Hauling me away from my lusty desires for textiles, jewellery and pottery, blogger-at-large Bill Doskoch has landed me with a thump back into bookworld and a damn good thing, too. My publishers would agree. His questions have forced me to start thinking again, something I haven't done since I stared at the last batch of notes I received from my researcher yesterday on the Pickton hearings in Vancouver.
Bill's three questions - with answers.
1. What was the last book I purchased?
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
2. Name five books I really liked.
The Kite Runner - it blew me away. It's the best book I have read in the last year. It deserves its success as an international bestseller, unlike the unspeakable da Vinci Code which compresses ridiculous events into an impossible twenty four-hour period and was so badly written it made my teeth hurt.
(Bill's invitation here is too open-ended. I am sticking with five books I have read since I came to Israel in February.)
Okay, so I am half-way through Saturday by Ian McEwan and liking it much better than I believed I could. It is brilliant and I find myself sticking with this neurologist as he meanders through his own brain pan.
If I may interject in my own post here with a book I really hated that I bought recently, it's Exodus by Leon Uris. (This shouldn't count as one of the five.) I thought I's better read it, especially after talking to some friends who spent time after the war in Jewish refugee camps on Cyprus waiting to get into Palestine. Which is where Uris starts his plot before losing it altogether.
I read this book forty years ago and maybe I liked it then. Now I cannot get past the punctuation!Exclamation marks! The information is interesting and even useful but the telling excrutiating!
But I loved the new one-volume edition of Harold Nicolson's Diaries; it was as much fun to read as the first three volumes, the ones that were published in the mid 1960s. This is book three of my choices and brings me to my fourth book, Cecil Beaton's Diaries, which I just finished and which covers the same era. It's wonderful. Both men hated T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia); I think one actually called him "that shit, Lawrence." I suspect they were jealous of him and of his book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was a major hit among my grandparents' generation. I haven't read it but will; I saw the actual Seven Pillars in Wadi Rum in Jordan a few weeks ago and suddenly thought Lawrence was not at all the fraud that Beaton and Nicolson believed him to be.
For my fifth book, I'd pick Mo Hayder's The Devil of Nanking about a woman obsessed with the 1937 Nanking Massacre. It's timely - the Chinese are raising hell with Japan over this yet again- and it's a fine mystery. Beautifully plotted and written. It's ambitious and it works. It is loosely based on a true story about a real individual, Iris Chang, who wrote The Rape of Nangking.
There Bill. My tiny mind at work.
3. How many books do I own?
My defence is that I am older than Bill is. I have thousands and thousands of books.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Books, books
Shopping in the Old City: Beads
The jewellery, especially the old beads for making it, are one of the best things about shopping in the Old City. 
Tiles from the Balian factory
Tiles from Balian's, another famous Armenian Pottery. Their store and factoy are in East Jerusalem, on the Nablus Road, north of the Garden Tomb and south of the American Colony Hotel. Like the Sandrounis, they sell beautiful tiles, murals, dishes and ornaments.
Shopping in the Old City: Armenian Pottery
George and Garo Sandrouni, two of three brothers who own one of the best Armenian pottery shops in Israel; it's in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City. A few days ago they were showing their wares to Laura Bush, when she had a few minutes to spare between demos in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Sandrounis make dishes, ornaments and tiles among their many products, all designed and handpainted on the premises. My favourites are their sinks and we have ordered one, painted with fish swimming in endless circles.
Suzanis on the ceiling
Suzanis, side by side with Palestinian embroideries, decorate a shop in the Arab souk of Jerusalem's Old City
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Shopping in the Old City: suzanis, pottery and beads
For weeks I brushed off all the imploring invitations to step into my shop, welcome, just see, look lady, you don't have to buy, just see lady, welcome, welcome, please, have some coffee, maybe mint tea?
The merchants in the Old City are desperate for customers but even in the good years, good years which have not yet returned, they intimidated me with the endless hassling. It made me crazy. It was the Jerusalem version of squeegee kids.
I was wrong. I should have accepted the invitations.
The hard sell is there, sure it is, but many of the shops are good and the people who own them interesting, charming and easy-going. I have made many good friends among the merchants of the Old City and will miss them when I go home.
But with so many shops, strung along the great streets of the Old City - Christian Quarter Street, David Street, El-Khanqa, Armenian Patriarch Road, Derech Sha'har Ha'arayot - how can you figure out the ones to enter?
Forget trying to decide on the basis of what you need or what you know. Go with what you feel when these merchants show off their best goods. They like to talk and get to know you; when they are a little surer of who you are and what you may be open to, they'll push past the trays of film, the postcards and the Hebron pottery (which I happen to like, okay?) and pull out the pieces which can make your pulse quicken.
Heard of suzanis? I hadn't - not until about three weeks ago. I stumbled over them with a friend when we edged in to one dusty place to look at Palestinian embroideries and old rugs.
"What are these?" I stuttered. "These!" The shopkeeper instantly dropped the stuff he'd pulled out for me and started unfolding suzanis - wonderful, gorgeous, breathtaking. My friend knew all about them; in fact she has a few. Hers, like these ones in the pictures, are antiques.
Suzanis are richly embroidered fabrics made as decorations, bedspreads, curtains, even pillow cases. And they were made in the 'Stans - Uzbekistan, Turkestan, Afghanistan...
The best ones you see now are at least 150 years old, but most of the ones in the shops are about 50 years old. The poppy is the most persistent symbol in them and the pieces come in various colours although most are stitched in reds or pinks with blue, tan, yellow and green silk threads.
I am also hooked (and have been for years) on handpainted Armenian pottery - the tiles, the dishes, the sinks, the lamps and bowls - all covered with the peacocks and flowers and trees and traditional motifs of this culture. There is a ton of nice Hebron pottery around that imitates it, but the real pieces levitate compared to the copies. At home in Toronto, we have a Tree of Life tile mural we had shipped from Balian's on the Nablus Road; for years it waited in a cupboard, each piece wrapped like a little present, until we could afford to renovate our kitchen. Now it fills the space over the stove. Our big buy on this trip is a handpainted sink from the Sandrouni pottery in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City; it will go to the cottage and rest there until we can afford a new bathroom.
Then there are the beads and the bead shops. The pal who taught me about suzanis also showed me the best old beads to buy and I am hooked. It's like crack. My hunt for them has taken me all over Jerusalem and now I am making necklaces for my daughter's wedding. Not with old beads, though; we're going for a more bridal look. Pearls and such. More expensive too, I might add.
I do not understand my new passion for camels
Camels, camels, everywhere! I am besotted and bewildered by these amazing animals.
Kids getting camel rides at a gas station on the way to Jericho. Getting off seems to be the tricky part.
Say cheese!
Camels at Petra - characters, all and how vain. Not that you could blame them; look at those wonderful saddlebags. I like the one with the great teeth and the one sleeping with her head in the sand.
Lunch: In Jerusalem, at the Mahane Yehuda Market, it always starts with pita
Steps to fresh pita: making the dough, patting it into a round, stretching it over a round disk of cloth, slapping it against the wall of a ferocious oven powered by gas, letting it bubble and brown
Mahane Yehuda Market, Jerusalem: Much bigger than I remembered but it was rebuilt after two consecutive suicide bombings killed 15 people there on July 30, 1997. Security guards still roam the place and soldiers with rifles often stand at the entrances.
Returning to Galilee
Not that he wanted to teach us anything; I think Cameron was happy to be as much a tourist as the rest of us - but, when pushed, he explained the significance of each site in a way we have never forgotten.
We've driven up there from Jerusalem many times since we arrived in February. Most of the time we drive north along the Israel-Jordan border past Joshua's town of Jericho, which is controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and then up into the Golan Heights which overlook Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as the Sea of Galilee itself - called Lake Kinneret by most Israelis. Today the Golan is a lush farming area, filled to the horizons with fields of onions, potatoes and wheat, interrupted here and there by machine gun nests, heavily fortified military camps and snarls of barbed wire protecting communications towers.
The route we like best takes us about half-way across the top of the Golan and then hairpins down to the water and along the shores of Galilee to the sites most revered by Christians.
Why do we like these places so much? Because of their modesty, simplicity and authenticity. There is none of the appalling kitsch of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City or the dubious claims, proclaimed by General Gordon, of the charming Garden Tomb by the East Jerusalem Bus Station.
Where Jesus lived and taught
At St. Peter's house in Capernaum: a statue of St. Peter; the synagogue where Jesus taught; the new - and shamefully ugly - church built over the foundation of Peter's house where Jesus lived; some remains of the other houses around Capernaum
At The Mount of the Beatitudes
The monastery at the Church of the Beatitudes; the visitors' centre is at the far centre; the garden in bloom; a walkway to the lake...
Now you may understand why I think this is the most beautiful of all the Christian sites in Israel. The eight-sided Church of the Beatitudes; a porch looking west towards Tiberias; the view looking down the Mount of the Beatutudes to the Sea of Galilee (white netting covers grapevines) and the porch looking towards the east and the Golan Heights.
A bird welcomes us to the gift shop; one of the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"; the terrace in front of the visitors' centre; a prickly pear cactus in bloom
At St. Peter's Church in Galilee
Visiting monks hold an impromptu service by St. Peter's Church at Capernaum - beside the statue of Jesus appearing to Peter after the resurrection (right)
St. Peter's Church at Capernaum
Coming down the walk to the Church of the Primacy of Peter, built by Franciscans in 1938 on the foundations of a Byzantine church. This is where Jesus is said to have appeared to his disciples after the Resurrection and given the leadership to Peter. Visitors, as David is doing here, often take pebbles from the lakeshore to give to sick and grieving friends and relatives.
From the Greek monastery to St. Peter's house
David at the bubble gum Greek monastery; behind him is the roof of Peter's house by the shore where Jesus lived and taught
The Greek Monastery at Capernaum
The bubble gum monastery is surrounded by beautiful gardens; the landing place; David at the shore; chickens in the vegetable garden
Wildlife at Capernaum
An egret goes fishing by the shore; schools of fish by the dock; cormorants taking their ease; a peacock trying to woo his indifferent mate
Arriving at Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee
Entering the visitors' centre at Capernaum; looking back up the hill from the water; two of the etched glass guides to the history of this site
The Golan Heights - on our way to Galilee
Looking down from the Golan Heights to the Jordan River and across into Jordan; coming down the road to the Sea of Galilee with an eagle headed our way; a massive sprayer waters crops on the Golan; a field of onions in bloom
