Breaking News: I just saw on TV that a bulldozer driver ran into a bus in Jerusalem. This happened right in front of a store where I bought the best "pigs in a blanket" croissants. I'm not sure it is really "pigs" but they do taste great and now I think I might look for them at another bakery.
Whenever I took walks in a new place with my Dad, he always had one timeless, unanswerable question. “How do these people make money?” While he never left the U.S. as best as I know, we did often go to Chicago when I was little and then later New York. We would walk in the Lower Eastside past miles and miles of little tiny storefronts, poorly lit, with some momma/poppa characters sitting at a counter; shelves of stuff (in Yiddish we call it “hazeri”) and never any customers and if there was a customer, they weren’t buying anything and if they were buying something it was only an insignificant thing. My Dad would stop, look inside and say to me, “How do these people make money.” I assume every dad has some kind of repetitious question they keep asking in front of the kids and when their kids get older that question rattles around in their heads. As my kids can tell you, my less profound question has always been, “Why do women wear those uncomfortable shoes.”
So, while my Dad’s question is not mine, as I’ve traveled around it usually does occur to me that there are lots and lots of little shops and I can’t help wondering how they survive. This phenomena is of course world-wide, Mexico City immediately comes to mind, but there is no place that raises petite bourgeois store ownership to as high a cultural and ethnic level as Tel Aviv and I assume also Jerusalem. The historic Jewish tendency to small-time peddling is expressed in so many ways and has so many levels of quality on the streets here. There is of course schlock (junk), rows and rows of clothing places filled with Chinese garments, but then there are also the specialty stores with just books or spices, and even high level fashion stores with designer clothes. Of course, at the very top of this food chain are the malls, which are just huge and fully equipment as in any modern Western city. For lack of a better expression, the bourgeois materialism is just overwhelming, so much for the Zionist socialist ideal of the early 1900's.
Two different books stores, crammed to the ceiling with used books, there is no obvious organization and only the owners seemed to know where anything was and the prices were negotiated on the spot from scratch.
Still, the question persists. How do you equip these places, big and small with all this expensive inventory and yet I almost never see anyone in these stores and when I do they are just looking and very seldom buying something. I just don’t get it and apparently neither did my Dad. Note: In later years I was told that many of the shops in New York were owned by the mafia and used as a front to launder money, I don't know if that is true, but it does answer my Dad's question nicely.
On the top is an enormous modern mall which was largely empty on the day I was there and on the bottom is the very fashionable Hamedina Square which has about 50 exclusive shops. I saw very few customers but the saleswomen were gorgeous and they were ALWAYS outside on the street smoking their cigarettes and looking incredibly bored in their designer clothes.
In the News
I just read an article in the paper about a small town Kiryat Gat in which the city government has produced a video called, “Sleeping with the Enemy” and a representative of it’s Anti-Assimilation Department goes to the schools and tells girls that they must not date Israeli Bedouin men (who are legally Israeli citizens) because ALL those men want to do is get the girls pregnant and then abandon them. The city representative claims this is a “phenomena that is happening everywhere” and is caused by “exploitative Arab men.” Now you know why the radical Christian right in the U.S. feels so comfortable with the radical Jewish right in Israel. But in defense of moderates in Israel, there were over 147 comments AGAINST the article and only a handful for it. The “against” letters were excellent and expressed shock and outrage, one says, “holy smokes, who are these people” and points out that a program like this directed to teens is so “clueless” it will undoubted increase the dating of Bedouins. Others said this was how the Nazi’s talked. One interesting response pointed out that under Islamic law, if a Moslem man dated/married an Israeli women and converted he could be put to death. The bizarre article and the overwhelming negative response just shows how much polarization there is in this society.
I don't know what this sign means, but it was huge and caught my attention
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