something: The days are getting longer, so how is it that during the summer vacation the nights also get longer?
Cake in protest
I read that someone threw a cake at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris and thus drew attention to some protest he wanted to protest. Whether his interest is right or not, he has indeed garnered attention in all the news channels in the world. Which made me think a little: Is there a work of art in our country that if you throw a cake on it someone will notice you?
What are the most famous works in our museums? It occurs to me that perhaps in third place is the sculpture “Love” by Robert Indiana, which is housed in the Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; In the second place I place the sculpture “Nimrod” by Yitzhak Danziger, also in the Israel Museum; And in the first place is definitely the painting “Yom Kippur”, which was painted by Maurice Gottlieb before he died at the age of 23. This wonderful painting, my first place, is in the Tel Aviv Museum.
What is your rating? No matter what, most important: do not throw cakes, please, especially not on Gottlieb’s painting. There is no point either. You will not win the title anyway.
Wild thoughts about Yakim
I read a happy article in our newspaper: “The German government has donated one million euros to the Hick Museum.” I live in a family that is half-Yakit, my sons are half-Yakim, because I picked up my teenage wife whose last name was Shtkelmacher at the age of 18 from a locality where the notices on the bulletin board were in German alongside Hebrew. The locality is Ramot Hashavim, almost 100% established in those days. I am still very much attached to the levels of returnees even in the day to day, the hiccup tradition is familiar to me and surrounds me.
My library has a series of spectacular red-bound art books with the rings, which were brought in when I immigrated from Germany and are written in Gothic letters. On Passover we also put on the table Haggadot with Gothic letters next to the Hebrew letters, and which were printed in 1861 in Rudelheim, Frankfurt. My house has furniture that the family of my beloved teenage wife brought with her in an elevator from Nuremberg, Germany. The furniture was antique already when they bought it there. I have other old books that all Yaka must be familiar with, and they are books of illustrations and humorous texts by Wilhelm Bosch, who also wrote and illustrated “Max and Moritz.” In the two thick volumes I created there are many more illustrations and many amusing stories of the same bush. I bring to his honor in the “puddle corner” below a drawing and text of his from one of these books.
There were many in the Steckelmacher family whose memory surrounds me, both in objects and in books that I do not know how to read but am in no way able to say goodbye to. Recently, however, we handed over to the National Library books written by one of the family’s old fathers, Dr. Moritz Moshe Shtkelmacher, who is the father of my wife’s grandfather.
I love these hymns, there is a phrase called gemitlish, which means a warm homely atmosphere, and for me, at a time when I was younger and my wife’s grandparents’ generation was still alive, gemitlish was for me also to hear the sounds of conversation in German spiced with Hebrew in the background.
And I especially like the nickname for the Jews of this Diaspora: “Yakim.” I always have a problem when Jews who immigrated from Romania are called Romanians, or Jews from Poland, Poles, or Iraqis, or Moroccans, or Russians. It’s jarring to me. After all, these are not Poles, not Russians or Iraqis, but Polish Jews, Moroccan Jews or Russian Jews and the like. For the sake of brevity we say Poles, and in the end also mistakenly think that they are Poles. It always confuses me in reading history books. For example, it is written that a delivery of Dutch came to a certain concentration camp. It took me a while to translate this into what really happened: a shipment of Jews living in the Netherlands arrived.
The word Yaka taught me, as a single case in Hebrew, that the language and understanding could be enriched if each community had a name that indicated it. As is well known, they do not say German-Jews, they say Yakim. But there is no such expression for Jews living in the Dutch exile, or the exile of Tunisia or any other exile.
The Yakim Museum will be established, but I do not give any exhibit preserved in my house, and especially not a great dagger that my wife’s grandmother, Dr. Eugenia Stecklemcher, received from a friend when she finished her first operation. She was one of the first women doctors to be in Germany. Driving her Mercedes, model 1929, before she and her husband, the psychiatrist Dr. Siegfried Stecklemcher decided to immigrate to Israel and establish a Hebrew settlement there. Luckily for me.
The cry of the crane
A story I heard from a crane operator. He works at the Weizmann Institute, and his crane rises in front of the windows of Prof. Oded Goldreich, winner of the Israel Prize for Mathematics and Hatred of Israel.
In recent days we have been informed that the same Israeli mathematician has sent a letter to leaders in Belgium urging them to boycott and harm Israel.
The same crane operator also heard this. Therefore, he said, he hoisted two large Israeli flags on his crane in front of Prof. Goldreich’s window. “I hope he saw the flags,” said the crane operator.
There are types of protests of the kind that only crane operators can understand, there quietly and the loneliness of their cheaters.
The corner of the puddle
If someone who has barely crawled to the top of the tree thinks he is a bird, then he is wrong.
(Translation and illustration from page 723 Vol. II of Wilhelm Bush’s illustrated books).