Tel Aviv Rooftop

The writer and poet Haim Heffer  a bastion of secular Israeli culture from  the “ Palmach generation”, passed away yesterday and today they are playing his songs on the radio. When I first arrived in Israel and began to distinguish a few Hebrew words in the songs I was hearing on the radio, many of them were his. I also cut my teeth on the maqamas   that he wrote in Yedioth Aharonoth, in which he’d comment in rhyme on current affairs – a form that seems hopelessly outdated now but was taken seriously then. Even someone taking his first steps in the language could recognize that Heffer was a master wordsmith with a prolific output. But, for me, the sentiments expressed in many of his lyrics belonged too closely to the 1948 generation, to times and places before my time, that were foreign to me.   . Not so with one song that I loved from the start : Hakol Zahav  (Everything’s Gold). Heffer wrote the lyrics for the singing troupe Ha-Tarnegolim ...

We've recently returned from two weeks in the USA visiting family and had the good luck  to exchange the Rooftop for a fortnight with Paula Derrow and her husband whom we met through a house exchange site. So while Paula and R were discovering the charms of Neve Tzedek, A & I were wandering around the  Upper West Side. And while they  were enjoying the beach here at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, we were riding bikes down the Hudson River Greenway, all the way to Battery Park. Central Park Apart from the financial savings, people who exchange homes do so in order to simulate  the experience of living as an "ordinary" person in a foreign place. Living in an apartment block and not in a hotel, means that you get to meet the neighbours in the stairwell or the lift; you visit the local grocery store, buy in local shops and eat in local restaurants.         Everywhere we went in New York, people were kind, courteous and...