The Lost Semetic Art of Haggling

Under the arch at the top of the midrachov in Zichron is a little shop that sells hippy-Indian clothes, where my three oldest daughters can often be seen rummaging through the over stocked store in search of something easy and cool to wear for the summer. The owner is used to us by now and knows that his patience will pay. He lets the girls treat his small shop like their own private dressing room while he fusses about trying to look busy and helpful. At the end there will be a sale of a few hundred sheks and a small mound of clothes to put back on the racks. He will have something to do, my girls will feel loved and I will rest guilt-free for the remainder of the week knowing that my princesses have something to wear to the ball.

Our last purchase at his store totalled four pieces of coloured cloth weighing all of 75 grams and barely stitched together at all. He folded them slowly, meticulously calculating the addition of each out loud. “Three hundred and fourty shekels” he said, waiting for my return offer. I stared at him blankly not sure exactly what it was I was supposed to do. Uncomfortable at the awkward length of silence and my obvious lack of response he continued ”I’ll make it three hundred”. “Todah rabah” I replied, pathetically trying to retrieve my credit card from the bottom of my daughters bag. I was grateful to have been let off the haggling hook.

Though presented with many an opportunity in the Middle east, haggling is just not an art I have been able to master. I can’t even do it do it with my seven year old, for whom everything is a deal. “I’ll let you buy me the entire Lego Pirate ship with all its little Lego pieces - that you will have the pleasure of stepping on in the early hours of the morning, if you let me eat ice cream on the couch and go on your computer whenever I want”. ” OK, I say, sounds like a fair deal to me”.

A few weeks ago I found myself in a Jerusalem taxi with my parents on our way back to their hotel from the Kotel. My father inquired about the cost of the ride to which the driver shamelessly replied “Forty shekels”. ‘Forty shecks ‘ I mouthed silently to my mother sitting next to me in the back - ‘that’s outrageous’. It was a twenty shekel ride at most. Excited by the opportunity to exercise my new found citizens rights to haggle I began frantically to search for my courage, but unlike Mulan who went to battle for her father’ honour, this time my silence betrayed us all.

Haggling is an aggressive game of one- upmanship and while I completely understand the premise of ‘get what you can’, it feels dishonest to me. I am reminded of a game we played at College where one party has to spend exactly the same amount of money on a purchase as the other needs to receive for a sale by the end of a certain day. The game commences at the eleventh hour with five minutes left to negotiate. No one in the group simply sat down and said “this is what I have or this is what I need”. We all started to haggle, each team running out of time and all parties ending up in jail or having lost everything.

Last week after a long day of too many grown up activities and broken promises, we found ourselves engaging in the futile art of haggling once again when our seven year old dragged us into the markets of the old city in search of something sharp and dangerous with which to taunt his sisters. Again my silence brought a terrific drop in price. The laser sharp finely crafted be-jewelled and dazzling pocket knife went from more shekels than I can say in a foreign language to less than a pack of Zanex. But there was more - for a few extra shecks he would throw in a sparkling home crafted hand grenade and a fluffy self exploding Katsuya.”Yes” I replied finally finding my voice “but can you also throw in a pack of 5mg Valium and a bottle of Vodka?” And so it was that I left the scene of the crime and the seven year old to work it out for himself.

Moments later he emerged victorious, with Aladdin-like triumph, his new found pocket knife safely tucked into the elastic waistband of his khaki shorts, his rainbow knitted Kippah dancing innocently on his head. Later we will haggle over ownership rights, but for now, I am just grateful that not all of our Semitic origans were lost in the Diaspora.

Mop Technology and Cleaning Ladies

I never once saw my mother, my African nanny nor our gorgeous Czechoslovakian cleaning lady Angela throw a bucket of water on the kitchen floor and mop it by attaching a shmatta to a stick. The first time I saw this extraordinarily primitive cleaning technique was on a visit to a friend in Mullumbimby where his new Moroccan Israeli girlfriend was cleaning his house perhaps for the first time ever. Since then I have only ever seen the bucket-shmatta-stick method used by Israeli’s or their partners. It completely fascinates me. In this day and age when we can practically call home from our mobiles on Mars, how is it that Israeli woman are still mopping the floor with a shmatta and a stick?

For most of my adult life the cleaning lady in my house was me. Perhaps it had to do with a certain uncomfortable feeling I had from having grown up in South Africa, or perhaps it was because I married a man sorely lacking in an MBA, but by the time our fifth baby came along, I was ready for some help and so I enlisted the services of an Israeli. It didn’t take me long to discover that young Israeli girls are rarely skilled in the art of cleaning house and besides, I could never tell them what to do because I was too busy making them tea and mopping the floor to ask them to hang out the washing. “Never mind, you hold the baby, I’ll do the washing” I would say shocked by my own inability to delegate to someone half my age wearing gold platform shoes.

Eventually I responded to a flyer in my mailbox. A gentle trustworthy reliable husband and wife team from Korea, who would bring their own equipment, speak very little English, clearly define the job they intended to complete and stay no more than an hour and a half. It was perfect. No tea, no counselling and no waiting for them to finish. For five years I lived without fear, and then we made Aliya.

A few weeks after arriving in Israel, our agent called to tell us the cleaning lady would be arriving at 8am. It would give us an excuse to get the kids to school on time (for once) and do some shopping for Shabbat. By one pm, we thought it safe to return home, only to be swished out the front door by a wave of water and a well dressed cleaning lady waving a shamatta and a stick yelling at us in a most officious Hebrew.

Since then, Lubner and I have bonded. She arrives whenever she wants and tells me how long she will take to finish. She leaves a tower of Babel pile of linen for me to wash, and a list of chores for me to complete before she returns - whenever that may be. She speaks to me in a a language I will probably never understand and she locks up the safe room with a promise that if anything ever happens, she will rush over from the adjoining village to attend to my families safety.

Last week I woke the entire household at six am, to get ready for Lubnar the cleaning lady. We tidied, we washed, we stacked, we sorted, we packed and we tucked away but Lubner never came. So out came the bucket and the shmatta and the stick. I filled the bucket with soapy water, swished it over the tiled floor and began to mop in disbelief. This is the twenty first century, we talk with and see family and friends online over a distance of 14136 kilometers in real time and I am mopping the kitchen floor with a shmatta and a stick. In those moments, I invented an automatic swirly machine that silently polishes the floor much like a swimming pool cleaner randomly moving around the house sucking up dust and polishing. I invented Ugg-pads, wide soft self soaping removable sponges that you attach to your teenagers feet when they are still asleep and as they mooch around all morning (without lifting their feet), unbeknown to them they are also miraculously cleaning the floor.

Then the five year old took over and completed the task with Cinderella enthusiasm while I wiped down the bathroom mirror, splashed some tea tree oil around the loo, sent hubby outside to shake out the rugs and cleaned the kitchen. The older kids hung out the washing and the seven year old entertained us playing ‘Let it Be’ on the out of tune piano. The house was incomparably filthier than it had been the week before, but a little leavened bread tucked behind the couch will only serve at a mitzvah in the year to come. As for Lubner, I believe she will be back, one random Friday morning 8am, sharp, I just hope I can extract the shmatta off the wheels of the remote control car before she takes out her stick and reminds me that in Israel, some things will never change.

Sun-set in Jenin

Recently I was stopped by a woman who kindly pointed out that I was parked illegally. “Slicha”, I said apologetically, “ b’Englit ?”. “Sure,” she said, in a broad East Coast American accent “I can do it in English too” and she repeated her diatribe of abuse for the horrendous crime of my having parked half up on the curb outside my own house in the dead end quiet backstreets of Zichron Yaakov. I was confused. I thought that my newfound Israeli Citizenship entitled me to drive, if not park like an Israeli. Still it came as a bit of a culture shock, the way Israeli’s drive, and after my first month here I declared to all that I was never leaving my home town of Zichron again, a vow my husband annulled immediately, and thank G-d for that for a few days into the Pesach break I was ready to venture out again.

Israel’s roads are notoriously badly signed. Decisions made at break neck speed must contribute to the toll of lives if not to the toll on Israeli nerves, and so it was that we found ourselves in Tiberius instead of Tzvat. It was a hot and windy day but we found a place to park in a run-down outdoor parking lot where to the delight of all, I proceeded to deposit our only credit card into a parking meter into which it disappeared never to be seen again. So I decided to read the instructions “b’Ivrit”, which apparently did not say put your card in this slot. After stumbling around Tiberius with no money we discovered our twelve year old still had some Aussie dollars, so we negotiated a ridiculously high interest rate (with the twelve year old) and managed to exchange many dollars for a few shecks. Tiberius markets are no fun without money and a pack of annoyingly poor teenages and so we moved on to Tzvat, stopping for a dunk in the Kineret and an ice cream on the way.

A few hours later we reached the holy town of Tzvat where our oldest daughter had been learning and couch-hopping the previous year. She knew all the alleyways, the artists, the cafe’s, she knew each and every nook and cranny of the Old City. She took us up the back streets through shortcuts and unknown walkways pointing out important and significant sites along the way, like where Raffi threw up all night on Purim and where Sarah found her stray dog. We sat outside the Bagdad cafe and ate a kosher l’pesach meal and watched the little children dodge the traffic, our son leading the way with his Israeli army kippa and a cap gun. We were safe, he was armed.

Our daughter decided to stay for the night and sent us on our way down narrow winding roads that lead to dead ends that back into private dusty yards that go nowhere. Finally we followed someone who led us down the hill out of the old city up a one way street, the wrong way and back on the highway accompanied by The Beatles, singing “On our Way Home....”

My husband seemed to know what he was doing so I devoted myself to separating the children who were entangled in a blood battle over Mario and besides I have a notoriously bad sense of direction. Then he looked at me and said something he has never said before in his life. “Maybe that last turn was a mistake “. The sign to Jenin should have been a dead giveaway but then maybe we were just heading in the direction of Jenin and not actually going through it. Or maybe it’s OK to drive through Jenin, maybe everyone drives through Jenin? Maybe it just gets bad press? By now the traffic had thinned down to one car, ours and as darkness set in doubt miraculously transformed into certainty - this was NOT the way home. My husband is always reluctant to turn around; so we drove a bit further our relationship, indeed our lives more at risk with every passing meter, until he saw the checkpoint ahead. He then conceded that perhaps there were better ways to end our days and besides we both knew, no checkpoint guard would ever let pass a family in a rental car driving on the wrong side of the road, no matter how brave and neutral Australians are, and besides, now we were Israelis.

An Aliyah Journal

The taxi driver threw his hands up in the air in excitement and greeted us with a big warm smile when he heard we had just made Aliya from Australia. “Australia”, he said, ‘I love Australia! I’ve been to Australia! I want to live in Australia” He tossed our bags and our children into the back of his dusty sheirut and off we went making our way up north on the No.2 freeway to a small town just north of Natanya called Zichron Yaakov. “The No. 4 is better “he said “but I never take it, too many fines” meaning you couldn’t get away with speeding the way he was. He told us about his travels to Sydney, to the Opera house and the Blue Mountains and how he dreamed one day of living in Australia. “I had to come back to look after my father “he said, “but you how could you leave the best country in the world to come to Israel? “ I had to admit, it was a damn good question.

Even though my husband had been threatening for years no-one believed we would ever actually do it. Firstly no one believed he would ever talk me into it, and then once he had, the move was contingent on him doing absolutely everything to make it happen, which no-one believed he would do, but he did. He went to the Aliya office, he did all the research, made all the phone calls, attended all the appointments, filled out all the paperwork, organised to have our home packed up and shipped over, booked the tickets and found a house for us to rent.

We arrived at Ben Gurion feeling like Maurice Saundeks ‘Max’ having ‘sailed through night and day and in and out of weeks’ and were promptly escorted to an office inside the airport where we were issued with Israeli ID’s and granted Israeli Citizenship right there and then - before we changed our minds. I was somewhat taken by the Ministry’s confidence that we were here to stay and in that simple defining moment for the first time in my life, I felt the stirrings of a sense of national identity. I think it’s true, that Israel experienced in ones youth ensures a lifelong attachment, but like Lorenz’s duck, I had imprinted Los Angeles on my psyche in the wisdom of my youth, and it was not until the motherland embraced me in her matriarchal arms, granting me citizenship without a moment’s thought, that I felt, in some strange way that I had come home.

I had no real expectations, but I knew (because everyone told me repeatedly) that it would be hard to make Aliya at forty something with five children and a substandard Jewish Day school Hebrew. Even so there was a flow to the events that lead us to believe that it was the right thing to do. The universe synchronised itself to make it easy for us. I don’t mean in a big way, I mean in a small way, like when you ask for a parking spot and you get one in a most unlikely place, that’s how it was.

From our rented house in Zichron, over suburban red rooftops we can see the Mediterranean in the distance. On our first morning we awoke to a street parade for soldiers who had completed their first level of training. Their spirits were high as friends and family joined their march to the base. I examined the young faces of these teenagers carrying guns and felt a great tug at my tenuous newfound national identity. This was a reality for which I was not prepared. When I told my cousin that I was ambivalent about coming to live in a ‘war zone in the middle east’, she promptly corrected me, “It’s not a war zone” she said, “its Israel”.

At night the streets are quiet but for the noise of neighbours doing evening chores and children speaking Hebrew at a speed I will never understand. A cool breeze blows through the house and the crisp evening air reminds us that in Israel it is not summer yet. We have given ourselves three years to decide if we can make it. Before we left, we attended the United Israel Appeal function in Sydney, where we heard Natan Shransky and Fentahun Assefa-Dawit’s remarkable stories of their return to Israel. I guess if you spent nine years in a Siberian Labour Camp or you walked across the Sahara by foot to get here, you cannot be so easily convinced to leave; we however had flown in from Sydney’s eastern Suburbs with a laptop and a credit card...I guess only time will tell.