Avital's Blog

To my mom on mother’s day

If I were a painter I’d paint you a painting. If I were a musician I’d compose you a song. If I were a florist I’d arrange you some flowers. If I were a carpenter I’d make you a chair. But I’m a writer so I’m writing you a piece. It’s about you. 

Here are some things I love that make you you (I’m writing them as I think of them, so they’re not in any real order): 

Your constant assumption that all people always mean well by all their actions.

Your gratefulness whenever anyone does anything remotely nice for you, and your genuine appreciation for even the smallest of gifts.

Your willingness to give praise generously and not just to your kids. It’s never contrived, fake, or forced – you always wholeheartedly believe all the things you tell people that make them feel better about themselves and their lives a little easier.

Your willingness to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. 

Your great gusto while cooking a perfect meal for ten when you only have five to feed. 

Your ability to be deeply moved by the small things, like a man walking his very old dog. 

How, despite your deeply sweet nature, you used your brains to make it pretty big in a field almost totally dominated by men. How you insist on having a challenging career that stimulates your mind and provides for your family. 

How you always always put family first no matter the sacrifice.

How you speak four languages but never brag about it or even ever really think anything of it. 

How, when everyone else is annoyed by a crying baby (on a plane, in a restaurant), you react with genuine concern for it. Whereas others sees their own inconvenience, you see a child’s dignity and its need for something.

The way you miss your parents and always tell me when this song or that food reminds you of them. It makes my heart ache not only for you but also for me because I know I will be doing that one day in the very far future. When I see a lemon on a tree that everyone else is just walking by, I will stop and notice it like you do. When something only slightly funny happens in a movie or a play, I’ll think how you would have just cracked up. Whenever I encounter an animal, I’ll be gentle and loving not because you told me to be that way but because you showed me how. 

Ima, though I’ve tried a bit, there’s no way to truly paint a portrait of all that you are and all that you’ve made me. I guess the best way to say it is: I love you. Thank you for everything you are, everything you’ve done, and all that you’ve made me. 

Wishing we could be together today,

Your daughter Tali

Goodbye to the Quirky Jewish Luminaries

I have a complicated relationship with being Jewish. I’ve worked hard to assimilate. I can easily hide the fact that English is my second language (I was exposed to nothing but Hebrew as a small child) and enjoy seeing people’s incredulity when they find that out.

When it came time, I learned English – and Americanness – with a vengeance. I now have a beautiful, shiny Anglo last name to replace the clunky Germanic one I was born with, which got away with having four consonants in a row.

But within the past week, three people died: first Adam Yaunch, then Maurice Sendak, then Vidal Sassoon. Each of these people embodies, in his own way, what it means to be a Jew. The fierce creativity, the bucking of anything staid, the insistence on doing things his own way, the personal eccentricity that became pop-culture standard.

I love each one of them. I want to be like them. And I savor the fact that I might have, coded in my DNA, something of theirs. I know I have a strident urge to express myself. A wish to be different but loved for it. A chutzpah that begs to be let out – and a neuroticism that, every day, goes to battle with it. A constant and simultaneous feeling of massive pride and stuttering shame about where I come from.

Each of the famous men who’ve died since Friday had their own relationship with their Jewishness (Yaunch basically abandoned it for Buddhism, Sendak embraced it in all its Brooklynness, and London-born Sassoon joined the Israeli army), but none could separate themselves from their roiling minds, their effervescent ideas, their pervasive and passionate fears and doubts, and their deep yearning for acceptance and love from the greater population – and it is a much greater population: Jews are just 2% of Americans.

I think of Allen Ginsberg, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Marc Chagall, Shel Silverstein – and God knows how many other quirky thinkers, writers, and artists killed in 1940s Europe before they could get famous or do their real work.  

“Pride” is a harsh word that I don’t really like. So is “empowering.” It’s maybe not pride or empowerment that I feel because of these people but hope, probably. Hope that something of our similarity, something of our blood, something of our tiny, earnest, funny culture, may exist in me too.  

On Marriage, Luck, and Wedding-Day Rain

I’m married.

That’s the first time I’ve typed those words. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s a very good thing. I didn’t always know that it would be. For some reason, I wrote in my college journal that I didn’t think I’d ever do it. But these first three weeks have easily been some of the happiest of my life.

We’d been together more than 10 years before we said our vows so I don’t know if the phrase “honeymoon phase” applies. But for all we’ve been through within the span of that decade – including his 13-month deployment to Afghanistan and all that it took for him to come back – that’s what this feels like. A honeymoon phase. I feel freshly and wholly in love.

Maybe it was the rain.

It poured the whole day of our wedding. I mean, it didn’t let up once.  We were glued to my iPhone’s Weather Channel app in the days leading up to March 24. The chance of rain kept creeping upward: Ten days out it was 40%. By the day before it was 100%. One hundred percent. I didn’t even know that was a thing. Like, there’s not even a 1% chance that it’s not going to rain? Making a prediction of absolute certainty didn’t seem scientifically advisable (aren’t there always exceptions?) but there that absolutist prediction was, on the most perfect, sunny day you can imagine, the day before our wedding. Everyone kept walking around saying, “Can you believe the forecast?” Still, we held out hope that a miracle would happen.

It didn’t and it did: From the moment we opened our eyes in our hotel room the morning of our wedding until our heads hit the pillow late that night (very early the next morning, really), it rained. It rained and it rained. It rained a cold, Alaska-sent rain that made me shiver each time I stepped outside, even after I’d sent a nice amount of champagne coursing through my veins.

Our ceremony, which we’d planned to have out in a grove of Santa Cruz redwoods and ferns, was moved inside. So was the cocktail hour, during which our guests would have explored the fairy-tale grounds of the venue we’d rented. There was bocce ball to play, a tree house for people to hoist themselves into, a koi pond to ponder, an explosion of bright-yellow tulips to behold, a freaking miniature train to ride around in on its miniature tracks.

None of that happened. What did happen was — well, let me paint you a picture: You know when it’s pouring or freezing or otherwise untenable outside and you just feel crazy lucky to have a solid roof over your head and there’s a fire roaring and just the right song playing and you’ve got the exact person or people you need with you and you’re swaddled up in a chenille blanket and there’s good food and something hot or strong to drink and life just feels perfect in its moment? Project that immense coziness out into wedding size and you start to approach the unexpected level of intimacy our rain created for us. Many of our guests told us with conviction that it was the most romantic wedding they’d ever been to. Their words, and our feelings, and the few photos we’ve seen so far, tell us that it had been filled with joy and gratefulness and fleetingness and most of all love.

During the rollicking party, people kept beaming at us and saying what good luck rain is. About the French saying, Mariage pluvieux, mariage heureux (“Rainy wedding, happy marriage”) and the Italian one, Sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata (“A wet bride is a lucky bride”).

Rational being that I like to think that I am, I enjoyed the intent of these rhyming refrains but thought in the back of my head that they must have been conjured up to console some teary, far-less-joyful-than-I bride who’d been set on a perfect day for her nuptials.

But now I sorta kinda believe the romance-language hype: Water has always and everywhere symbolized cleansing, renewal, baptism. Fertility and abundance. It’s the requisite ingredient for new growth, for purification, for movement in the only natural direction that exists.

Tim has always known this. His mom remembers that when it rained and he was little, he’d sit in the street gutter in front of their house watching the water whoosh by. He’s a certified river-rafting guide. He’s got a master’s degree in hydrology. Tim in water is Tim in his element. How apt, then, that it should pour down on us on our day of union. 

The next morning, Tim’s mom texted us: “Wouldntcha KNOW it?!!!” and we both knew what she meant: This day was gorgeous, boasting a sky blue as periwinkle. As if rain was something that didn’t even exist.

Reading this post over, I should say here that I didn’t set out to write it to gush about our wedding. I set out to write about the renewing effect marriage is having on me – and us – so far. It’s quite likely that the giddiness we’re feeling would be just as real had our wedding-day rain not fallen and deemed us lucky.

Of course, life is long and who knows what sorts of fortunes and misfortunes it has in store for us. I’ve seen friends and family members, blessed until then, suddenly have to contend with slashing losses and menacing illnesses so I wouldn’t ever presume, at age 32, to declare myself an overall lucky person.

I do know I’ve been lucky so far, though. Astonishingly lucky. I sincerely do feel that I’ve won the husband lottery.

I know, too, that I’m verging on being cloying at this point but I’ll just end with this fact: Sometimes at night when we’re falling asleep side by side, I lay there telling myself, “This is what it feels like to be in his presence. Pay attention to what this feels like.” And it is the most cozy, intimate, loved feeling in the world.

Focus, please.

That’s me talking to myself.

It may well be the zaniness of wedding planning (I’m getting married next month and I’ve never been the girl who’s had her nuptials envisioned since she was 4, so planning them is WAY more work than I’d ever imagined) but it also may well be the mental reluctance of moving into a new phase of life. A new phase of work, really. I’ve gone part-time at my main gig under the pretense of pursuing the type of work I’ve been aching to do for a long time but haven’t had the time for. And now that I have that time, I fill it grazing over my registry, figuring out how to make DIY place cards, engaging in Facebook pleasantries, and who knows what else.

Actually, I do know: Obsessing over the fact that I’m not yet doing the kind of work I told myself I’d be doing. Granted, it’s only been a month. But I feel I should have hit the ground running. Instead, I’m taking a looong time to ease myself into the hot water.

Writing this does feel good though. Getting blogging again. Maybe it’ll open something up. Maybe if the seeps and drips come through steadily enough, the dam will soon break open and the flood will come rushing out.

I told my dad how I’m feeling. As always, he had the perfect metaphor ready. He said that I’m crouching at the starting line of a race. The wedding is the starting gun, and when it happens, I’ll off and sprint headfirst into the career of my imagining.

Life Lesson From a Cat

On a whim once, I put a laundry basket over my cat to see what she would do. I thought she’d see it as a cage and try to get out. Instead, she relaxed and started purring. It had made her feel safe. I was moved by her sweet, unwitting reminder that circumstance is only limiting if you perceive it as such.

How a little Jewish girl discovered she’s part Viking

“I’m part Viking,” I tell people. Then people, especially those who know that I’m pretty Jewish, ask how I know that. Here’s the answer:

My dad’s brother started to not be able to straighten his ring finger, which became such a nuisance that he went to get it checked. The doctor told him it was a classic case of Baron Dupuytren’s disease, commonly called “Viking finger” because it shows up only in people of Viking descent. My uncle told my dad, my dad told me and my brothers. (My little brother yanked up his shirt to expose his hairy chest and declared, “Well, that explains this!”)

I, ever the journalist, was immediately on Google to learn more. How, if my dad’s side went centuries back in Jewish Russia as we’d always been told, could this be? Turns out that while the Vikings from Norway and Denmark decided to rape and pillage what was west of them — the British isles, mainly — the Vikings from Sweden, the story goes, responded to a request that the tribal Slavs, in the year 862, put out for governance. “Come and rule your land and people? We’re there!” said the warrior Rurik. There’s controversy over whether the Slavs actually invited him or whether he just volunteered. Regardless, he and fellow Swedes sailed into Novogrod via the Volkhov River to start a dynasty that would rule Russia for more than seven centuries. In fact, today’s Russia is named after what Swedish Vikings were called: the Rus.

I like to think that some burly Viking dude fell in love with a dainty, bookish Jewish girl and that, Romeo-and Juliet-style (minus the suicidal ending), they stood together to become my culture-crossed ancestors. Some of my family members scoff at my Disney-like imaginings and tell me that my existence is more probably thanks to rape. 

Either way, I must be off to braid my hair and polish my horned helmet.

A New York moment

Years ago I was in New York City visiting a graduate school that I ultimately didn’t choose in large part because I didn’t think I could handle living in Manhattan. But I won’t forget one incident I saw on the subway that showed me that despite all the grit and intensity, there’s a current of love that runs underneath.

I was riding the 1 train when two young teenagers, probably from Harlem, boarded our car carrying a box of candy bars and announced they were selling them to raise money for their education. They walked up and down the aisle as people averted their eyes or shrugged apologetically. No takers.

They kept going until they reached a large black man who suddenly started yelling and pointing: “You think you’re going to get money by coming on here and demanding it from us? Who do you think you are?”

The youngsters shrunk into themselves and turned away. The rest of the car went silent, scared by this intimidating man who kept on hollering: “Kids like you think you can just walk onto trains and take everyone else’s cash! Go earn your money!”

He kept going at them as I got engulfed in the drama, aiming my anger and spite, as everyone else was, at this uncharitable bully. Still, I kept my bit of cash firmly in my wallet.

As the kids gave up hope of collecting any contribution from this crowd, the man kept shouting: “You weaklings are lucky I’m hungry!”

The other passengers turned to look at him.

“How much for the whole box?” he demanded.

“Twenty dollars,” one of the kids mumbled.

He handed the kid a twenty and snatched the box, then leaned back into his seat and closed his eyes with a satisfied smile.

Face to face on Union Square

As is wont to happen in the busiest parts of San Francisco, I came upon a dark but vibrant walking protest near Union Square. Many of its members were wearing that mischievous Guy Fawkes mask which is becoming a staple of today’s minor-league hacker-revolutionaries. (Side note: This is the first era in which anti-capitalist fringe groups can and do complain on Amazon about how flimsy the plastic of their iconography is.) When I leaned in to try to understand what they were upset about, I heard their chants about the need to tax the rich.

The same thing that Warren Buffett recently called for in the New York Times.

Not being too offended by their cause, I relaxed to enjoy the spectacle.

A fresh-faced young man, one of the few who wasn’t masked, extended his arm toward me, offering a glossy postcard-sized flyer. Normally I politely refuse such offers, preferring that pamphleteers waste their paper on others. But something about his earnest, post-racial face made me think, OK, let’s see what this is about.

I took the flyer and when I did, his serious countenance softened for the briefest moment into an almost intimate expression of solidarity and gratitude. Even if I never march for his cause or check out the website on his – now my – postcard, we’d had, if only for an instant, a real and meaningful human connection.

The protest swept him around the corner and I continued walking straight ahead, toward home in my prim black dress.

On catharsis

I’m starting to realize how important catharsis is.

It started when a dark travelogue I’d written about Prague was rejected for its potential to “scare the snot” (editor’s words) out of readers. I’d meant to portray the city as being creepy in a whimsical, haunted-house way. Instead, I’d painted a grim portrait of a town obsessed with death. My mistake was, in part, how I’d ended it: I wrote that I was ready to turn away from Bohemia’s stews and spires and head toward Bavaria’s pretzels and beer. As I was writing, I’d thought that was a clever conclusion, but on second look, I see that it’s just depressing.

What I should have done — and what I’ll attempt to do in a rewrite — is end it on a more uplifting note. In Prague, I’d seen an exhibit of drawings done by Jewish children in a concentration camp. The kids had drawn things like summer days at the beach, family celebrations, stars in the night sky. If they could portray life’s beauty from their bleak vantage point, then certainly I can.

Midnight in Paris, a film that wasn’t all I’d hoped it’d be, did have a line in it that stuck with me, spoken by the Gertrude Stein character: “The job of the artist is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” I don’t know if that’s a real Stein quote or not (my guess is no), but its fact is true.

About a week later, I was reading a terrible blog post about how the blogger’s cat died. He (the writer) watched a car run over her (the cat). When he ran over, he saw that her jaw was visibly broken, her eyeball was hanging out, and that her little body was crushed and bloody. I was horrified, sure that the image the writer was evoking would haunt me. But then I read his ending: He picked up his cat to hold her, and as she died in his arms, she started purring.

This excellent L.A. Times piece, headlined “Where’s today’s Dorothea Lange?” gets it right. It’s about how this generation’s artists are choosing not to attend to people’s suffering but instead exert themselves on shallow bursts of creativity. In effect, they’re choosing comfort and apathy over the hard work of providing a sense that even though things aren’t OK right now, that things will be OK. Or that even though things aren’t OK right now, we’re all in it together. Or that even though things aren’t OK right now, we can still have a sense of humor about it all. The article says that the only artists who are providing catharsis about the hard times that we’re in right now are the comedians, and I agree.

But — and here’s my hopeful ending — decades of apathetic frivolity, like the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s, are usually followed by decades during which the art and iconography matter and mean much more. The 1930s, 1960s, and, less so, the 1990s, were decades during which people didn’t feel alone in their difficulties anymore because they saw themselves represented in the mass culture. The eyes of artists (and distributors of that art, like publishers, galleries, and record labels) fluttered open to see what salves their audience needed. Today’s audience doesn’t need more Biebers or Beyonces. We need Leonard Cohens and Janis Joplins. We need people who’ve been through it, man. People like us.

Let’s move into it: the decade of catharsis.

Why I am doing this

Not long ago I told my boss that I wanted to go part-time. Probably a stupid thing to do in this economy but I’d been having these urgent feelings about needing to pursue my own creativity. I need to see if I could harness it, feed it, set it off running, and chase after it. My day job is still semi-creative: I’m an editor at an environmental magazine. So I get to be close to manuscripts and story ideas and editorial collaboration and all that. But it’s not as hands-on as I need.

I was losing faith in my abilities as a writer, and that faith was never that fierce to begin with. “I need to get back in the gym,” I told my boss. I need to be doing hard work. I’d been obsessing over how to tell him that for a while, wondering how he’d take it.

He was gracious and supportive. He said we could make it work but also expressed concern about my financial situation and warned me about how hard it is out there right now. I know how hard it is out there right now. It’s probably one of the worst times to be making a transition like this. But I also know that it’ll probably always feel like the worst time to be making a transition like this. I can find every excuse in the world to not make a transition like this, and it’ll always feel like a perfectly excellent excuse.

I’m sick of making excuses in my life. I’m sick of being a flabby writer. I’m sick of writing crowd-pleasing fluff for mass consumption while I stuff the honest stuff, the stuff I should be writing about, in the back corners of my head and heart, assuring it that I’ll get to it at some point, lying to it as it dies, crusted in a thick layer of dust.

That’s not life. That’s not a writer’s life. I want to live. I want to be honest. I want others to read my words and be able to see themselves. I want, with a nod to Ginsberg, to make myself naked. Every writer does and many never do. But many do: Those are the brave ones. Am I brave? I’d like to think so, but I don’t think so. I’m going to have to push myself to not want to crawl back into myself, the way I’m feeling like I’d like to do right now, even as I type. It would be so much easier if I didn’t have to do this. But I do have to do this. When I’m not writing on the computer or in a notebook, I’m writing in my head. And if I’m writing only in my head, it’s a life half-lived, a life half-written.

Please bear with me while I find my voice. Please don’t cringe as I lash myself with my own self-consciousness. Please know, reader, that I constantly picture you and that I care what you think and that I know you can’t possibly be thinking as highly of me as I’d like you to, and that I’m worried about it.

But maybe someday I’ll get good enough that I can win you over. Maybe if I’m real and you still like me, I’ll know you like the real me because I’m my real self and not because I’m writing what I was paid to write. I’ll know your appreciation is true. And isn’t truth all we need?