home world

The Heinrich Boell foundation in Nachalat Binamin's smaller and less crowded then I expected. I'm going there to catch a lecture about Israeli and German authors. I don't know neither of them, but the place's near my apartment and I just can't stand being in my life now, I need a diversion, and so I decide to go, just in order to escape from myself, preferably into a place that's got air condition.

There's a small jazz group playing and a food and people are eating and laughing, mostly in German, I read about this event in the news paper and I'm thinking - how come this place isn't packed, it's free and there's music and food, am I the only person here that isn't from the German embassy? Apparently I am, cause I'm the only one dress improperly (or in anything black for that matter) and I'm the only one there that isn't speaking to someone.

"It's cheaper than a movie, and there's free coffee."

- Jim Uhls based on a novel by Chuck Palahnuik

I feel like I'm pulling a Marla Zinger, Like I have no right to be there, I eat just cause there's nothing else to do, trying to convince myself that no one's going to come and yell at me and that I have a right to be there, just like everyone else. But then this woman did came and wanted to know how I got there, after I realized she wasn't going to cast me out I started to talk, she introduced me to some people, I felt better, almost a part of the human race. There was this cool comic artist who I talked to about illustrations in Israel and even gave her my phone number, we might get together next week.

Then the conversation started. The man holding the discussion quoted Heinrich Boell "this is the century of emigrants" and talked about the two authors. The Israeli called Dorith Rabinian and write about her childhood memories and about her family Iranian heritage, and the German author called Saelim Oezdogan, who writes about his memories from Turkeys. Both author read parts of their books. I love being read to, I love hearing a voice vocalize prose or poetry. It was so relaxing, like my own self help group made of beauty and art and far away places. I didn't even care that this Selim Oezdogan read out loud in German cause the intonation of his voice was already telling a story. I started to breath again, and it felt like I didn't breath in weeks and weeks, like for that brief moment something was beginning to open up again.

Then someone else read a version of the story in Hebrew, it was about a child growing up in a small village and his encounter with the big city for the first time.

They both talk about the being an emigrate, about being multicultural, not belonging anywhere and feeling as if they always look at things from the outside, and though I’m not multicultural I’m beginning to think that maybe I am. I live partly in Israel in my office and my apartment, and partly in HomeWorld, here, under a different name and identity, both of us share a life, but we don’t always share a respective. I often have that feeling of looking at that double mirror and seeing my own reflection, that emigrant duality of belonging anywhere and nowhere.

I guess we all do those days, in a question about his style, being German or Turkish, Salim Oezdogan quote Arthur miller “if you can’t make words fuck, don’t masturbate with them” and say that his simple style’s mostly effected by American writers. I uses English about 4 or 5 hours a day, the other week I was speaking Hebrew but parts of the sentence came in English, without me even noticing it. I am multicultural even though I’ve never lived out of Israel, contemporary living is being multicultural, since we are exposed so much to other culture, since we can choose what we like, what art, what music what food we want to consume by our preferences, not by where we were born.
Free choice - the thing that living in this time, the thing that suffering so many doubts and fears, the thing that taking responsibility over one’s happiness and satisfaction and life in general. It makes it all worthwhile.

People asked questions, light was coming through the window and I couldn't hear and noise from the outside, I felt relieved by the quietness and the cultural crowd, protected by esthetic. I got out real quickly as it ended, feeling better then I had most of this week.

I still got something unresolved in me, something deep and dark that's stuck to my soul and won't let go, and I'm still making effort to dissolve it, to balance myself enough to handle this rationally. It's not over, but at least I got a couple of hours of rest, a break from all this.