Florentine, TLV, 2014

 Florentine, Tel Aviv, 2014

JReeve

Finsbury Bank

The old Finsbury Bank for Savings on Sekforde Street in Clerkenwell.

March, 2017

Goodwillgames. Wikicommons

London Fields by Night

In this photoset for the Hackney Gazette, photographer Kristian Buus captured nightly scenes within the verdant interior of London Fields during the recent weeks and months of the pandemic. Due to the relative absence of traditional third spaces functioning as normal such as restaurants and cafes, London's parks have taken on an even greater social role within the fabric of the city. 

Due to current restrictions, Londoners are permitted to meet outdoors, but unlike in the summer and earlier this fall, they can now only meet with one other person outdoors to socialize.

In my opinion, as the city with the most outstanding parks and green spaces of any major capital in the world, I found this piece to be particularly intriguing. Buus's photo series captures the intimacy of these gatherings and illustrates the importance of London's green spaces as the de-facto meeting points for intimate encounters outside of one's own home. More than that, though, it's the profiles and interviews of these Londoners themselves, who represent such a diverse mosaic, which makes this such great journalism. 

I didn't make it up to London Fields or Broadway Market on my last visit, but the memories I have from my time there are still strong. This piece resonated a lot and I definitely hope to be back soon.

Hackney Gazette. Kristian Buus

L’Étoile Manquante

The view of Rue Vielle du Temple in the Marais quarter in Paris. The photo is taken from the vantage point of a window within L’Étoile Manquante, a neighborhood cafe.

Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times

London '19

Some notes and reflections from around this time last year:

Dec '19

The cafe slowly emptied out and from my small window side table looking out onto a mostly darkened stretch of semi-detached Victorian terraced houses, I noticed it began to rain again. It was only a short walk back to Highbury and Islington Station, but it was late and since I had been reverting to old habits and hours, I found myself drifting back to unanswered messages and scattered notes of former addresses and book shops and general points of interest, mostly close by in Hackney. There were still a few small groups of friends and couples huddled over half-empty cups of cafe au lait seated in the back and away from the blasts of winter air that kept drafting in. But other than those remaining few, most tables had already cleared out. I'd been going back and forth, intermittently reading a secondhand copy of Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy I brought and returning to the incomplete journal entries on my phone. I began to try and write more, just to let some fleeting thoughts flow.

The barista passed by and asked again in a warm voice if I needed anything extra. Her hair was mostly tied back and a thick dash of dark fringe hung down obscuring her eyes. She looked tired, but hid it well and I could tell she was probably accustomed to a routine of late shifts and minimal sleep. Feeling my own mixture of fatigue and jet lag catching up, I regretted the recent stretch of more or less sleepless nights and I was reminded about a period about eight years earlier when I when I just finished my last stint of reserve duty and also traveled back this same way from Europe and essentially returned to Israel and my small second floor flat in Florentin feeling more like a stranger than I had before. 

By the time I arrived back at Earl's Court it was past midnight and even though I was spent, I took a slight detour and walked an extra block or so down and stopped at the local Co-op to pick up water and a few things before heading back to the hotel. Almost everything else, including the Nandos across the street and the string of fast food chains had just closed, and the high street itself was nearly deserted at that hour, save for the few random passersby who were coming and going, each shielded by an umbrella or hooded parka. The store was largely empty and I waited in the self-service queue behind a young couple who looked to be in their early twenties who I overheard quietly speaking in Polish. 

When I reached the check out counter, the woman who was working on shift came to check my signature and ID. She looked similarly tired and weary, but when noticing my Massachusetts license, she cheerfully mentioned about having relatives of her own in Boston. I added and told her she should come visit during foliage season in autumn if she's never been before. Her eyes were dark and her accent was heavy and I would have guessed it was Albanian or something similarly Balkan. For a moment I thought I saw her glance inquisitively at the Hebrew on both my teudat zehut and miluim ID when I was putting my license back. Not that it mattered. It was more indicative of my mindset when traveling than anything else.

On my way back I saw a message light up on my phone as I passed Earl's Court station again. There were a couple of people hovered around and waiting under the station's small awning that faced the high street. Among the late returning commuters and other stragglers, I also noticed the Polish couple from the store. The girl was leaning back against the wall and taking meticulous care to lick and tighten her thinly rolled cigarette, only glancing up once to make eye contact with her companion, who himself looked disengaged and glued to his phone. After a few minutes they left together and then split and walked off in different directions. I tried to compose a quick reply in front of one of the transit maps, but ended up procrastinating and not sending anything. The crosswalk lights flashed and I trudged across the wet intersection and back towards Hogarth Road where I crashed out nearly as soon as I got home.

Hogarth Road, Earl's Court

Reuven Rubin

Reuven Rubin's 1929 painting The Fiancees. The painting shows the artist and his American-born wife Esther on the balcony of their home in Tel Aviv during the British Mandate period. Reuven Rubin was born Reuven Zelicovici in Galaţi, Romania and would later become Israel's first ambassador to Romania. He studied at Betzalel in Jerusalem and went on to spend significant time during the inter-war period between Mandatory Palestine, Europe, and America. As a painter and an artist, he is considered an Israeli national treasure.

Reuven Rubin

L'eau à la bouche

Street scene along Broadway Market in Hackney outside L'eau à la bouche, a neighborhood delicatessen and cafe.

Veggie Option. 2018.

Soho, NYC

Street scene outside Rintintin on the corner of Spring and Elizabeth Streets in Soho.

December 13th, 2020

Luke Tress. Times of Israel

RIP John le Carre

"The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal." - George Smiley, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)

Image below: Gary Oldman as George Smiley, one of fiction's greatest ever anti-heroes, and Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr in Thomas Alfredson 2011 big screen adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Jack English. Feature Films

There aren't enough words to describe John le Carre's legacy and his impact on literature in the second half of the 20th century and into the current millennium. He was not a spy novelist. He was a writer that transcended all labels and wrote about the deepest and often darkest of our inner workings and relationships. The sense of betrayal, both personal and professional, was always lurking under the surface within le Carre's work. In today's literary circles, he has few peers, if any. He will be sorely missed.

David Cornwell aka John le Carre in Hamburg, 1964

Ralph Crane/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Exmouth Market, LDN

 Exmouth Market on an autumn day.

Derek Clark. Flickr.

Herzl 16 Rooftop

Rooftop view from Herzl 16 with a half illuminated Migdal Shalom and other more modern towers off Ahad Ha'Am and Rothschild in the near distance.  

Herzl 16 FB

Broadway Market, Hackney

Hopefully we're on the way to getting back to similar Saturday afternoon scenes soon.

Alex Seagre. Alamy.

Dusk in Brussels

Brussels on a rainy early evening.

September 2020

Dmitry Kostyukov. New York Times.

More Comrade Detective

Just because.

עוד אחד מקיבוץ ניר דוד

One more panoramic shot over Kibbutz Nir David in northern Israel's Beit She'an Valley. Reaffirming why the north is easily my favorite region in Israel by far.

Aviad Shmuel

Comrade Detective

Personally for me, it doesn't get better than this. Comrade Detective has already been out for a few years and I watched it for the first time in 2017, but each time I'm in need of a laugh, which has been frequent lately, or a vicarious urge to revisit Bucharest and Romania, nothing is better than this show.

Horshim Forest

View of the community of Oranit in central Israel, which is located in the Seam Zone and abuts the green line. As seen from Horshim forest.

Wiki Commons

Exmouth Market Autumn

This time last year. Exmouth Market, November 2019. 

Just because I'm clinging to the final days of autumn as much as I can. And because I can already feel myself missing the foliage and fall colors, and of course, London way too much.

Exmouth Grind. Lundonlens.

Mikve Israel

The outside view from the main building within Mikve Israel, the first agricultural youth village to be established in Eretz Yisrael. The location of the village sits on the outskirts of Tel Aviv just near the entrance to Holon. It is was founded by members of the Alliance Israélite Universelle during the Ottoman period in 1870 and exists today as one of the few remaining open green spaces in the Tel Aviv district. The school served as a base of operations for Palmach units during the War of Independence in 1948 and it remains a historical landmark whose legacy has shaped the Zionist movement. 

PikiWiki

Cafelix, Merhavya St

Cafelix on the corner of Merhavya Street in Tel Aviv's Shuk Levisnky neighborhood.

Way to Coffee

Berlin at Dusk

Street scenes. 

Sean Gallup. Getty Images

Kazimierz 1870

The historically Jewish district of Kazimierz in Krakow. This photo is at the intersection of Józefa and Bożego Ciała streets in 1870.

Malczewski Colorization

Vintage Clissold Park

Clissold Park, Stoke Newington

Hackney, London

Amir Dotan/Hackney Archives

Mevasseret Zion

The view from Castel National Park overlooking the neighborhood of Maoz Zion within Mevasseret Zion, just on the hillside outskirts of Jerusalem. The Castel summit was a critical site during the 1948 War of Independence. After numerous exchanges of the fortress, it finally was controlled by forces from the Harel Brigade of the Palmach during Operation Nachshon.

תומר א

Kotbusser Tor 2012

Kotbusser Tor U-Bahn platform

Kreuzberg, Berlin 

April 2012

Zelma Shepshelovich

Zelma Shepshelovich as a young woman. She was a Latvian Jew whose family was murdered in the Holocaust and whose testimony played a critical role in definitively establishing the war crimes guilt of Latvian aviator and hero Herbert Cukurs. The Mossad assassinated Cukurs in 1965 in Uruguay after he had gone into hiding.

Naomi Ahimeir

Hackney Downs School (Grocers)

 A view of Hackney Downs Secondary School in 1941 following damage from a Luftwaffe bomb. The school, which closed in 1995, was the home of a string of prominent alumni from the London Jewish community including Harold Pinter, Alexander Baron, Roland Camberton, Steven Berkoff, Efraim HaLevy, and others.

Layers of London

This is about right

 Love this representation of London.

Illustrated map of London. Second Edition. House of Cally.

Rain on the Pavements

Not sure where to start with this, but the mystery behind this book has led me on a somewhat obsessive goose chase. Until we moved it had been languishing on my bookshelf for several months and mostly slipped my mind.

Roland Camberton only published two novels during his lifetime and after Rain on the Pavements in 1951, he then vanished almost without a trace, never publishing anything again.

Camberton was another Hackney writer and was born Henry Cohen. Little is still known about his life and he died relatively young in 1965. He served in the RAF during the war and adopted the pen name “Camberton” as a non-Jewish pseudonym that combined the areas of Camberwell and Brixton. The novel is a semi-autobiographical take that traces the young protagonist’s journey from his orthodox upbringing to his explorations with his uncle into the wider world of London - from the cafes and pubs of Soho, to clashes with Mosleyite fascists on Cable Street, and separate meetings with Zionists and Young Communist Party members in smoke-filled basements.

No one has done more than Iain Sinclair to uncover details about Camberton and his “lost years.” In addition to a stripped down audio tape recorded with William S. Burroughs in a Chelsea pub, there is reportedly also a lost manuscript of a hitchhiking journey across the UK and Europe. But apart from his two novels, nothing else has ever surfaced.

For a long time only those close to the author knew where he was buried. But following Sinclair’s digging, he uncovered significantly more and found out that he left behind a daughter and is buried at Rainham Jewish Cemetery under his birth name, Henry Cohen.

The second photo above is a dedication note from a separate copy of Scamp I found online. Whoever Gordon and Joyce were, it’s clear they knew the author on a personal level as Henry Cohen. At the end of the inscription, the name “Camberton” is written in quotations. Just another open shred that leaves more questions than answers.

I’ve added a little bit more from Iain Sinclair to fill in some of the gaps. Here is a link to the full investigative search from 2008.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/30/fiction

Amy

Circa 2007

Alamy

Haganah 1948

Haganah Members in Jerusalem

1948

Haganah Archives

Kikar Paris J'lem

View of Terra Sancta College and the surrounding area of Kikar Paris in the heart of Western Jerusalem. 

RoofSoldier. VK.

Clissold Park 2016

View of Clissold Park Cafe and St Mary's Church from a near distance.

November 2016

David Holt. Wikicommons

Fabric

Fabric 2009

Farringdon, London

Fabric

9/30

Ticket stub from Jerusalem's former Edison Cinema from the ICC exhibit "Stars Over Zion Square." Courtesy of the collection of Hedy Or.

Israel 21C

Rehov HaMashbir

Jan '20 Excerpt

Beyond the garment storefronts along Derekh Yafo and the dilapidated and nearly crumbling buildings that stretched further into Florentine, I walked the block or so over to Rehov HaMashbir and found the doorway at number 18 slightly ajar. I could see the same darkened drapes still hanging over the second floor window, and directly across, two stained glass Magen Davids and a menorah, both somewhat rusted and fading in colour, also still atop the synagogue on the opposite side of the street. The newly pedestrianized stretch of Levinsky Street by Tony and Esther was a sea change, but around the corner everything here appeared almost as it was nearly ten years earlier when I had just settled back in Tel Aviv after finally marking the end of my army service. 

Earlier that evening after returning from Jerusalem I managed to go through some tattered notes and photos that brought me back to that same time and refreshed some old memories. I contemplated stepping into the entrance to see if the staircase that I trekked up and down so many times had managed to be repaired. And also to quickly glimpse the ornamental tile floor at ground level that was so similar to the interior floor scheme of my old flat. I peeked inside and walked in a few steps, but didn't go much further. I saw from a distance that the stairwell had been moderately fixed and instead I went back into the street, where sounds from Levinsky fixedly echoed, and I decided to keep walking. 

Rehov HaMashbir, October 2011

Emanuel Litvinoff

East End writer Emanuel Litvinoff, middle, is pictured in uniform with his two brothers, Abe and Pinny, during service in the British army. Litvinoff reached the rank of major by age 27 and saw service in Northern Ireland, Africa, and the Middle East. This photo was taken December 18th 1940.

Herzl 16

I've been thinking about the many garden cafes in Tel Aviv, those that are open and those that have closed some years ago. Here is one current favorite.

Herzl 16 FB

Emmaus-Nicopolis Monastery

There was a great piece in Haaretz's weekend supplement recently about how Israeli Jews are finally visiting and discovering the beauty of the country's various Christian monasteries and their stunning gardens. The article focuses on a new book published in Hebrew called "God's Garden's in the Holy Land" by Ami Zoran, which is extremely timely due to the current increase in domestic tourism. The book provides a photographic and historical profile of 42 of Israel's garden monasteries. I look forward to hopefully getting a chance to read through it soon. The book seems is perfect for those looking to step outside their familiar boundaries and explore these amazing sites. 

The Emmaus-Nicopolis Monastery near Latrun. Moshe Gilad

מיכאל שלי‎

Amos Oz's 1968 masterpiece, My Michael, in its original Hebrew. Published by Keter Books.

Kore BaSfarim

Apocalyptic America

Downtown San Francisco along the Embarcadero at 10:55 am. Wildfires continued to rage throughout California and the West Coast.

Jim Wilson. New York Times

Catastrophic scenes were also captured elsewhere throughout the state as the surrounding hillside next to the Bidwell Bar Bridge in Oroville, California burned. 

Noah Berger AP

Preliminaries

Lately I've been staying awake later and later and not sleeping enough. The other night while packing and streaming whatever random set was playing on NTS at that hour, I came across a few battered notebooks with scrap pieces and short journal entries from some of my former and more recent travels. They stretched from Romania to Paris and London to Israel, and also included shoddily written thoughts and sketches going back to life in Tel Aviv circa 2011-2012 and the immediate months after I finished reserve duty and subsequently ended up traveling to Berlin. 

I also stripped some hybrid notes off my old phone from my nearly month-long stay in Israel via Hackney this past last winter, which already feels like ages ago. Between the mostly unrecognizable phone numbers and faded names and the marked off dates next to addresses of cafes and bookshops, I've been slowly trying to thread these pieces together and sketch out whatever possible vignettes I can. 

Jerusalem, January '20

Another Saturday Night from Jerusalem

Protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu have continued week after week each Motze Shabbat in Jerusalem's Paris Square.

Oded Balilty. AP.

Down Hackney

So far I haven't lived up to my promise to go back to writing more consistently, but hopefully this will serve as a positive catalyst. I finally received my copy of Roland Camberton's Rain on the Pavements. It's been nine months since I was last in London and clearly a lot has happened since then. Just being able to actually hold a copy of this book is a real thrill. The copy I have is the 2010 reissue featuring Iain Sinclair's introduction. The cover is a reproduction of the original 1951 publication. It's only the second published edition and has since gone out of print again. I don't want to get ahead of anything and I'm trying to temper expectations, but to say that I'm excited to finally read it would be an understatement. 

In the interim, I finished up There's No Home and I'm now almost done with a new compilation of essays and interviews about Alexander Baron and his novels titled So We Live. It seems like so much leads back to Hackney and the former East End, specifically to the forgotten Jewish voices of a largely secular, working-class community that no longer exists. The book is a fascinating exploration of a very private man, someone who did not outright disappear like Camberton, but nonetheless also faded from the public eye. A lot of questions about Baron's life are answered in the series of essays and archival interviews which discuss his wartime service, and even more intriguing, his awakening as Jewish writer and the influence of the Holocaust on his work. 

Yesterday afternoon I took a brief break from work and went to sit in a nearby park. I managed to read his included short essay The Anniversary for the first time. It was originally published in the Jewish Quarterly in Spring 1954 and was reprinted and included in So We Live. The premise concerns Alexander Baron's trip to Paris in July 1952 for a memorial commemoration on the anniversary of the Velodrome d'Hiver deportations. Even though it is barely four pages long, it is among the most haunting pieces I have ever read. 

Alexander Baron. Photo: Nick Baron

There is still one pressing open question that is discussed and never answered in So We Live. During an interview in 1963, Baron mentions a personal incident that occurred some years after his discharge from the army and return from Europe. He doesn't expand beyond that and little in terms of specific details are revealed, but he goes on to say in his own words that the incident brought about a profound awakening and was related to the Holocaust. He added that it was what led to the Shoah becoming "the master obsession of my life." 

It is difficult to try and read between the lines, and speculation should only be seen as that. However, if there are any slight trails left to potentially follow, one may potentially look closer at Baron's earlier prewar years as an organizer for the Popular Front and his visits during this time to France. Susie Thomas notes that Baron had always been "buttoned up" and never did reveal the details of this "personal incident." If we look closer, perhaps it is in within his fiction where we may glimpse some possible answers. One only needs to look at the character "Nicole" in The Lowlife. Her off-page character is that of a French-Jewish young woman who is abandoned by Harryboy during the war and who turns out to be the mother of his child. After he returns to Hackney from his military service, Harryboy is haunted by their prospective fate and it is this looming influence of the Holocaust which serves as the novel's most powerful mechanism.

Shuk Levinsky

Street scenes on the relatively new pedestrianized portion of Shuk Levinsky in Tel Aviv. A lot has changed in the area since my former days on Rehov HaMashbir, but it was great being back in the area this past winter and I will try and add a bit more soon.

Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality

Custodia di Terra Santa Casa Nova

View of the interior courtyard of the Custodia di Terra Santa Casa Nova in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Trip Advisor

8/25/20

Following initial concerns of a suspected infiltration, the IDF announced hours later that its aircraft struck Hezbollah observational posts in response to shots being fired from Lebanon at IDF soldiers stationed along the border. No reports of casualties.

Flares light the sky along the Israel-Lebanon border. Times of Israel