most of our neighbors took time to warm to us. But no one made us feel more welcome than Meir, the local grocer. Almost right off — from the first morning I stumbled out to buy bread, butter, and a box of long-life milk — he insisted we make ourselves at home here, in his home, a place generously defined not just as his own store but the whole closely knit neighborhood, the entire ingrown country. An effusive set of hellos and salutes greeted each customer who passed into his shop — in physical if not psychological fact just two narrow aisles crammed with merchandise. It became clear upon entering the store, though, that Meir’s honor, his family’s honor, and maybe even the honor of his long-dead ancestors was at stake with each and every bubble-gum sale, and soon we, like almost everyone in Musrara, had become friends of a commercial but genuine sort with the shopkeeper and Yaffa, his eerily intuitive wife.
Meir had grown up in Musrara. Then, not so many years ago, as a newlywed, he’d opened his “mini-market” and emblazoned in crimson letters across its yellow awning YAFFA, much, perhaps, in the way a boatman christens a new vessel with the name of his lady love as a final good-luck touch before setting out to sea. Meir’s Mini-Market Yaffa was, in my own admittedly biased estimation, the best grocery store in the entire city: not just because Meir and his lanky Arab assistant (whose name and face changed every six months or so but whose height remained the same, as if Meir hired with tall shelves and hard-to-reach canned goods in mind, no experience necessary) made sure to stock the dairy refrigerator and bread bins freshly every single day, but also because Meir was such a pleasure to buy yogurt and tinfoil, chickpeas and vinegar from. Cookies and pastries arrived warm every morning from a bakery nearby; farm eggs, some with a few wispy feathers still stuck to their shells, sat stacked in their open cardboard flats; the high tin shelves were always dusted and filled with boxes, sacks, jars, and tubs of the simplest and most essential stuff; even the Hebrew tabloids looked edible there, laid out in their crisp, inky piles. The only really frivolous items in the shop were the brightly wrapped chocolate bars and packets of hard candies, the bottles of lollipops and licorice whips, arrayed in tight rows across the sliding tops of two huge blue Popsicle freezers. Although one sensed from this lavishly sweet display Meir’s soft spot for his own small children and by extension all the children in the neighborhood, these confections too were a serious matter. A good part of Meir’s business, during the summertime in particular, came from the under-ten set, who seemed to survive for the season on a diet of nothing but sunshine, sugar, and colored ice.
While other stores in town might have boasted more exotic and varied merchandise, none I’d encountered was quite so neatly or proudly organized. There was little wasted space, all the goods at Meir’s meant to be bought, consumed, and replenished right off, though my frequent visits to the store did prompt in me the urge to squirrel away items I knew I didn’t need. I often found myself contemplating packages — of coconut flakes, dried figs, sesame crackers, red lentils, bulgur — for which I had no obvious use but which looked so appealing in relation to the rest of the store’s unpretentious inventory that I had to restrain myself from buying them for their own sake, in the name of abstract plenty. The sudden urge to stockpile that struck me upon entering the store was not, I see now, a matter of greed or gluttony, but followed from Meir’s own bearing. It was impossible to conceive of a growling stomach while sheltered inside Meir’s retail pleasure dome, yet just beneath the offhand surface of each of his cottage-cheese transactions lay an awareness of the acute necessity of every item sold and bought. It was with a sense of quiet gratitude, not luxury or indulgence, that one placed one’s groceries on Meir’s counter and waited for a tally.
And if Meir’s shop wasn’t satisfying enough on its own terms, one needed only to compare it with the other “mini-market” nearby — two streets down and worlds away — to understand its literal and symbolic superiority. This second shop was more typical of the city’s grocery stores, a poorly stocked little box of a place run by a well-meaning but sluggish man named Mani and his rather sour wife, who always slumped on a stool behind the counter with the unfocused sneer of someone who has been startled awake before getting a decent night’s sleep. Mani seemed resigned to his role as the neighborhood’s lesser grocer, and he invested most of his limited energies in rearranging the counters and freezers once every couple of weeks. While the floor plan kept changing, the food itself sat for too long on the shelves, going stale if not bad and giving the whole shop the grimly desperate air of a survivalist’s pantry — an impression underscored by the building’s close proximity to a municipal bomb shelter. Located at the bottom of the same incline that Meir’s market crowned, this other store owed its continued existence solely to topography. The local stragglers, those who couldn’t be bothered to venture the slight uphill grade to Meir’s, shopped there for their staples: presliced white bread, cigarettes, cola. Sometimes on mornings when I didn’t feel like giving my mind over immediately to upbeat conversation and just needed some milk for the coffee already brewing on the stove, I too would trip the path of least resistance and find myself skulking into Mani’s, plagued most times by a pang of melodramatic guilt. Patronizing this sad-sack spot was, I knew, a betrayal, not just of Meir but of all that he stood for — pride, care, determination, even art.
So most days I found reason to buy something from Meir the master grocer, both for the sake of that something itself and my own social well-being. And if ever I found myself short a few coins, or even bills, Meir would sternly insist I take what I need and pay him back later: “Are you sure you don’t want something else? Some juice?” (He knew well my repertoire of usual purchases.) “Do you need some cheese? Don’t be embarrassed. Take, take.” Mayor, we renamed him privately, the mayor of our small city-village, for his easy yet politic charisma and unflagging ability to make anyone who passed under the circus-tent-like awning flaps and into his shop feel fortunate. This even-handed welcome, or canny business sense, even extended to the realm of national politics and the pictures that he chose to display above the cash register, alongside a slick ad for Swiss-style yogurt, a popular kabbalistic bumper sticker, and his neatly handwritten Hebrew exhortation to have a GOOD MORNING, GOOD AFTERNOON, GOOD EVENING, GOOD NIGHT, THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND GOOD-BYE. After the last elections, he had dutifully tacked a shiny paper portrait of the new right-wing prime minister alongside the fading portrait of the old left-wing prime minister, for whom he himself had voted. “So no one should talk,” he explained when I remarked at the unusual sight of the two sworn enemies smiling side by side. Later, though, as the political situation worsened and each party leader fell from Meir’s favor, he removed both their faces from his shop wall, and replaced them with a safer long-term bet, a large framed photograph of a white-bearded Moroccan rabbi in an elegant conical hat. “Khalas,” said Meir this time when I asked, the terse Arabic for “enough,” with which I had to agree.
Still, in general he avoided sticky political or religious discussion and preferred to keep the talk in his store focused on more upbeat matters. He managed the shop and the conversations that took place there as if this were a party and he were the host, responsible for keeping the mood light and music flowing. Sometimes he would shush a tirade about to begin and steer the truculent speaker back to a friendlier subject: the weather, the lotto or soccer results. When he discovered I worked as a film critic, he had a convenient new topic to trot out in a conversational bind: movie stars. What do you say about the new Schwarzenegger? Sharon Stone, do you like Sharon Stone? Al Pacino! Now there’s an actor … Rude neighborhood children, confused American tourists, sunburnt Romanian workers, stooped Arab grandfathers, bleary-eyed civil servants from nearby City Hall, me — he treated us all to the same casually measured banter that he directed at his cronies, a ragtag group of layabouts whom he had grown up with and, it seemed, considered as close and unshakable as his own brothers. In various tipsy formations, this lazy crew would gather around the sandwich counter at his store most evenings to stand, drinking whiskey and wolfing down the little black olives and peeled cucumber slices he set out on a saucer and replenished as customers shuffled in for a few last items before closing time. Sometimes he even served his buddies entire hot dinners that he would spontaneously conjure from one or two ingredients lifted off the store’s shelves. The men had usually grown quite rowdy by this time and would drunkenly croon some synagogue song as they pushed the stacks of newspapers and piles of soup mix and cookie packets aside, pulled up chairs around the table that served as an extra counter, and awaited Meir’s latest pungent concoction: white rice and tomatoey-sweet beans (from a can, yet transformed in this magical context into a great delicacy) or perfect circles of parsley-green ejjah, thick Moroccan omelettes cooked on the small orange camp stove perched on a stool just behind the counter. Mint tea followed, poured into glasses from a dented but sparkling tin pot with an elegantly curved handle, after which — I do not know. Perhaps this straggly men’s club picked up and carried on elsewhere, when the other customers left and Meir locked his shop doors, although by this hour he himself usually seemed anxious to close up and get home to his wife and three little boys whom he plainly adored more than anything on earth.
With his baby-fat padding and full black mustache, Meir still looked young, but he already carried himself as a kind of tribal-elder-in-the-making, a breed apart from his drinking buddies who grew louder and sillier as each of these evenings wore on and the whiskey bottle’s contents lessened. Meir, too, would sip the harsh local liquor from a little glass near closing time and allow it to mellow his mood. But as he counted the money in the till, stowed away the outdoor cake and newspaper racks, placed a final telephone order for the next day’s rolls and bread, and bolted the front doors behind him, he stayed more or less sober. One had the sense, in fact, watching him in constant thoughtful action that, no matter how much of the cheap booze he gulped down in the name of friendship, he had lost the ability to ever get really drunk. He had too many details pressing on his mind. Although his demeanor was always outgoing — either jolly or agitated, but never turned inward — the better I knew him, the more I understood that running the little grocery as cheerfully as he did was a tremendous, grueling task, made all the more daunting by the sleight-of-hand that allowed him to appear most often in high spirits. Meir loved his work, that was clear, but that love didn’t shorten his fourteen-hour workdays, or make it any simpler to demand credit payments from some of the neighborhood’s shiftier residents. For the first few years that we shopped at his store no one, so far as I could tell, was denied a running tab by Meir, who kept track of what was owed and paid in a neat black box beside the register, but whose fundamental sense of the need to prevent his neighbors from going without food was occasionally tested by an especially snaky shirker, or by the most unapologetic bill dodgers, who would send their smallest children to collect the items on a list as a last-ditch means of further stalling payment. Meir couldn’t very well refuse a six-year-old her request for tea bags, frozen peas, and laundry soap. The child, often too young to read, would hand Meir her mother’s list like a bank robber’s stickup note and wait, understandably a bit confused by the whole transaction and her own role as an innocent go-between. More than once I’d heard him bellowing into the phone at an “old friend” who pleaded sudden insolvency and appealed without shame to Meir’s already-overextended sympathies. (And what about the friend’s sympathies? Meir had a business to run.) Another time I listened as he explained with weary firmness that the customer on the other end of the line could not pay off her grocery bill with used stereo equipment. Soon after, a terse sign in Meir’s own hand appeared, announcing NO CREDIT GIVEN HERE, once and for all. The declaration didn’t seem cold so much as necessary, a weary step that Meir had in essence been forced to take by people more cavalier about their debts — both financial and emotional — than he. He’d tried his hardest to help his friends and neighbors and too many of them had let him down, and though I myself had only rarely and always skittishly bought on credit, making sure to pay up within twenty-four hours, I too felt responsible, as if I were partly to blame for the collective abuse of his overwhelming goodwill.
Not that he ever complained to me or to Peter. The closest he came might be a mumbled confession of slight fatigue, or a general What can you do? murmured late in a slow day of a particularly hot midsummer week. One just knew, though, that his job was endless and arduous: Even when he was struck with a second heart attack, Meir insisted on returning to work after a scant and, I gathered, extremely restless week in bed. How are things, Adina? How is Peter? What’s new? Send my best, a warm hello — he welcomed me, upon his own return, before I had time to greet him. Meir’s well-being might have been threatened directly by the wear and tear of these grueling days, but he refused to buckle, insisting (implicitly, by his constant charismatic presence) he was well enough to stand upright behind the counter and greet his customers by name as they trickled in throughout the day. Any rest cure a cautious doctor might prescribe was emotionally useless.
Yaffa, his wife, also had a regal bearing. She was naturally shyer than her husband, or at least more obvious in her introspection, a trait unusual among the shrill young mothers of our neighborhood. There was, too, a cloud of just-perceptible sadness that sometimes shadowed her face, making it difficult to say for sure if she was depressed or simply daydreaming. Yaffa took her public role far too seriously to ever grumble or detail specific woes from behind the cash register, but she also couldn’t prevent the trace of her bluer moods from seeping through the politely cheerful facade she’d learned from her husband, to whom boisterous sociability came as second nature. Late morning and into the afternoon, the quietest patch in the store’s brisk day, she would relieve Meir of his post behind the counter, and when I sauntered in for a can of tuna fish or package of white cheese, I’d find her sitting very still, inhaling the silence and her cigarette as, in the summertime, the industrial-sized fan ruffled her dark ponytail and the papers on the counter. In the winter she worked all day in a long wool coat. Although she adopted a slightly formal tone with me — asking laconically how I was, then handing me an unnecessary receipt after ringing up my items and thanking me in careful Hebrew when I paid — I sensed in her presence a kind of bedrock understanding, despite our real differences. Her eyes would meet mine and she’d smile slightly as she placed my things carefully in a large plastic bag and wished me a good day. When she was pregnant, and in the weeks just after Meir’s latest heart attack, she would sit in the same chair, pitched forward intently, reading psalms to herself in a barely audible whisper.
There was something good-witch-like about Yaffa. Her name — and by extension the mini-market’s name — means “beautiful,” which seemed unfair to me in the beginning, given how plain she looked at first glance. But the longer I knew her, the more the name seemed prophetic, a kind of slow-seeping secret to be revealed only later to those she trusted well enough to grace with one of her sudden, dazzling grins. Then her entire face would light up, her brown eyes glitter, and her whole being shine for an instant, radiant.
The first time she flashed me one of these smiles I was caught completely off guard, aware at some dim but happy level that the awkwardness of our limited relationship had lessened and that our connection had progressed, if not to real friendship then at least to real, unspoken affection. She had just given birth to her third son, and Meir — beaming ecstatically behind the counter late one afternoon when I wandered in to buy orange juice for a predinner screwdriver — invited me and Peter to the circumcision, to be held the next day at a banquet hall on the outskirts of town. I was moved, probably more moved than was altogether reasonable or appropriate. He had doubtless invited half the neighborhood, any familiar face that had happened into his store that day. At the time, though, this didn’t matter. The simple fact that he considered us part of the neighborhood in this invitation-worthy way moved me. As he carefully copied down the address of the hall and the time of the festivities in Magic Marker and “with the help of God” I realized that, for better or worse, Peter and I had both already made other plans and wouldn’t be able to attend. But I thanked Meir several times and took care, a few days later, to appear at the store bearing the gift of denim infant overalls wrapped in sparkly paper. Purchasing this token, too, had taxed me much more than it should have. I’d spent the better part of an afternoon wandering downtown in search of the right present, then paced the floor of the kids’ clothing store unsure about the amount I should spend, the size of the baby, even the outfit’s slightly precious French label: maybe it was too snobby, too imported-looking, too much. And perhaps it was an excessive gesture to give any gift at all. I understood well enough that my sense of scale was out of whack in relation to Meir and Yaffa. They didn’t know it, of course, but sometimes my writing would keep me indoors all day and I wouldn’t see another soul besides Peter until I emerged from the house in time for my dusk-hour run to their shop, ostensibly to buy soda water or a can of pickles but really to be sure to speak face-to-face with some other human being before the sky darkened completely. I felt so thankful toward them for simply being there on these occasions — calm, cheerful, and apparently unneurotic — that I guessed a gesture too grand was better than too meager.
And I guessed right. In thanks for my probably extravagant gift, Yaffa offered one of those full-wattage grins when she saw me next. Now she was full of familiar chatter and seemed more relaxed in my presence, greeting me each time I saw her with a soft burst of gossipy odds and ends, in themselves nothing special (one of the children had a rash, it was so hot today), but poignant in the context of Yaffa’s typical reserve. Unlike the usual avid, undiscriminating local small-talkers, Yaffa’s carriage was not automatically outgoing and jolly. It seemed as hard for her to muster this breezy nonchalance as it was for me to absorb it, and our mutual reticence linked us as a private joke would.
Although I’m sure Yaffa couldn’t begin to guess how I spent my days, she seemed interested, which already set her apart from the other women in our neighborhood. I couldn’t be certain but I had a strong sense that most of the rest of the nearby female population considered me at best inscrutable and at worst a sort of freak — possibly even the target of a curse — for not rushing to be a mother. Choice in such matters was more than out of the question: It was heresy. Barrenness would be better (biblical, even), and I assumed that most of them must have ascribed my “condition” to some incurable anatomical flaw, worthy of prayer and a few tongue clicks. Mazal, for instance, a blowsy Algerian neighbor who lived catty-corner and half a story above us and whose offspring numbered somewhere between ten and fifteen — I didn’t try to keep track — offered a condescending smile one day as she watched me watering the porch garden and then called across her balcony in the most encouraging voice she could manage that “plants are just like children.” Another neighbor-mother was distant toward me on the whole but allowed herself to greet me knowingly and ask how I was feeling when she once saw me balancing a liter of milk and family-sized tray of eggs on one arm: Those were quantities she recognized, and I’m sure she took the vision of me-with-milk-and-thirty-six-eggs as an announcement of my intentions.
And the unspoken curiosity about my childbearing potential was, we knew, conjoined in our neighbors’ minds with whispered speculation about Peter’s precise line of work. (I think they assumed I had none.) After watching my poet-husband intently tending our spilling jasmine, bougainvillea, and honeysuckle for several months, one man who lived next door and up one floor blurted his guess outright: “You work for the Society for the Protection of Nature!” No? “You’re a florist …?” Every time I passed our tubby yenta of a neighbor, Miri, in the street, she’d ask me nonchalantly how I was and was Peter abroad? She hadn’t seen him in such a long time, after all, and she had begun to worry.… Abroad, too, had certain dubious connotations, vaguely financial. When yet another nearby neighbor was packed off to prison on a drug-smuggling charge (thus clarifying once and for all his precise line of work — which, based on the furtive hours he kept, the harsh fluency of the Arabic he used to shout at the construction workers forever drilling next door, and the unblinking deadness of his stare, I’d erroneously guessed involved the Shin Bet and violent interrogation), his little daughter developed an unnatural interest in Peter, roughly her father’s age, to whom she announced that her daddy had gone to America. He did at long last return from those golden shores, looking tired and thin but bearing armfuls of gifts for his three blessedly oblivious children.
Yaffa, meanwhile, didn’t seem to care about my maternal prospects or Peter’s mystery profession. If anything, I sensed live interest in us as an unknown quantity — familiar foreigners or foreign familiars. Who, I wondered, did she imagine we were, this couple come from far away to settle down on her turf? The Russians and Ethiopians who spoke softly in their own languages as they padded cautiously down the slippery stone of the neighborhood’s streets were part of larger, sociological trends and mass migrations that didn’t require explanation. But why would secular-seeming Americans pick up and come here of their own free will? There were other Western transplants in the immediate vicinity, journalists mostly, reporters posted in Israel for stints of several years before their newspapers or TV stations shipped them off to some other continent. But they kept to themselves, spoke little Hebrew, and drove to the impersonal, multi-aisled supermarket to shop at all hours of the night. Most of them maintained a studied, even incurious, distance from the natives, whether in the name of reportorial objectivity or simpler contempt for the brash local manner, I was never sure.
It is possible, come to think of it, that Yaffa and the other seasoned residents simply didn’t register the presence of this international secret society that passed stealthily through their midst like a band of haughty spies. I myself never saw its members in the street or at the bus stop; I knew of their existence only through my work writing film criticism for the local English-language paper, and from a few cocktail parties we had attended. There, though the tongue spoken was my own, the music, mixed drinks, and vegetable dip familiar, I felt more profoundly out of place than I did with our other, North African–born neighbors, from whom my differences were more obviously pronounced. One-on-one, some of the journalists were sympathetic, intelligent people — several of them were our friends — but as a group they frightened me: I didn’t like the callous, know-it-all laughter that crowded the air when they came together and drank, the way the boozy generalities of their conversation sloshed from Jerusalem to Sarajevo, from Cairo to Moscow and back again (pat analysis of genocide and coups d’état overlapped with gossip about such-and-such a bureau chief whose wife had just left him). They boasted as they compared notes on famous people and places — each showing off his or her clever grasp of an entire culture in just a few parlor-game-length sentences. While I envied their confidence at some level, their glib attitude also angered me. With a smarting resentment that I’d try to quash with an extra plastic cup of vodka and too-sweet local tonic, I marveled at their collective ability to travel so far and so wide, and take in so very little.
How could they be so cocksure? We had lived for several years now on this narrow, cobbled alleyway, and I still barely felt I could account for the view out my own kitchen window, let alone the National Mood, the Prospects for Peace, or even the behavior of a couple of strangers as particular and vast in their complexity as Meir and Yaffa.
The two of us rarely ventured into Meir’s store together, yet once on our way home from a late-afternoon walk downtown we stopped in for a few dinner things, and Meir was for some reason overcome by the sight of us side by side — or, perhaps, of my husband in the flesh. Peter had been absorbed of late in his medieval translations and what he called their deep-sea-diving pressures, and had grown reluctant to run the gabby gauntlet that a trip to Meir’s entailed, so I did most of the shopping. The longer my husband avoided the place, though, the more he dominated my conversations with Meir, as a kind of make-believe or mythical character, fodder for our casual talk, not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger. HowareyouandhowisPeter? Meir would ask in one breath. Then he’d insist that I convey his best wishes to my invisible spouse. But now the recipient of these hand-me-down hellos was here in person and in honor of this rare event, Meir showered him with a far noisier greeting than the friendly but muted hello that my entrance typically warranted. After they shook hands and exchanged the usual Hello, how are you, how do you feel, what’s new, what’s up, how’s your health, and what’s happening, to which the answers were just as polite and programmatic — though genuinely warm — as the questions, Meir welcomed me by name: Shalom, ’Adina, the guttural A of the letter ayin gulped down correctly, as I myself cannot pronounce it. And then, without warning, Meir announced that “the time had come.” We should, he declared, visit them sometime for a Shabbat meal.
I swallowed and left Peter to handle the appropriately imprecise acceptance of Meir’s clearly stated yet somehow tentative invitation. We all felt a bit uncomfortable, I think, as soon as we’d completed this little ritual dance. The lines between business and friendship were always pleasantly blurred inside Meir’s store, yet within a tiny, reliable range. One went on an errand to buy garbage bags or a loaf of bread understanding exactly what one ought to say and do. Now, the idea of transplanting this connection elsewhere, opening it out and confusing its familiar form, seemed reckless and even scary. It threatened our subsistence-level sense of ourselves in the neighborhood — the relaxed, unfussy shape of our daily interactions there, the chain of endless, unremarkable events from which we derived an enormous and essential sort of pleasure. What would we talk about over dinner? If it didn’t go well, could I ever come back to Meir’s and chat according to same old neat formulas? Though I felt close to Meir and Yaffa, in truth I’d never exchanged more than four contiguous sentences with either one of them or spent longer than five consecutive minutes in their presence.
There was also another, more primal aspect to our response — our dread, which we later admitted to each other as we made our way home past the ragtag, boys-only soccer game that seemed always to be in rowdy progress on the floodlit outdoor court that sat smack at the neighborhood’s center. We lived, for the most part, on good terms with our Sephardic neighbors, though it was already plain to me that no matter how long we lived here and how much they liked us as individuals, we would always seem to them part of the same constitutionally withdrawn, allegedly well-off Ashkenazi elite. Or, at very best, we might be considered the exception to some basic, unflattering rule. Being Americans — initiates in the all-powerful free-market cult and also not, to their thinking, primarily Jewish — no doubt made us more acceptable. But what if, as guests of Meir and Yaffa, we revealed ourselves to be condescending snobs or panicked, prissy “whities” — not just in their eyes but, more devastating still, in our own? Aside from a spontaneous little Coca-Cola toast we’d drunk in the marble-tiled living room of our Moroccan-born contractor-neighbor, Yaakov, along with Ali, the neighborhood’s dapper Palestinian fix-it man, over TV coverage of the signing of the Oslo peace accords, live from the White House Rose Garden (Rabin, Arafat, and Clinton each represented nationally by those gathered around this Jerusalem tube in a trilingual circus of simultaneous translation), none of our neighbors had ever formally invited us into their homes for a meal: to do so would mean venturing over some final ethnic frontier that both they and we tacitly understood was simpler left uncrossed. Yaakov’s pillowy wife, who tended to bellow at her children in the same awesome, glass-rattling tones as her mother, Rina, our neighbor from the house on Daniel Street, grew silent when we entered, and offered a far-off smile, welcoming us with uncharacteristic formality before dutifully scrambling away to fill her best bowls with sunflower seeds and potato chips in honor of our arrival. She then wandered outside to smoke a cigarette and play with the baby, and made a point of not returning; her reluctance to sit and yack might have seemed haughty or cold to an innocent onlooker, though I’d already spent enough time in the neighborhood to recognize her standoffishness as fright — plain, blunt panic at the thought of interacting for longer than a few proscribed seconds with the childless Americans from upstairs, let alone with an Arab worker, no matter how charming or given to ironic winks Ali the handyman was.
There were neighborhood-business-related cups of coffee here and there, up and down the street, but they were few and far between (and by nature spur of the moment). But Meir’s invitation was different. “The time has come” he’d said, which seemed to acknowledge in its drum-rolling though pragmatic way the very difference and difficulty I’m attempting to describe, the vault we were all poised to try to clear. In the meantime, though, his offer remained abstract and we half-contented ourselves with the knowledge that such spontaneous invitations were always being threatened in these parts and weren’t necessarily acted upon. Mazal, the prolific matron next door, for instance, spent most summertime Saturday mornings swathed in a long robe on her balcony, brusquely insisting that various acquaintances who passed by come up and join her for tea. Why not? she’d demand to know if they declined, which happened most often. And no excuse was good enough: She pretended to refuse to believe they had another appointment, or an invitation elsewhere, and would use the gruffest terms to accuse the victims of her bullying hospitality of fibbing. It was part of a little game she played each week. When will you come? Why not now? What’s your problem? Come up here now! And so she would begin again, with a touch of flirtatious anger.
But Meir, it turned out, meant it. (Later, I realized it could not have been otherwise: Meir always meant it.) Early in the next week, I finally overcame the fit of perverse misanthropy that had kept me from entering the store after his sudden demonstrative display and, as a sort of cosmic punishment for my antisocial behavior, I found myself alone with Meir, who I was sure had sensed my previous deliberate absence and now my creeping shame. First, he rang up my items and asked the usual polite questions about my health and my husband’s. Then he softly suggested we come eat with them that Friday night. This time around, he sounded almost apologetic, though in a respectful way — as if to cushion the discomfort that he knew I must be feeling. As a man of his word he was, I understood, now obligated to host us. And I saw that we also had no choice but to accept. I did so, a dry smile pinned across my lips, then trudged home. Peter would be irritable about this development, I knew, annoyed at my bursting the private little work-and-newspaper-filled bubble of the weekend ahead. And in fact I’d had a perfectly legitimate excuse I’d forgotten to wield — a marathon of previews for an upcoming film festival, scheduled to run late into Friday night. But it was too late. As soon as I remembered my previous cinematic engagement, I knew I’d have to scrap it. The time, I supposed, had come.
Although I would love to report that all our misgivings evaporated and gave miraculous way to pure public confidence in the days leading up to the dinner, the opposite is true. By the time the designated evening rolled around, we’d both worked ourselves into a quietly gloomy mood of anxious anticipation. After consulting with a friend better versed than we in the tricky soft-shoe of religious etiquette, we determined that a bottle of wine could be brought without offense. We each changed our clothes several times in nervous silence, then set out on the suddenly long-seeming journey several meters around the corner to the looming public housing projects where our hosts lived.
I had passed these monolithic gray buildings every day since we moved to Musrara, though I’d ventured inside just once in all these years. The place was, in essence, the sum symbolic total of all the impassable-seeming ethnic and class barriers that still existed everywhere around us. Though our neighborhood was in theory fully integrated, it was in practice still divided, as newcomers like us had paid handsomely to settle in the elegant old Arab houses with their scalloped lintels, interior arches, and high, sometimes vaulted, ceilings. Meanwhile, the two urban fortresses at the neighborhood’s heart — boxy cement slabs constructed several decades before to provide the needy residents nothing more complicated than shelter — still belonged to the original occupants or their children and grandchildren, the only notable exception being a few slender-boned families of Ethiopians who’d moved in over the last decade. This was poor people’s housing, and though renovations had recently been carried out on the buildings’ facades — a decorative-stone false front stuck like a Band-Aid across the dirty concrete — there was no disguising the essential ugliness of the structures, or the basic character of the place as a home for those without the means to choose where they would rather live.
On most days, the long public balconies were filled with old women who sat in housedresses, head scarves, and spangled slippers, eyeing passersby from their stuffed armchair posts. Now, on Friday evening, this open-air living room was empty and we tiptoed past it, then up and down and around an interchangeable-looking series of empty hallways and institutional staircases several times before we found the correct apartment. Meir’s instructions had been immaculate yet useless, since none of the building’s entrances or floors were marked: We only found their home by asking an extremely pregnant young woman who ran through a list of possible Marcianos — Meir’s brothers, cousins, uncles, apparently, who all lived within shouting range. She then gave our gift bottle of wine and my somehow foreign maroon dress a suspicious once-over and pointed us warily in the direction of the appropriate door.
The combined sounds of Friday-evening mealtime prayers, the nightly television news broadcast, the screech of a movie car chase, a few loud women’s voices, and the wails of what seemed like dozens of crying children but might well have been just a noisy two or three surged up, jumbled, and recombined to form a dull yet omnipresent wall of noise. As we plodded upstairs, pausing at each landing to fumble in the dark for the timed light switch, it was impossible to say precisely where each of the parts of that racket came from. Meir and Yaffa lived on the top floor, and by the time we reached their door, the din in the stairwell gurgled all around our feet, a boil of human lava threatening to spill.
Inside, though, it was unnaturally quiet, as if the walls themselves were preoccupied with the thought of the delicate dynamic that was sure to characterize the long evening ahead, and Yaffa welcomed us with a serene smile that just barely masked her obviously threadbare nerves. The rich, layered scent of the food she’d probably spent all day preparing greeted us even before we knocked, and inside the apartment the smell was still warmer and sweeter. Meir had not yet returned home from synagogue, she explained in a slightly officious tone as she gestured us inside the apartment, whose central area was filled with bright oil paintings of flowers and familiar neighborhood landscapes. This space served the multiple functions of entryway, corridor, dining room, living room, TV room, and playroom for the children. Would we like a drink? Yaffa appeared at the sparkling glass coffee table with a large, new bottle of fine imported vodka — Peter’s favorite brand, which Meir had understood we would appreciate. I felt a cheapskate’s blush coming on at the thought of all the rot-gut alcohol I’d paid for with loose change at his store, along with cartons of juice to wash the stinging poison down. Meir, though, had selected in our honor a tall bottle of the very best, and priciest, stuff.
My anxiousness began to pass as Yaffa placed the bottle on the table and we were suddenly surrounded on the faux-leather sofa by her three peering boys, each neatly combed and scrubbed, dressed in a clean shirt and skullcap for the Friday-night meal. Ely, the eldest at age nine or so, was a small, stocky boss-man with probing eyes and a driven gait. He looked like a fairer version of his father and shared his carefully effusive demeanor. After steadily meeting my gaze, then Peter’s, and introducing himself and his brothers in a comically formal manner, he sprang up to fetch glasses, then wrestled open the vodka cap and poured us glasses a little too full of the strong liquid. The uneasy air had already started to lift, and Yaffa herself looked amused and relieved at this precociously elegant bartending display by her oldest, but still little, son. She set out the requisite bowls of peanuts and potato chips then excused herself to attend to her chorus of burbling pots and pans. Meanwhile we sat on the couch between the boys, and Ely regaled us with a disquisition on his Sabbath routine: Most Friday nights he went to synagogue with his father, he explained, but tonight he had offered to stay and help his mother set the table.… He then disappeared into another room and emerged a minute later bearing his brother’s firstgrade penmanship notebook, which he proceeded to show off, ruled page by ruled page, with a bizarre adult pride at his younger sibling’s scribbling crawl through the alphabet. “Gimel,” he said, “is already much clearer than bet, don’t you think? Look at his lamed! Even better.” Yonatan, the bashful author of the work in question, could only wrinkle his nose and throw a fistful of marbles across the floor in response. But Ely was unswayed and continued with the same patient, teacherly air — so peculiar for a child that I just nodded and reiterated his own words of praise, not in honor of his brother’s fledgling hand as much as his own uncanny politesse. “And this is my favorite —” he announced with a philosophical hum. “A blank page. Unspoiled.” His world-weary demeanor almost made me laugh out loud, but instead I forced my tongue against my teeth and took another sip.
And so Ely and his little brothers continued to entertain us until Meir finally appeared at the door in a larger version of the same pressed shirt and neat skullcap, booming with good wishes. The boys scampered off to jump on him like hungry puppy dogs and we rose stiffly from the sofa, each in our own way determined to make light of the situation’s pronounced strain. (Amid the exuberant din of Sabbath greeting, Peter extended a hand to meet Meir’s own and I smiled a little too widely.) The nonchalance we affected as we moved to gather around the dining room table and act relaxed in a respectful way while Meir blessed the wine and bread and his children in turn was, of course, transparently put-on: The awkwardness of our being there must have been as plain to Meir and Yaffa as it was to us. But so was our unspoken determination to push above and beyond this first level of strangeness. As we sat down, Meir, ever the diplomat, rushed to our rescue and perhaps his own with a torrent of insistently animated talk.
Meanwhile, with table-waiting help from somber little Ely, Yaffa served up the meal, which was — how else to put it? — quite simply one of the most satisfying I have ever eaten. It seemed endless, and describing the whole of it now — the array of cooked Eastern salads, the onion and egg pie, the tossed green salad, the peppery fish, the meat and rice and chicken and potatoes, the vegetables, the sliced fruit and hot mint tea — it sounds like a recipe for staggering gluttony, although in fact after each course, I’d consider myself completely sated, incapable of another bite, until Yaffa would appear, her expression at once eager and a bit concerned as she set down the next fleet of dishes before us. And then, again, I’d find myself ravenous for more, driven by a feeling of awe at the total, unstinting nature of the hospitality to which they had treated us, and an almost feverish sort of raw animal craving. (Whether or not I’d had my fill, I vowed to eat and eat.)
Throughout the meal, a place sat empty, waiting for Sa’adia, one of Meir’s older brothers. I had heard, though I hadn’t quite fathomed, that Sa’adia was a legend — not just in our neighborhood, but around the city and across the entire country. As a punkish teenager several lifetimes before, he had been one of the founders of the Israeli Black Panthers, a fact that at the time of our eventual meeting meant little to me, except in the most general and superficial terms. (Peter knew more, about which he remained tactfully silent.) Perhaps if I’d been less absorbed in my plate I would have intuited something of Sa’adia’s stature, at least within the family, from the fanfare that preceded his entrance. Only later did I learn that Sa’adia Marciano, as ringleader of the Panthers, had almost single-handedly created the myth of radical Musrara. To this day when most outsiders hear our address, this is their first association. The notorious, furious Sa’adia Marciano. When I did finally get around to asking questions and looking into Sa’adia’s past, at the library and newspaper archives, I was amazed by the sheer quantity of documents his activities had generated — interviews, photographs, news reports, documentary films, academic articles, leaflets (“Downtrodden Citizen!… You are downtrodden not because you were born that way, but because someone is treading on you”), even a Ph.D. dissertation about the day-to-day doings of twenty-two-year-old Sa’adia and his friends. He’d started an adolescent street organizer, leader of a group of poor Musrara kids who’d been in and out of reform school and jail and who were enraged at what they saw as the European-born establishment’s contemptuous disregard for pressing social concerns — for them, in other words — and wound up a Knesset member, representing a small, left-wing splinter party. (He quit soon after, in a complicated shift of ideological, financial, and power alliances typical of the Israeli parliament.) And even before he’d achieved the unlikely status of public official, he and the others were savvy enough to flamboyantly milk the media and to understand the associative power of the term Black Panthers. “We chose that name,” Sa’adia explained in one interview, “because we knew that Golda Meir was aware of the American Black Panthers’ reputation. We wanted to scare her.” (In one classic incident, the Russian-born, American-raised prime minister did in fact sound plenty frightened as she delivered a mousy denunciation of the Panthers after meeting with them. “They are,” she said, “not nice.”) Nearly every statement the Panthers made, and every defiant display they attempted, became a major headline, in part because Israel a quarter century ago was hardly much more than a big small town, but also because they’d obviously hit a nerve. In many ways, that nerve — ethnic mistrust, economic inequality — remains exposed to this day. And though the Panthers have long since split up, Sa’adia slipped from public view, and the terms of the discussion changed, its pain persists and continues to drive much of the country’s internal politics. Looking back, though, through those stacks of brittle clippings, one senses how palpably Sa’adia and his friends must have felt themselves poised on the precipice-edge of the Revolution. One newspaper story, dated September 3, 1971, screamed PANTHERS SURRENDER IN ZION SQUARE, and showed a picture of a pudgy-cheeked Sa’adia, no more than a boy, a cigarette raised in one hand, being grabbed from all sides by a group of older men: He’d staged an illegal demonstration that had given way to a riot, fled underground for several days, then, after alerting the press, given himself up to the authorities in a heat storm of flashbulbs. The caption read “Jerusalem Panther leaders Sa’adia Marciano and Charlie Biton, taken into custody by police detectives in Zion Square … Marciano’s sweatshirt carries the slogan BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY — MALCOLM X.”
Now, at Meir’s table, constant reference was made to him as we ate — Sa’adia said, Sa’adia did, Sa’adia is — though two hours into the food I began to wonder seriously if he would ever appear. For a few fleeting seconds I even mused that perhaps his coming was just a wishful figment of Meir’s imagination. Maybe the hint of his imminent arrival was some sort of practical joke the family played on unwitting Ashkenazi guests. I didn’t believe he would come.
We had just finished our dessert when Sa’adia arrived. The older children had run off to play with their cousins and friends in the stairwell; Peter and Meir were leaning, elbows on the table, swapping anecdotes and political talk as Yaffa — now visibly relieved with the intricate choreography of the meal behind her — led me on a glowing tour of the small apartment, showing off the kitchen that she herself had redesigned, with its built-in microwave and shiny black marble counters; the carefully made beds and tidy stacks of toys in the boys’ cramped room, a blocked-in balcony; and their own bedroom, Yaffa’s perfumes neatly ordered on the dresser, an exercise bike in the corner, for Meir’s heart, she explained.
Then in came Sa’adia, without knocking. Groggy from a long evening’s nap, he looked like a walking silhouette, with sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, and a skeletal smile. He carried a cell phone in one hand, and the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket bulged out from his thin frame. After apologizing half a dozen times for being late, he drew the youngest child up on his knee and dug in with his free hand to the full plate Yaffa had rushed to prepare the moment that he entered.
While as guests and hosts we had worked with voluptuous delectation through all the different modes of food, Sa’adia’s meal seemed to serve a different purpose altogether. He was hungry in a chronic sense and his sister-in-law didn’t ask but just piled high the various courses in overlapping mounds on a wide white plate. He ate fast, without seeming to notice the flavors or colors of the food so much as its filling effect, and as he chewed he talked with the breezy intensity of a man who is used to dominating every conversation in which he participates, using his fork to gesticulate. His banter was friendly, energetic, and not necessarily specific to our presence in the room: I had the sense, in fact, as he outlined his pungent opinions on at least a dozen subjects, that Sa’adia must move from group to group and shadowbox this way. Though I imagined it must be tiring to exist inside that leathery, pugnacious skin, I liked him and admired his indefatigable spikiness. After the initial introductions and chat we learned that he was organizing a concert in honor of an infamously strung-out Yemenite pop singer and Sa’adia’s close friend who had hung himself in jail some ten years before. Oh yes, I chimed in, I’d reviewed the singer’s movie-biography a few years back.
I stopped myself and asked more cautiously what Sa’adia had thought of the film. It stank, he announced, his mouth half full, a disgrace. I agreed and gave a rough sketch of my critique, as Sa’adia nodded intently, taking in what I said, then went on to detail his firsthand connection to the making of the film — this with a bit of nudging from Meir, who was clearly proud of his older brother and wanted to show him off for the American guests; Sa’adia obliged with a suddenly humble half smile that evolved into a more intent and troubled look as he told in edgy detail the story of how he had served at first as a special adviser on the picture, which he’d considered an important document. But as the project took shape and the director systematically ignored Sa’adia’s suggestions, he had grown disgusted and quit. And sure enough, in the end the movie was a hackneyed mess: The director hadn’t wanted Sa’adia’s opinions or advice so much as his approval, the use of his name. Although his tone retained signs of the itchy agitation I had first noticed when he entered, there was also another, more patiently thinking underside to Sa’adia’s talk, an alert and exact kind of calm that informed it, no matter how loud or emphatic he became. When he’d cleared his plate and wiped up the juices with a thick slice of bread, Meir gestured and Yaffa wordlessly filled it again. The late-coming guest of honor dug in once more with the same desperate gusto, as if he hadn’t eaten a bite today, or all week, since last Friday night when the same routine had perhaps been enacted.
As he ate this second plate, he promised to get us tickets to the concert, and our talk eased, more freely now, into adjacent topics, including a short movie that Sa’adia once made, with Meir’s help. “Get this!” Meir piped up now to explain the plot, which centered on a mental patient named Meir Kahane who is inspired by a visit from the ghost of Adolf Hitler to organize all the other crazies on his ward to storm the Knesset and take over … which in turn led to a quieter back-and-forth about America and Israel, where it was that we’d grown up exactly, how we’d come to this country, why we’d decided to stay. Meir and Peter, it turned out, were born in the same year, which at the time seemed jarring to me — though now, thinking back, I cannot say precisely why, or even which of them seemed to me older, just that they held their years so differently, Meir the booming patriarch-to-be, Peter the soft-spoken poet.… Did we like it here? Were we satisfied? Meir posed a string of those eternal, impossible questions, to which I know only answers that take shape as other questions, such as Aren’t there problems everywhere? or Where else would we go? According to a strange psychological equation, the longer we lived in Jerusalem and the better I understood the place, the less coherent my explanations for my own presence there became. When I’d studied in the city for a semester as a young, inexperienced college student, my first impression had been, in the know-it-all, snap way of so many of my impressions then, clear, unwavering, and unabashedly sentimental. After two decades of living where I didn’t quite fit I felt I finally belonged. And though this sense had since been challenged, twisted, tarnished, and made suspect in so many ways, it still (to my amazement, some mornings) more or less held true — though to say so outright after even just a few years spent actually reckoning daily with the place in all its angry contradictions would be partial and misleading. My complaints had grown in direct proportion to my feelings of attachment. The once-exciting newness of it all had given way with time to a more practical, critical engagement. What had been strange was now part of me, or I of it, for better and for worse. This, though, was a necessary part of the acclimation process — the emotional trial by fire that is the hardest thing for visiting Americans, for instance, to understand. Why do you stay if so much about the place makes you angry? Attempting to untangle this web of conscious and unconscious “reasons” would be something akin to trying to explain, from the inside out, a loving but tempestuous marriage.
But Meir did not expect an answer so tortured or long-winded. I could, at least, turn his question around and answer a straightforward “Yes, I like it here” if “here” meant the neighborhood, or in fact this dinner table. “I love this place,” I announced, which clearly pleased Meir personally. I wasn’t trying to act the flatterer, though in that context I realized such a statement would be seen as such: Musrara was nearly their own private property. Earlier in the evening, Meir had proudly announced that their family was among the first two or three to move into the neighborhood, just after the war in 1948. Sa’adia, meanwhile, continued to eat, though his attention seemed to be drifting farther and farther away, or perhaps he was amused in a detached, ironic way by the young American and her apparently unchecked enthusiasm for the streets he knew so well.
It was late — a good sign, declared Meir, who sounded as glad as we felt that the meal had passed with such unexpected pleasure. After we’d said our good-byes and begun the slow stroll home, walking gingerly so as to jar neither our burdened digestive systems nor the tipsy flush of contentment with which the evening had left us, we realized — as an amputee senses a phantom limb perhaps, but without any longing — that once we had passed into their home we’d left our ludicrous fear behind us, as Sa’adia had abandoned his famous hostility and Yaffa had relaxed despite her fragile nerves. Meir was too poised a public presence to let his particular weakness show through but, after his own boisterously thoughtful fashion, he must also have recognized the airy relief that had taken hold as the meal progressed, and that went on lifting us, all the way home, into sleep and through the next day, and the next and onward, as we continued to live in Meir’s neighborhood as, somehow — it would always remain so, but now I didn’t mind — his welcome guests.