I had lunch with Tova in her apartment, and then we spent the afternoon talking and looking at photographs. She showed me her studio, and a room filled with hundreds of painted canvasses. We looked through an album of photographs from Poland, then albums from her first years in Tel Aviv with her husband. They lived on a sort-of kibbutz and were true early Zionists: in the photographs they are plowing, planting, and harvesting their crop - just like the old Zionist posters:
"To a new life in the Land of Israel" (Romanian)
After lunch, we walked through the German Colony (Tova's neighborhood, and very close to my hotel). I rented a cell phone, we looked at sunglasses together, and Tova picked up some groceries. One strange thing here is that I hear snatches of American English everywhere, but when I look, it's being spoken by people who are decidedly Israeli. Tova asked me what languages I could speak, and when I told her Italian and some German, she said, "I haven't spoken Italian in a very long time!" She quickly remedied that by speaking Italian with me for the next half hour. So, I was walking down the street in Jerusalem, which is a mixture of European-esque stores, Middle-Eastern architecture, and heavy traffic of American-esque cars, speaking Italian with my Polish-Israeli friend. It's already a little confusing to keep straight about where I am, but that was really something.
Tova's doctors gave her the go-ahead this morning to travel to Poland, so it looks like our trip is on for June 2. She invited me to go with her on a trip to Poznan, where an exhibit of her paintings has been up since January. We'll attend the opening of her exhibit at the Jewish Cultural Center in Krakow on the evening of June 6. She's going to help me get my flight itinerary changed for the extended stay in Poland and trip to London since she can speak Polish to these Polish airline people. And we'll be together when we leave Israel, so I'm hoping she'll deflect any security interest in the two of us.
mmr
