It's hard enough to find love at the best of times, right? But things get really complicated when you can't tell if the person you are interested in is actually a terrorist or not. Or when you are busy chasing after a rare artifact found on the Temple Mount by an Arab garbage collector. (We all know that feeling, right?)
Two books deal with the question of Jewish English-speaking singles in Israel are looking for love, when around them buses are exploding and international tensions are getting in the way.
Come along to this funky event on May 6th and hear all about them:
"Love in a Time of Conflct" Both books included free in entrance price!
http://www.bangitout.com/events/viewev.php?a=7072
Excerpt from Katamonsta, a story from "The Hidden of Things":
So I’m coming back from a party in Tel Aviv one night, feeling pleasantly buzzed from drinking an entire bottle of Golan Heights Merlot. I catch the last number 13 at the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, and it’s completely empty because it’s late and people aren’t taking buses so much at the moment because they want to go home and not to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute.
So there’s not a soul on the bus except myself and good ol’ Mr Nahag, the bus driver. The very next stop, this dude gets on. “FWORR!” I think. “Haven’t seen such a fit bloke for years!” He’s nicely tanned, great torso, good cheekbones, all the important things. He walks the length of the bus and then plonks himself down next to me! Davka next to me, with all these empty seats available! Well, these are tense times, and I couldn’t tell if he had come to chat me up or blow me up, right? True, the guy has these incredible blue eyes, but that doesn’t prove anything because there are lots of Arabs with blue eyes from the time when the British Mandate was having lots of man dates with the local
So here’s the two of us, sitting next to each other on this totally empty bus, and it all feels really dodgy and I’m trying to work out if I can lose enough weight in five minutes to be able to escape through the window, just in case he looks like he’s pulling the cord, know wot I mean? I venture a look at him, and he’s staring straight ahead as if everything’s perfectly normal. I kind of cough and he still ignores me, so I say to him
“Slicha—this seat’s taken” (in English. I can actually say that sentence in Hebrew, but I always speak in English when I think I’m about to die—it seems a more polite way to go).
Well that gets him, and he turns and looks at me for a long moment and then says, “By who?”
“My great-aunt Ethel,” I say. “She’s getting on at
He totally surprises me by going with it.
“Well, when she gets on I’ll be happy to hand over my seat.” He says “hand over” so it sounds like “hand
Dangerous extremist 0, Harmless nutter 1.
His English sounds good, though his accent is weird and I can’t place it.
“OK,” I say, “so what’s the deal? Why this particular seat?”
“I always sit in this seat,” he says.
“And if someone’s already sitting there already…?”
“I shoot ’em,” he says. I raise my eyebrows.
Dangerous extremist 1, Harmless nutter 1.