I begin today’s column with three photos of a falafel stand. Kind of innocuous, the sign that says “Falafel Oved” in the middle, the guy making the falafel on the right, and on the left, in the green box, a certification that the place is kosher, and below, in the red box, a note that they have a set of tefillin there for anyone who wants to use them.
That’s the Jerusalem of old, stuck in the middle of a trendy, much modernized neighborhood. Baka, as the neighborhood is known, was originally home to big villas owned by wealthy Arabs in the region … the cool Jerusalem air was a reprieve from the hot environs of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan or elsewhere, so wealthy Arabs in the early part of the century built gorgeous homes all around here. Gorgeous and huge.
So huge, in fact, that when those people fled the fighting in 1948 and never returned (they wouldn’t have been allowed to even if they wanted to, which they likely didn’t), a young Israel that didn’t have what to do with the thousands and thousands of immigrants pouring into the new country stuffed multiple families into these formerly single family homes. Dividers were built, more people than ideal shared cramped spaces. Quickly, a once elegant neighborhood of wealthy Arabs became a bit of a slum for Jews from Arab lands.
When I was a kid and we lived here for a couple of years, we were allowed to ride our bikes anywhere wanted—except Baka. Our parents told us that if we rode there, we’d come home without our bikes. But the time my wife and I moved with our family to Israel (and to that very Baka neighborhood) some thirty years later, Baka was no longer a slum. It was quickly on the rise and much desired.
Places like that falafel just up the block from us, clearly a throwback to Baka’s early days, have seen it all. But you live some place long enough and you stop asking questions about it. Why was Falafel Oved called that? Never once asked myself.
It turns out, the place was owned more than half a century ago by an elderly guy named Ovadiah. He, too, was an immigrant, as was Judy Lev, who lived in this neighborhood and in a charming and compelling book about twelve of the colorful personalities that once made up this neighborhood (including Ovadiah the falafel guy), tells a story not only of stores and streets and a community, but Israel and a way of life.
I saw down to chat with Judy about her book, just released this week, Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile and we’re sharing it with you today as part of an informal series on Israeli authors who’ve written books in English that we think capture something unique and special about Israeli life.
Judy Lev was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and made Aliyah in 1967. From 1984 to 2004 she wrote columns for both The Jerusalem Post and The Cleveland Jewish News. She also writes fiction and teaches both creative nonfiction and fiction to adults, and mentors Anglo Israeli writers. Since October 14, 2023, Judy Lev has been writing Epistles from Israel, now on Substack. Our Names Do Not Appear, a memoir about the legacy of silenced childhood grief, was Lev’s first book.Bethlehem Road: stories of immigration and exile is her second book.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
Here in Jerusalem, just a few weeks ago, we were running our air conditioners not only during the day, but some evenings and nights as well. It was still hot. Now, though, just a couple of weeks later, it’s gorgeous outside in Jerusalem during the day, and the nights are crisp, even a bit chilly. To many of us, the fresh air feels like a new beginning. In many ways, it’s not only the the beginning of a new season, but it feels like the beginning of a new period in Israel’s history. We’ve all taken a deep sigh of relief with the return to Israel of the 20 living hostages, and while we still pray for those who are not living to be returned as quickly as possible, there’s no question that people here are breathing easier. The war may not be fully behind us, but still, it’s become a bit easier also to look around and to be reminded of the charms of life here in Israel, whether in Jerusalem, where I happen to live, or elsewhere. So today we’re starting a series of conversations with Israeli authors who’ve written in books in English that our entire audience could appreciate, that somehow shed light on dimensions of life here in ways that may not often get discussed.We begin today with Judy Lev, who has lived in Israel since 1967, and who has written two books, the second of which we’re going to discuss today. Her second book is called Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration Exile, and it’s just now come out. I really enjoyed the book for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it’s about the very neighborhood that I’ve called home for 25 years. So I learned a lot about the stores that I frequent and the places that I see and the history that’s behind them that I didn’t know. But I also really appreciated the fact that Judy pointed in a very subtle and powerful way to the fact that all of us who are immigrants have also been exiled in a way. Stories of immigration are also stories of exile, as she notes. And I think she captures something very powerful about Israeli society in general when pointing to that, because, of course, so many Israelis, either this generation or the previous one, were immigrants. It turns out that our neighborhood’s charms began long before we got here. And Judy points to them by bringing to life the struggles of 12 immigrants searching for meaning and happiness on what is now one of Jerusalem’s vibrant thoroughfares.As I mentioned, the book is just out, and we are attaching an Amazon link for those who’d like to explore it further. And we hope you’ll enjoy this conversation with Judy Lev about her new book, Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile
It’s a story of a neighborhood, which happens to be the neighborhood that I live in. Every building that you talk about, every street corner, every store, I know all those places. There was something very charming about reading a really beautifully written book in many different people’s voices, a kaleidoscope or one of those quilts, patchwork quilt, where each one is somebody else. I loved reading about my own neighborhood, which is really fun. But I think there’s something else that’s really profound about this book, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today. You call it in the subtitle, Stories of Immigration and Exile. And Baka is, as I’m sure you’re going to tell us very shortly, very much a neighborhood of immigrants, different kinds of immigrants at different stages. And we’ll get to that when we talk about the first of the stories that we’re going to talk about. But because it’s a neighborhood of immigrants, it’s also a neighborhood of exile. Because, first of all, there were people who were here before we got there, and we’ll talk about them a little bit. But all of us who chose to come here also chose to be in exile. In other words, we were American, you and I, originally, but there’s a lot of French people in Baka, and there’s people from all over. And by virtue of their having made a decision to live in Israel and to live in Jerusalem, they also made a decision not to be where they grew up. And that’s something that you don’t ever quite completely shake. You and I were both saying to each other a different point that our grandmothers who came from the quote, unquote, Old country, seemed to us like immigrants, and our parents were completely situated in America, born in America, spoke English, mellifluously, felt totally comfortable in America as America’s apple pie. And then here we are, once again, repeating our grandparents’ story, just instead of moving to America, moving out of America, and being immigrants, really, until our last days. And so there’s something, if the first book struck me because of its focus on Israel and memory, today, I think we should talk about Immigration and Exile.That’s a very long-winded way of saying. I’m thrilled that you’re back. I love your second book really very much. It’s just like I loved the first. Tell us a little bit, and we’ll put your whole bio in the notes for today so people can read all of that. Tell us why you wrote this book.Okay. Well, first of all, I want to say thank you for inviting me again. It’s lovely to be here back in the hood. Why I wrote the Book. So I lived in Baka for more than almost 40 years. And then when I left Jerusalem in 2005, I moved far away to Mosha Bait Zait, which is all of a half a kilometer from the city limits of Jerusalem. But I felt like I was in Galut. Exile. I felt like I was in exile, even though I was a half a kilometer away.Well, Bait Zait is very different from Baka.Yeah, right. It’s a beautiful suburb. It started off as a Moshav. It’s still a Moshav, theoretically. No, it was lovely. It’s the dream of a lot of people to have their own home and a large garden and mountains, surrounded by mountains and lots of trees and all kinds of critters. And indeed, it was lovely. But I miss the city. And my way of coping, pretty much with any strong feeling, is through writing. That’s my coping mechanism. Just like I started the epistles from Israel, four days after this war started that we’re currently still in. And so I started writing stories that take place on Derech Beit Lechem on Bethlehem Road, the main artery of the neighborhood of Baka, which is located in South Jerusalem.A little bit of history of Baka, give us, please.Yes. So the French built a railroad from the town of the seaport town of Jaffa to Jerusalem in the late 1800s. It was completed in 1898. And at that point, there were well-to-do Arab families, both in Bethlehem and in the old city of Jerusalem, who wanted to create a garden suburb, the Arab version of what Talpyot was, a garden suburb. And so during the Ottoman Empire, they built the first few homes, mainly along the train track, because the train track opened up Jerusalem to the rest of the world. Then after the British came, then in the ‘20s and the ‘30s, there was really a lot of building, and they built beautiful homes out of the local- They built enormous homes. We should make everybody I understand. Something like there were two and three-story homes, ornate with arches. I mean, these are not little houses. No. These are ornate homes. These were wealthy Arabs. They built gorgeous homes.Well-to-do Arabs, Christian Muslim and Armenians. It was an exclusive neighborhood in that everyone had a large garden area, and they planted pomegranate trees and fig trees, and And they had vegetable gardens. And they also built buildings for apartments. And there were tennis courts in the neighborhood. I’m not sure exactly where. And it was a strictly Arab neighborhood until 1947, ‘48. More than 99 %, probably 99 99% of the population were either forced to leave by the haganah, by Israeli soldiers, or they were told to leave by the leaders of Jordan who said, Get out now and for two or three weeks, we’ll finish off the Jews, and then you can go back to your beautiful homes. So they got out, and we on the war.And they never got back in.And they never got back in.And what did Israel do with these huge houses?So immediately, they displaced persons from the old city, Jews from the old city of Jerusalem, who had been defeated during the war, so they couldn’t live in the old city anymore. So they were placed in homes in Baka. And then in ‘49, ‘50, ‘51, the Jewish agency housed refugees from DP camps and from people who had been living in the tent camps, the Maabarot in Talpiyot, and they placed the families in these homes. So in a gorgeous home where maybe one family lived or an Arab family, and the son maybe had the second floor, the Jewish agency would place maybe four families. So you had people from DP camps in Europe, from Yugoslavia, from Romania, And you had Moroccans who were in the 10 cities in the Maabarot, Moroccans and people from Kurdistan and Libya and Tunisia. And you had a really potpourri of populations all living together in these gorgeous homes.Which were not so gorgeous anymore inside, because when you take a single family home and you put four or five families in it, then the neighborhood changes dramatically.And then in the early ‘50s, the government started building these shikunim, public housing.Soviet-style apartment buildings that were just rectangular, ugly, whatever.And they built schools in the neighborhood, and It was a completely immigrant neighborhood, except for the few Armenian families who still live in the neighborhood.Now, you moved into the neighborhood in the late ‘60s, right?Yeah, I lived in one of the oldest Arab homes that no longer exists. In ‘69, I lived there for a year.Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about what Baka was like back then, because as I mentioned to you in a previous conversation that we had, my family made an abortive attempt at Aliyah. My parents made Aliyah in ‘69, and we lived on Rechow Ben Zakai, which you actually mentioned in your book. I think the taxi is going down Rechow Ben Zakai or something like that. But I don’t know, it’s a 15-minute walk from Baka. It’s nothing. And we had bikes, and we were told by my parents, all three boys, you can ride around wherever you want. There’s only one neighborhood in Jerusalem you may not ride in, and that is Baka, because they said, if you ride into Baka, you’re coming home without your bike, in the best of circumstances. Tell us what was going on in Baka. I think you mentioned it on the corners of Yehuda and Levi with Derech Bet Lechem or Bethlehem Road. What’s going on in Baka back in those days? Why did my parents not let us ride bikes?Well, apparently, there were street gangs. I wasn’t so much aware of the street gangs, but it was a very neglected neighborhood. When my husband and I moved into a home in ‘72, there were drug addicts sitting in the entrance hall of the building. There was no electricity to get to the third floor where we lived.Not all the streets were paved, by the way.Not all the streets were paved at all. There was a bus or two busses that went back and forth on the street. But it was, some people, from Rehavia would call it a slum, perhaps, but it had a lot of charm. I mean, the architecture was just still-The architecture had more charm than some of the people, perhaps.Exactly. And the choices were, we could have bought an apartment in the newly built neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol in the northern part of the city for the same price, or no, for maybe even more expensive. But I don’t know, I fell in love with the apartment that we bought, mainly because it had an 80 square meter attached roof from which you could see the whole city to the west, and the and the sky because the buildings were all low. So you could see all of the Judean Hills, the hills surrounding Jerusalem, and its sunset and at dawn. And it was just so poetically gorgeous. I didn’t care if there were gangs, and I didn’t have children at that time, so I didn’t really care if the school was a lousy school. We had some wonderful neighbors in the building where we lived, people who had, our downstairs neighbors, especially, they had fought in the war of Independence, and the father of these three children had lost an eye.He’s in the book.Yeah. They were just wonderful people.Let’s fast forward a little bit. It’s a rough and tumble neighborhood in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. But because it’s cheap, it’s a place where if you’re a a beatnik American and you want to come to Israel and you want to find a place where you can rent or whatever, this was a great place to go because it was Jerusalem, but it was cheap. And a lot of the beginning of the gentrification of Baka, from what I understand, started with these Americans who are more your hippy dippy types, who moved in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. And over the course of time, of course, the neighborhood gets prohibitively expensive. Just for example, you know the streets very well. On the corner of Reuben and Gidon, which is literally around the corner from the building that you and I met in the first time. So it’s where the park is, a ravine going up and down. On the corner, though, they’re refurbishing an old building. One One apartment is $8 million dollars, not shekel, $8 million dollars. We’re talking about a neighborhood now that’s exploded in terms of crazy price, but it’s still got a lot of the color that it had back then.I remember when we had a block party years ago, our downstairs neighbor organized a block party. We lived in the building for, I don’t know, 15 years. Everybody recognized everybody from parking their cars on the street, but nobody knew anybody. They put out flyers in all the buildings for people to come and have like potato chips and Coke and whatever. A lot of heel came was very sweet. That That was when I learned, by the way, that not all of the streets had been paved. It never occurred to me that. Of course, the streets were always paved, but they weren’t because the old people from the neighborhood, mostly Moroccans, were arguing about, did they get paved in ‘73 or did they get paved in ‘74? When did they change the names from the Arab names to the names of the 12 tribes? Then they made a joke, which was, Me Marokaim le Amerikaim. The neighborhood went being from Moroccan to American. It wasn’t all Moroccan, and not all American, but their point was that the gentrification really changed the neighborhood dramatically. It’s still very colorful, though, and a lot of things that you talk about in the book are still there.I want to dive into some of the issues that you raised, not so much about the neighborhood, but about Israel and exile and so forth. There’s, I don’t know, how many stories are in the book? I don’t remember anymore. Twelve stories. Twelve stories. They’re great. Each one is in a different person’s voice, and they’re written beautifully. It’s just no way to capture the beauty of these stories without us reading them out loud, which we’re not going to do because people can get the book if they want. But I want to talk about three little comments that get made in the book, which I think touch on this whole idea of immigration and exile, and what they say, not only about Baka, obviously, but what they say about Israel in general. Because this is a book about Israel. It’s about Baka, but it’s really a lens onto Israel. I want to start with a story that you call the law of Return. The law of Return, as I’m sure most of our listeners know, was a law passed in the summer of 1950, which basically says that anybody with one Jewish grandparent, which was the same definition of Jewishness that the Nazis had used. So this was a way of getting back. If you were Jewish enough for the Nazis to kill you, you’re Jewish enough for the Israeli state to accept you as a citizen, any Jew could automatically become a citizen and come here. Other people, like in most countries, you have to apply to become a citizen. But if you’re a Jew, that right just is given to you if you have one Jewish grandparent. And that, of course, has created all sorts of issues because lots of Soviet Jews have come with one Jewish grandparent, but it’s perhaps, let me be on the paternal side. So they’re halakhically not Jewish. There is for the Ministry of the Interior, they are Jewish. It’s all to do. We’re not going to go there.Who is a Jew?Right. That’s a whole other can of worms. In this story called The Law of Return, though, you tell It’s a story that a lot of people have experienced, which is that they’re in this old Arab house, somebody knocks on the door.Yeah.Take it from there.Yeah. And this story takes place on the anniversary of the Sixth Day War. And there’s a young woman from London who’s buying an apartment on Bethlehem Road, and she wants to see the apartment after the people who lived there before had left. And she was dancing around the apartment, and it had beautiful tile floors.Which they still do a lot of them.Right. And the windows were gorgeous, and there were these two tall palm trees in front of it. And then there’s a knock on the door. And it turns out it was the son of the of the original owner of the building.He’d actually built the building.He was a builder. He was the owner, and he and his family lived there not for a very long, well, no, they lived there. They could have lived there. I’m not sure what year it was built in, but they could have lived there for 20 or For sure. Right. He wanted to see this man, who was the owner’s son, wanted to see his apartment, his house. He had been trying to see it for years since 1967, and the previous owners did not let them in. Now, this actually happened in many homes in Baka.Lots of them.So This new immigrant from London, she let the man in. And then he tells her the story of what happened the night when they left and what a trauma it was for them and has been for them, even though they’re resettled in Ramallah. And the woman, the 27-year-old woman who’s buying the apartment is not traumatized, but shaken. She’s shaken.Because it’s traumatizing, I think. It really is.She didn’t know what she was getting into when she bought this apartment that she’s buying into this whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Right. Just buying an apartment puts you in that conflict. Exactly. And there’s a really, for me, a very profound line which you have when she wants to go. First of all, she wants to go because she’s very uncomfortable with him being, it doesn’t sound like she’s scared for her safety. She’s just very uncomfortable with him, and the whole story is so uncomfortable. And she also has a meeting with the lawyer to finish the sale of the apartment. So she really does have to go because she’s got a meeting. And then she says, I’m really sorry. I said, again, Would you mind leaving? I have to get to the lawyer’s. And he says, Sure. My family’s used to being kicked out by Jews. And it’s a stab in the heart. Because at the heart of that little story in the apartment is, of course, the story that we’re still living right now. I’m in the news on whatever the news was today on the front page. It’s about the same conflict. Whose home is this? Who gets to be here? Who doesn’t get to be here? Who did what to whom? Competing narratives about that.I thought that this whole idea of who’s in exile here. She’s an immigrant, but she’s in exile because she came from some other place. He’s in exile because he had a house that was taken away. There’s nobody who’s situated where they started. There’s nobody in the story who, his father’s already gone, but his father didn’t die where he had built this house. Everybody someplace else from where they had been born. That struck me as being very instructive about this country and the neighborhood in general. By the way, I have friends who lived on Rechow Yehuda, which is literally it intersects the the street that you’re talking about. Exact same thing. A guy knocked on the door. They were very hesitant to let him in, but they’re good people. If a guy says that, you don’t want to be a jerk, but he could tell they were very nervous. I said, Look, I’ll describe for you. He remembered the apartment. I’ll describe for you the layout. I remember it as a boy. When he said, There’s a window here, and then there’s a kitchen. It was so clear they knew the apartment. She let him in, and he looked around, and he didn’t take pictures. He didn’t say anything. He just walked around very quietly, and then he left. But she also was not an unpleasant interaction, but she was so shaken. I heard about it a couple of weeks after it happened, that she was still visibly shaken by that. Because, again, every house has a story. Every stone has a story.And it’s easy to deny it and not, you mentioned to me about a young woman who didn’t know that it had been an Arab neighborhood. I mean, it It was a completely 100% Arab neighborhood.Well, Baka is an Arab word. Baka is an Arab word that means valley, like Bicah in Hebrew, but it means valley because it’s lower than other parts of Jerusalem. All right, let’s move from Baka or old houses in Baka I want to mention Paris very quickly because there’s a line in the book in a different story where people are talking about this couple, one of whom has come from Paris or both of whom have come from Paris. I don’t know.Both were in Paris at the same time. I mean, both Annie and Ted.Then somebody says about them, They’ll always have Paris, which also is a very interesting issue that all of us immigrants here face. Which is, at what point are you really Israeli? I had a boss who was really a mentor and a teacher, Professor Seymour Fox, of blessed memory. When I worked at the Mandel Foundation, he made Ali on ‘67. His three boys were all raised here. They all went to the army. He told me that, I don’t know, in the ‘90s or something, he was on some panel at Hebrew University, and the woman who was putting the panel together said, Yeah, we have you and we have so and so, but I really want to get an Israeli also. He said to her, I’ve been here for, I don’t know what it was, 30 years, 40 years. All my boys went to the army. They were all raised here. At what point do I actually become Israeli? She didn’t say anything, but the answer was, of course, never. I mean, the way my grandmother also living in Borough Park, her English was very good, but if she was tired, she slipped into Yiddish, and her English was fine, but it did have that little bit of an accent. At what point, if you would ask her or ask someone about her, are you going to be really authentically as American as Apple pie and Chevrolet? The answer is never. And when you’re you and I, Judy and Danny, are you going to be really completely authentically Israeli? We’re not. When our kids are going to deal with that, however they deal with it, and what we do understand, and what we don’t understand, and what nuances we pick up when we don’t, why did you think it was an important I would think to put that line in about that they’ll always have Paris? What were you trying to say about immigration, exile, what it feels like to live here?Well, I once volunteered at the Beth Moses, which is a home for the agent here in Baka. It’s still there. Yeah, it’s still there. I did writing workshops with them. I was amazed when I heard this one woman who had been a principal. She came from Germany. She was a principal of a girls’ school in Haifa. And the memory that she shared with the group was how in 1934, ‘35, she was at home and she heard this parade outside, and her father closed the curtains because the father didn’t want her to see the parade. But she snuck, and she saw her friends from school marching with the Nazi youth down the street, and she felt like she wanted to be with them because they were her friends from school. And the father got so angry. And I don’t know, just hearing this story from her made me realize that this woman, she had contributed so much to Israel. Her Hebrew was exquisite, and she was a principal of a school. And yet one of the strongest memories that she had was being a young German girl who wanted to be with her German friends. And I don’t know, from that, I had the feeling that like, she’s also an immigrant. Like, oh, I’m an immigrant. I’m always going to be an immigrant because I’m always going to have this American background and this American accent when I speak Hebrew and my American education, and I don’t want to get rid of it. I mean, I love it.It’s part of who you are.Yeah, it’s who I am.Well, it’s replete in all the stories in the book. And I think that’s one of the things that makes the book so authentic. Even O’Vadia, the falafel salesman, right? O’vadia falafel is still there. I mean, O’Vadia for sure is not anymore because he’s already a pretty older guy when the story takes place decades and decades ago. But it never occurred to me in all the times that I’ve bought falafel at O’Vadia falafel, which over 25 years in the neighborhood is a lot of times because it’s really good. By the way, you actually explain in the book why there’s no schwarma there. I’ve always thought to myself, what an idiot doesn’t add schwarma to his falafel stand? The answer to that is in your book. But again, even O’Vadia was in his own way an immigrant. There’s nobody even, the old timers are in their own way immigrants.Totally. I remember also once when I was at Kibbutz Ginosar, there was an old man who was guarding the gate to the beach, and I sat and spoke with him, and he was thinking about his father’s shoe repair shop in Pinsk. And this was a man who had been the first fisherman on the Sea of Galilée for 2,000 years. What he had achieved, building this kibbutz, Ginosar, on the shores of the Galilée, And this is what he thought about when he was older, which is, I mean, it’s natural. I think older people, they think about their childhood. So this question of how authentic do they see you as being, right? How authentic do the quote, unquote, real Israelis see you as being? I won’t mention the name of the person in this case because I don’t have his permission to, but he’s also passed away, but I could ask his kids. But He told me he was a colleague of mine many years ago, a wonderful, wonderful man. And he told me that he made Alia sometime before the ‘67 war, I guess, just a couple of years. His parents were not keen on it. They were also immigrants from the old country. And here he was, the seeing America with all of its promise and going off to this God forsaken place. Israel in the mid ‘60s was the Wild West, so to speak. And they made him make a promise. And the promise was just promise us, you’ll never give up your American citizenship. And he made a promise. He said, okay, I can make that promise. Then there’s the period called the Hamtana, which you actually talk a little bit about in your book. I don’t know if you call it the Hamtana, but there’s this period where there’s shells being fired before the Six-Day War.I think it’s in the very first chapter.In May. In the very first chapter, the person goes running and they heard something. In ‘67. In ‘67, right. So everybody thinks that the war started suddenly with Israeli jets racing off and taking out the Egyptian Air Force. No way. It’s not exactly how it went down. We knew for a good 30 days that the war was going to happen. They just didn’t know that Israel was going to strike first. But they were shelling us, and the straits of Tehran were closed, and Israel was being embargoed. I mean, it was a whole to-do. And it’s getting very, very stressful in Israel. And he taught at one of the Israeli universities, and somebody said to him, Well, don’t worry. You have your American passport. And he told me that that night, it was a big deal to make an international call back then, he called his parents and he said, I have to break my promise to you. I have to be able to tell that man, No, I don’t. I’m in this as much as you are. And he actually went to the embassy and he de-Americanized himself, whatever that even means. But he was so traumatized by having broken his promise to his parents that he told me this story probably 40 or 50 years after that.It was quite powerful. But again, you shed light on this. You peel You peel layers of skin off the deep wound and expose it. I don’t know exactly where I’m from. I want to be from here, but I’m really from there. They think I’m really from someplace else. But it’s all very complicated And I think your stories, they shed light on it in a really, really beautiful way. I think that people who read the book will understand something about Israel that they’re not going to understand in any other way. Everybody Everybody here is from someplace else. A lot of people were born here, obviously, but then their parents were from someplace else or their grandparents. The number of people here whose great grandparents live in this country is minuscule, just minuscule. And it’s really a powerful thing. I want to turn our story back to the conflict, which is not all of this book, but it’s a theme throughout the book because it’s a part of Israeli life. There’s a scene, I actually think it’s on Rechov Ben Zakai, which I mentioned earlier. That’s the street that I used to live on when I was a kid. There’s been a terrorist bombing. The woman who’s telling the story of this particular chapter, and again, the chapters are all told in the first person by... No, that’s not true. Not at all. But a lot of them are told in the first person, of whoever’s story it is. The first person is not Judy. It’s whoever the character in that chapter is. She’s racing to Hadassah and Karem because her fiancé, they’re about to get married. Actually, they’re days away from their wedding. She doesn’t know, is he alive? Is he dead? She’s been called, you have to get to the hospital right away. And then she has this conversation with a taxi driver. Tell us about the conversation.Well, the news is on the radio, and she hears the news, and how many have been killed, and the taxi driver feels empathy for what’s gone on. And he says, Oh, it’s terrible, isn’t it? And she says, What do you care? Yeah.And what does he say to her?He asks her. He pulls over to the side, and he asks her to get out of the car because she’s belittled his humanity.And his sense of belonging. And the fact that his kids could have been on that bus, too. So he tells her to get out of the cab, and then what happens?And then she apologizes. She apologizes. And she explains that she’s been upset all day, and she’s a nervous wreck.If I remember correctly, and you remember it better because you wrote it, but I think he leans into the glove component or something like that, right? He gets her a tissue or something. Exactly.Thank you. Yes, he gives her a tissue. Right. And she keeps that tissue, and the tissue appears again and again in the story, later in the story.Yeah. Cabs are such a, they are a study in and of themselves. I remember when I used to work at the place that I worked at before I worked at Shalem, where I still work, we used to have to go around from place to place, and there would be a driver that would pick us up. One day, they told us that the driver, whoever he was, was not going to come. There’s going to be a new driver. I get in the car. He actually, believe it or not, picked me up on Rechow Ben Zakai, I still remember. He’s playing classical music in the taxi. It’s a little unusual. It’s not unheard of, but it’s not the norm. Israel has a great classical music station. He was playing it. That already won me over. I had never even met the guy at all, and he already won me over. There’s a picture of him. He’s in his 50s, I guess. There’s a picture of a beautiful young woman on the dashboard. What do you say? I don’t know. I was trying to make an idle chatter with him, and I said, What a gorgeous picture. He said, Yeah, that was my daughter. She was killed in, and then he told me what bombing she’d been been killed in. He remained the driver for the place that I was working for many, many years. He since passed away. Then his son also then worked with us. But there are bonds that happen in taxis, especially around some of these terror moments. In this case, it was the man whose daughter had been killed. In the case of your story, it was a completely innocent man who had done absolutely nothing wrong. But she tosses him in with all the bad guys, and he’s hurt. And she knows that he’s hurt. And the part of her that’s not insanely nervous about her fiancé feels badly that he’s hurt. So again, here’s why I wanted our listeners to know about your book, because it’s so different. Pick up the history of Israel or read I don’t know if there is one, a history of the Neighborhood of Baka. If there is one, I’ve never read it, and I don’t plan to, it would be boring. But this is a way of showing the kaleidoscope, all the shapes and colors changing all the time of a neighborhood.But that’s really about Israel. I think that part of the tragedy of our current situation is so complex, and it’s tragic on so many different levels. But all we think about now, Israel, Hostages, War, Gaza, genocide, not genocide, ostracism, not ostracism, embargo, no embargo, Bibi, no Bibi. That takes up 99 %.Hostages.Yeah, I said the hostages. That’s all we talk about. And your book is an opportunity for people to re-meet the Israel of Old. It’s not a perfect Israel. There’s a war, there’s a conflict, there’s terrorists, there’s good people, there’s bad people, there’s nice people, there’s some not nice people. But it’s The Israel of Old with its colorful tapestry. I don’t know if you set out to write these stories in order to show that, or maybe that was just your coping mechanism for leaving Baka. But you really did show that. I want to ask you the following question by way of beginning to wrap up. It’s being published by an American publisher, which is fascinating to me. They pick certain books to publish, and they turn down a lot of books, and they picked yours. They decided they wanted to go and publish your book. And I’m curious, what do you think spoke to them about the book? I don’t know if they’re Jewish or not Jewish. I have no idea whatsoever. But they’re not Israelis, and they’re not professional Jews. And it’s not the AJ, whatever press, American Jewish, whatever press. It’s not. It’s a press. It’s a press that puts out books of all different sorts. What about this book? What about a book called Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile? Spoke to them in 2023, ‘24, ‘25, whenever you started to work with them. Why do you think they wanted to publish this book?Well, this is all conjecture, because I don’t know for sure.You don’t care as long as they did, by the way. I mean, we’re all like that. We don’t care why they said yes, as long as they said yes.The press is She Writes Press. So it’s an independent, hybrid press, and they only publish women writers. I think one of the reasons they took it is because they want to, of course, they accepted it. I think they accepted it before... No, they accepted it after the war began. I don’t know. I think maybe they want to broaden their horizons and have a story that takes place outside of the United States. I mean, they do have authors. They’re putting out at the same time a memoir by a Japanese woman who’s an immigrant to America, and another woman is writing about the Holocaust. And I mean, they have Jewish authors. They’re not afraid of Jewish authors. I’m very fortunate in that sense. And I think they saw that it was well written.It’s very well written. That’s putting it mildly.I mean, I’m I’ve been working on these stories for 20 years, and I had a lot of people read them.What did you think it was going to be a book? How long ago? And what made you think, Oh, this isn’t a bunch of stories. This is going to be a book one day? What triggered that?When I was 60, I went back to college for an MA in English at Bar Ilan. At that time, then they had their Shaindy Rudoff Graduate program in creative writing. I was part of that program, and they offered poetry or fiction. I chose fiction. And in order to graduate, you had to come up with a thesis, which was 110 pages. And the thesis had to have a connecting theme, the stories. So once I heard this from our mentor, our teacher, Alan Hoffmann, it was just clear to me that I’m going to write about Bethlehem Road, that all the stories are going to take place on Bethlehem Road. It was clear because it was at the same time that I had left Jerusalem. And so I started writing these stories that all took place on Bethlehem Road. And I took some stories that I had written before that. I had one story that had been accepted to Kenyan review in 1991 or ‘92, I don’t remember. And so it was easy to put that story also, and it was the theme of exile and family violence and how that can lead in the echoes of the binding of Isaac. So it fit very nicely on Bethlehem Road.Yeah, it’s certainly a great spine, so to speak, for the various stories to hold together. The book, I guess if you buy it in person, comes with this incredibly charming map of the neighborhood of Baka with all the streets, and then it’s got numbered there where each thing takes place. And if you know Baka, you actually recognize little drawings of the buildings, which are really beautifully done. Some people will buy it online, I guess, and maybe the map doesn’t come with those books. I don’t have any idea. But for people that buy it online, people that buy it in person, people that buy it in, is it going to be on Kindle also? I don’t know if they do that anymore.It’s an e-book. I don’t know.Okay, so there is an e-book. Okay. What do you want people to walk away with? I mean, aside from the fact that these are really beautiful stories and the characters are rich and it is beautifully written, is there something about Israel that you would hope that Jewish readers, non-Jewish readers, would put the book down, back on the table, sip their coffee? What do you hope is going through their hearts and their souls when they finish the book?I never really thought about that. But now that you’re asking the question, I think I would say that I want them to realize what a rich place this is and how layered it is and how complex it is and how deep it is and how it has a history. I mean, all these streets are all from the Bible or from the Mishneic period, and people live surrounded by this history. It’s a very different place than anywhere in the United States, for instance, which is really a new place compared to this place. And I want them to be open to I’d love for people to come visit because of it. And I know this is a terrible It’s a terrible time to visit, but I hope times will change and get better.It’s a hard time to visit. It’s a hard time to live here. And for those of us who are immigrants, it’s, I think, a complicated time because we, theoretically, do have an option to go somewhere else. I have a very good friend who wrote a piece on Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day, Two years ago in Times of Israel. He’s American. His kids are all born here. And he wrote a piece about, How will I know when it’s time to leave? And he told me he got a tremendous amount of heat because a lot of his Israeli friends said, What about those of us who don’t have that option? Did ever occur to you that you’re thinking in terms that real Israeli is, quote, unquote, real? Don’t really get to think about. And he felt bad. He felt badly that he hadn’t thought about that. He’s an incredibly extraordinary, wonderful person. But he just said, I never thought about it from that lens. And so even the tough times, you’re right, it’s not exactly a pinnacle of tourism in Israel right now. But even these tough times are a way of all of us asking ourselves, Where do we belong? And where am I at home? And where am I at home? I think American Jews, who are a lot of the people who are going to be listening to this conversation, are unfortunately asking themselves that question in a way that we haven’t asked it in America for a couple of generations. What’s this place going to be like for my children and for my grandchildren? Is this a temporary blip or is this a new trend? Where do we belong? Where’s home? Where are we immigrants? Where are we in exile? Where are we completely part of the fabric of the place? They are complicated questions. I know it’s just stories about people along the road, but that’s doing it a great disservice. It’s really a book about the richness, as you said, the richness of the fabric that makes up Israel. Also just fabulous stories and windows into Israeli life. Bethlehem Road: Stories of Immigration and Exile by Judy Lev. Thank you so much, and good luck with the book.Thank you so much for having me.
