...
...Now they've left that and started excavating another section...
...He says I take his price and he takes my tobacco...
...Plans are underway for a gala celebration of Israel's 30th year of independence, and of course for the 11th year of the reunification of the capital...
...Ze'ev has had it made himself and it bears a brass plate identifying the twice-claimed property...
...The kid has disappeared...
...No previous move in my family, not Odessa to England, not the U.S...
...Plans also are being discussed for a 100-room tourist hotel in the Quarter...
...Arab children peep into the scene from lanes leading to the square...
...The municipality meanwhile is debating the best access route to the Quarter's proposed 1,000 car parking lot: should they tunnel under the Old City wall or punch a new gate through it...
...Later I see Arab kids bringing their friends to marvel at this decoration...
...to Israel, had filled me with such anxiety as moving from our rented flat in the newly built neighborhood in the north end of Jerusalem to our own home in the even more newly built neighborhood in the center of Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City...
...They tell us, in a mixture of Hebrew and English, that their family had moved in here under Jordanian rule and that they now live in another flat not far away and that it is very nice...
...U.S...
...Everyone knows that's an optimistic estimate...
...I huffily consider this immoral, and I know it is illegal...
...I tell him I'm keeping a woman there...
...Everyone is always calling Darwish...
...Children from the adjacent Armenian Quarter are fascinated by this, that the rabbits are pets, are kept for petting...
...We want some alterations in our kitchen and Darwish himself has agreed to handle it...
...In the course of securing his home when the Quarter was first reopened, Ze'ev discovered that the property adjacent to his was originally owned by one Baruch Mizrahi...
...Soon I-beams are shoring the arches and walls, and the laborious reconstruction job begins...
...In having it cleaned out, the engineers discover cellars which are definitely of the Crusader period...
...NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL A JEWISH NEIGHBORHOOD MATTHEW NESVISKY Hephziba Menuhin radiates a winning charm even before she sits at the piano and plays a note: the gangly, uncalculated walk-on, the girlish smile, the cheerful calico granny dress she has chosen with felicitous whimsy for this outdoor concert...
...Instead of our grand reception we have a memorial service in the Quarter's ancient Yohanan Ben-Zakkai synagogue...
...The noise is near intolerable...
...A live choir...
...Perhaps he said I don't understand what the Arabs are saying...
...Moshe Safdie, the architect planning the Western Wall area, has a home here...
...We're getting to know the narration by heart...
...My wife takes part and her work sells very well...
...Welcome home...
...Nothing in the Quarter pleases me as much as this simple white stone bow against the blue sky...
...One morning I see the name and address has been torn off...
...The Prime Minister had wanted a grand military parade right up to Jaffa Gate, but that idea has been scrapped as too provocative...
...But I can't see how I'll ever enter the picture...
...So has former Foreign Minister Yigal Allon...
...Someone not long ago heaved a rock and shattered one of these nudes...
...I put up another immediately...
...In fact, something unintentionally tongue-in-cheek simmers over this whole concert, part of the tenth anniversary celebration of the reunification of Jerusalem...
...Meetings of the residents succeed in moving the designers, however, and room is made for green corners...
...Everyone cheers...
...The Jew owns the truck and does the considerable mental calculation any packing and removal job requires...
...The 1,000 or so Jewish Quarter residents and guests swelter in their sabbath finery, unaccustomed to a mid-week, mid-after-noon, mid-June dress-up...
...He describes the complex relationship between the Jewish Quarter Company, the contractors, the subcontractors, the quarries, the work crews...
...A grand reception is to be held in the neighborhood marking Jerusalem Day...
...I have to reassure my own that the Arab boy wasn't hungry, that he just wanted a pet...
...It was all planned with the best of Jewish intentions, but the scene is simply too incongruous to take seriously...
...What could be happening in the Jewish Quarter I should want to go there this time of night, he wants to know...
...It is the worst air accident, military or civilian, in the history of the State...
...Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal declined to visit the Old City because it is not recognized by his government as part of Israel...
...The flagstones are laid quickly but precisely...
...Afterwards, we smoke our pipes and drink coffee and dicker a bit...
...A little Armenian girl who occasionally plays with my daughter comes to our door one morning to tell us she has just seen an Arab boy leaving our courtyard with one of our children's rabbits in a plastic sack...
...Our hallways must be dug up, the line repaired, the tiles re-laid...
...The name shouted most often in our neighborhood is "Darwish," and we soon learn why...
...Ze'ev meanwhile is making a film about the renaissance of the Quarter, and a highlight of his movie is,the installation of an antique-style balcony window on the re-built former Mizrahi homestead...
...I have a sudden fear that I'm hallucinating...
...It's an understatement to say Darwish will be missed in this little community...
...The five o'clock peal from the Armenian church wipes out whatever is left of the concerto's opening...
...He puts his broad back to good use as well...
...What he's saying is that when the Jewish Quarter Company, the contractors, the subcontractors and the work crews aren't looking, we should do as all the other homeowners do: steal the materials...
...James is sealed off by a cinder-block wall...
...Everything we own is now heaped in our new home...
...Suddenly I hear a choir singing "Jerusalem of Gold...
...It's said another five years will be needed to complete the job...
...Reconstruction has been going on for five years now...
...I'm prepared to put in a standing order with the printer...
...Only a pedestrian, or a man mounted on a donkey if he ducks under the arches, can make it through here...
...It's the largest building in the Quarter, and was built over 100 years ago by the Rothschilds as a shelter for penniless Jews...
...No vehicle, much less a van, can drive within blocks of my street...
...Yes, very careless work, must be done again, everything gets held up, what a pity...
...A new contingent of the Israel Defence Forces is being sworn in...
...Crowded into just a few score acres comprising ten per cent of the Old City, the Jewish Quarter is to be a cultural center, a focal point of Jewish scholarship, and the home of some 600 families...
...The Diaspora is well represented in the Jewish Quarter today...
...But nobody sings that song any more...
...While the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra thrums away dutifully in their white dinner jackets, Israeli paratroopers patrol the domed rooftops of Old City houses and yeshivas surrounding Batei Mahse Square...
...The man upstairs arranges—probably through Darwish but he isn't saying—to have a marble altarpiece, a column base, and a stone with an inscription all hauled into his house...
...this is not the first time he has shown me his existential wit...
...A fourth member of the family died there as well before police and firefighters arrived...
...James Road, which is the main pedestrian route to the Quarter from Jaffa Gate, has been paved for the first time in memory...
...My wife, who's both an artist and a critic, says it looks like the Disney concept of the Seven Dwarfs' cottage...
...We see that some of the residents have built sizeable stone troughs and wells in their courtyards in which flowers and shrubs and trees are flourishing...
...But we're feeling uncommonly content about it all right now...
...The archaeologists are going wild...
...Soon, when the contractors, subcontractors and work crews aren't looking, the neighbors are making raids for antiquities...
...In what was going to be the enlarged parking lot they've unearthed one of the greatest churches of the Byzantine world, an edifice three stories high and some 90 feet long...
...I have 1,000 printed envelopes and sheets of stationery...
...Behind the orchestra, the headquarters of the Company for the Reconstruction of the Jewish Quarter shines under its new stone facing...
...And since the new flats and semi-detached cottages are laid out on the old honeycomb pattern of the Quarter's alleyways, the sounds collide from all directions...
...In a muted ceremony nearby, General Yona Efrat of the Central Command points out to anyone who may have forgotten that, "In the history of Israel, there is no joy unaccompanied by mourning...
...James Road...
...They can't get over how much the house on the Street of the Angel has changed...
...No more detour through the crowded market...
...The desert heat arrives shortly after the first buds appear in Israel, and windows and doors must be left open...
...His word is respected...
...But we are living in the heart of a construction zone, and the racket is like a time-capsule recording of building techniques down through the ages...
...But the Jewish Quarter architects have staunchly maintained efforts to reproduce the character of the Quarter as it was a century ago...
...As she springs into the Emperor Concerto, studiously crouched over the keyboard and cueing her page-turner with a polite nod, one imagines a pink tongue-tip in the corner of her mouth...
...But neither he nor I, manic in my tattered T-shirt and jeans, could even dream of horsing like our Moslem help...
...But window boxes are insufficient...
...Tree-shaded malls, pocket parks, green belts—these are all Western concepts...
...But consider what's happening even closer to home...
...Leah suspects it was some student from the yeshiva across the way...
...People are fed up with the long detour caused by the walling off of St...
...But Muhammad Anwar Sadat just passed this way on his way to prayers...
...Donkey engines roar as the raw blocks are unloaded from the quarry trucks and hauled to the new apartment houses...
...We tell Darwish we'll do the masonry ourselves, but how can we acquire the nicely finished stone slabs for these flower boxes...
...They trudge under sacks of books, furniture and major appliances, cheerfully contemptuous of physical laws, cheerfully contemptuous of us...
...The hallucination turns visual...
...They've found something under the earth they can't identify, and something they can't ignore...
...And one midnight I enter a cab near the center of town, and as I give my address to the driver, he raises his eyebrows...
...Hundreds of Israeli soldiers stand ranked before the Western Wall...
...Four hundred years ago Baruch Mizrahi registered a will which said that his home must always remain in his family's hands, so that when the Messiah comes to resurrect the dead, Baruch Mizrahi will have a home in which to live...
...We're advised to negotiate with Darwish...
...Litigation between the Mizrahis and the government could go on until the Messiah appears...
...Leah is one of the Jewish Quarter residents whose family lived here before the Old City fell in 1948...
...Eight bombs in the Old City in as many weeks...
...My "street"—the Street of the Angel—is so narrow a pedestrian can touch the walls on both sides with ease as he passes...
...The Hurva Synagogue, once the largest edifice in Palestine, was reduced to rubble by the Jordanians after the Jewish Quarter fell in 1948...
...I'm stealing only dressed stones for our garden boxes, and imperfect ones at that...
...We attend an Armenian church bazaar, meet the man in charge of the Armenian community library and are encouraged to avail ourselves of its ample facilities (much of the library is in English), and an old Armenian woman serves us coffee and "reads" the grounds...
...And the writer and Knesset member Moshe Shamir...
...Next to him, Jerusalem's Vienna-born Mayor Teddy Koliek, accustomed to piano recitals as he is to jackhammers, steals a nap out of his 18-hour workday...
...The balcony is made of stained pine, or possibly of plastic planks...
...I replace that, too...
...But the affair is canceled at the last minute as the country goes into a state of mourning for the 54 troops killed the day before during an exercise when their helicopter crashed in the desert...
...The engineers recognize a fait accompli and pave a pathway around the construction site...
...he holds the keys to all the new flats, knows where the tools are squirreled away, knows which laborer can do what and where he is at all times...
...The job is accomplished in the now-classic Israeli style: a smart Jewish boss and three Arab porters picked out of the morning shape-up in East Jerusalem...
...We develop a modus vivendi with Darwish, or maybe he develops one with us...
...I dash out to give chase, hating the kid and hating myself for what I'm doing...
...Afterwards, like prosperous burghers, we stroll the softly lit lanes...
...He grunts...
...She foretells I will have a long and happy life...
...A compressor and then a jackhammer start up in the background...
...Furthermore, Darwish is literally the key man of the Quarter...
...Then it's discovered that the stone arches over the street have been weakened by the rumbling traffic on nearby Armenian Patriarchate Road...
...Conscientious Jewish foremen are down there in the dust overseeing the work, but only Darwish can find the time to attend to the residents' needs...
...the Company is even now supplying free plants and soil for each home...
...He will look out for Number One, but is not insensitive to the needs of Numbers Two and Three...
...Two of his cousins in their village of Abu Dis, just east of Jerusalem, had gone down to clean a cesspit and failed to reappear...
...With us it's a "forgotten" section of water line under the floor tiles...
...We unearth some decent clothing from the suitcases and celebrate by dining out at the Jewish Quarter's only restaurant...
...But with much of the new housing throughout the country built for Jews by Arab labor, there is the matter of sabotage...
...Teddy Koliek nonetheless has been vigorously introducing them in the New City...
...The work will get done, according to his concept of time and adjudicating blame and compensation, but it will get done...
...They tell us they used to live in our flat, or part of it...
...Most of the artists from the Quarter participate, and some not from the Quarter join in as well...
...The Rothschild family crest beams boldly above Miss Menuhin's head as she plunges through her solo...
...Jewish chauvinists sneer at all shoddy construction as avoda aravit, Arab workmanship...
...The nightmare has been realized, the nightmare has passed...
...The redesign of the building by the Company has been so thorough that they can't quite recognize the layout...
...But the supermarkets in town are reluctant to deliver to the Quarter: their boys tend to get lost in the maze...
...Matthew Nesvisky is news editor and book critic for The Jerusalem Post...
...An art fair is being held in the Batei Mahse Square...
...Many more restaurants, as well as galleries, studios and fine shops, are promised for the Quarter...
...They point out to us identical rabbits being hauled by porters to the butcher shops in the souk...
...In October we build our first succah and dine out there...
...Which means no greenery...
...This is in addition to the annual outdoor art fair held in New City, but it is very well attended and is considered a success...
...And seemingly borne on the noise is the very fine powdered stone dust that penetrates under even the tightest doorsill...
...We now have to take a ten-minute detour through the Arab market to get in and out of the Quarter...
...The more open-minded point out that Jewish handiwork— when you can find it—is hardly noted for its quality...
...Our court adjoins Ze'ev's, however, and tonight he's showing his Jewish Quarter movie yet again...
...Our kids keep rabbits in the courtyard...
...I ask him why Arabs don't do more careful work on building jobs, since so many of them are said to believe they'll acquire the houses after the Jews, like the Crusaders, have been driven away...
...It's been weeks now since my name has been ripped off the mailbox...
...One neighbor found a column of concrete poured down his toilet as a departing gift from the workmen...
...and dedicated to Justinian...
...Their brothers have gone to America, and presumably these girls, like many of the young people in the rapidly dwindling Armenian community, would like to follow the boys...
...No decision is reached, but in a burst of atypical aesthetic imagination, a great stone arch is built out of the ruins as a monument and reminder of the imposing nature of the famous house of worship...
...Right across Angel Street—which means two arm's lengths from our courtyard door—stands an abandoned building which the Armenian Patriarchate has sold to the Jewish Quarter Company for renovation...
...He comes after work hours for this private job and wields a hammer and chisel with astounding force and skill...
...When the Israeli authorities took over again, the Company for the Reconstruction of the Jewish Quarter determined that the house was structurally unsound and pulled it down to its foundations...
...A few days later it is gone...
...In the courtyard of her home stand several of her unique ceramic sculptures: fantastic animals and plants, bizarre soldiers and plump, slumped nude women...
...The band finishes playing, and hundreds of civilians press in to witness the ceremony...
...One evening a group of vigilantes sledgehammers a doorway through the wall, and everyone—Jew, Arab, Armenian and tourist alike—rejoices...
...Two Armenian girls in their late teens come to visit...
...A German tourist wanders into our courtyard, knocks on my door, tips his hat and asks: "Der Templeplatz...
...We stroll over toward the Western Wall plaza...
...The President of the State, the Prime Minister, the Chief of Staff, the Chief Rabbis, all the national figures are to attend...
...Wearing gas masks, they hauled the bodies out with ropes...
...What a splendid pleasure for us former apartment dwellers to sit in our private courtyard in the evenings and gaze up at the stars...
...A child of the Holocaust, Ze'ev was raised in England and would now live nowhere else but the Street of the Angel...
...He strokes his ginger mustache, itself possibly a Crusader memento, and says he doesn't understand what I'm saying...
...Since its liberation in 1967, city planners have been debating whether or not the synagogue should be rebuilt...
...It was consecrated in 583 A.D...
...That's called picturesque...
...The Quarter has a depressing lack of greenery...
...Miners from the Timna copper works in the Negev are brought in to plumb the strength of the foundations...
...I've pasted my name and address, clipped from an envelope of my new set of stationery, on our mailbox...
...Darwish is dead...
...But the logistics of the actual move itself had disturbed my dreams for weeks: how to get my household goods through the reconstructed lanes and alleys to my new home...
...Next door it was a tampered valve on the water heater, causing a horrendous midnight blowout...
...They've excavated to build an extension to the parking lot at the entrance to the Quarter, but they've left that and started digging elsewhere...
...I pay the owner of the van, I pay the Arabs their baksheesh, and my family and I are suddenly alone with a happy, hesitant bewilderment...
...At the same time, Moshe Shamir, Knesset member, novelist and Jewish Quarter stalwart, has complained publicly that the recorded muezzin's cry from the mosque near his home is disturbing his sleep...
...He speaks a musical Hebrew, but in rag-time...
...And it's done...
...Our new house needs certain "corrections...
...Mendi Rodan will next lead the orchestra through the New World Symphony...
...Since law stipulates that every building in the capital must be constructed of stone, the clack of the chisel against limestone assaults our ears from sunrise to sundown...
Vol. 3 • May 1978 • No. 6
