Alwayswriteagain

I Have Moved!

2021-09-05T21:15:00.000+03:00

A series of Google Blogger technical hitches have caused me to move on.

I may now be found at:

https://nataliewood.substack.com/

where details of a free newsletter subscription are also available.

With thanks for all readers' continuing support and best wishes to Jewish friends for a happy New Year of 5782.

NATALIE WOOD

Israel’s Mediterranean Diet Wiped off the Map!

2021-07-11T14:02:00.001+03:00

I started reading this **book with great enthusiasm.

I’ve long enjoyed a vegetarian Mediterranean diet and fully support Christopher Hernandez’s view that it helps those who follow it to maintain a healthy weight and to reduce potential physical and cerebral ill-health.

I also agree that much of the huge increase in obesity throughout western society is due to pervasive ‘snacking’ and ‘grazing’ rather than for regular traditional home-cooked group meals.

But modern life is complex; usually hectic and sometimes solitary. So many readers will find much of his well-intentioned but misplaced advice startling and impractical.

Take time off work to food shop and then prepare it?

Make complicated hot egg dishes like shakshuka and frittata for breakfast with one eye on the clock and the other on the front door ready for the school run? And what about the washing up ..?

I don’t think so!

I am also disappointed – but unsurprised – that Hernandez makes no reference to Israeli food along with that of its near neighbours. After all, its western coast abuts the Mediterranean and the ancient diet’s basic ingredients of wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates are mentioned in the biblical book of Deuteronomy.

“The Book of Deuteronomy mentions the seven species that the Land of Israel is blessed with: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates. The term “seven species” is not mentioned in the Bible; this is a post-biblical expression: “Bikkurim are brought only from seven kinds [species], but none [may be brought] from dates grown on hills, or from valleys-fruits, or from olives that are not of the choice kind”

“(Mishnah, Tractate Bikkurim, Chapter 1, Mishnah 3).

“Six of the seven species grow wild in Israel: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, olives and dates; the origin of the pomegranate is not known. The seven species ripen throughout the year: first to ripen is wheat, in the spring, and the last are olives and dates, in the early autumn. The order in which they appear in the biblical verse is also the order in which they ripen. The seven species constituted the basis of the economy in antiquity and great importance was ascribed to their fruit: they could be eaten fresh, stored and preserved for long periods, dried (figs, dates and grapes) and crushed (olives), and they could also be processed for products such as oil and wine”.

It looks like Hernandez prefers political correctness to historical truth as the wonderful diet we both enjoy is not a mere millennium old – but stretches into pre-history and has developed over a period of somewhere between three-five thousand years.

To end, I beg more in despair than expectation, that independent authors start to treat reviewers with more respect.

I do hope, for example, that this book’s published Kindle edition has been properly proofread as the pdf copy I was sent is littered with silly errors, especially in the recipe sections where accuracy is crucial.

** Mediterranean Diet Essentials: A Beginner’s Guide to Losing Weight and Eating Healthy with Easy-to-Follow Mediterranean Diet Recipes is available from Amazon on Kindle @ $6.99.

© Natalie Wood (11 July 2021)

‘An Indian Male Thing’

2021-06-13T23:45:00.000+03:00

A fellow reviewer of this collection notes the author’s fine poetic voice.

She is also wickedly funny!

The semi-fictional universe of **Gods, Nukes and a Whole Lot of Nonsense teems with male fraudsters: deceitful mystics; unholy, rapacious beggars; oversexed street food vendors; conniving civil servants - and even an apparent real-life divinity who disappears most disappointingly during a plane journey somewhere into the ether.

The cited characters above are non-Jews. But perhaps Shirani Rajapakse invited me to read this, her latest batch of stories, not only because she includes a jolly, cacophonous band of visiting Israeli musicians but also because Jewish Indians in Israel would recognise their western counterparts at every hallowed and so lucrative tourist spot they may name.

Rajapakse and I are acquainted only online. So I am unsure whether she is a stern political feminist, an unrepentant misandrist - or just a natural cynic.

Never mind!

Here she draws a devastating portrait of an India – where like Israel – pools of an unpleasant, ancient patriarchy swirl menacingly just beneath the tides of daily life.

**Gods, Nukes and a Whole Lot of Nonsense is available from Amazon on Kindle ($8.99) and Paperback ($15.99).

© Natalie Wood (13 June 2021)

From Patient to Therapist Via the Aikido Path

2021-05-08T20:02:00.001+03:00

Rachel Kling’s ** story is that of a ‘poacher-turned-gamekeeper’:

After an abusive childhood culminating in severe catatonic psychosis during her early twenties, she first found refuge and healing in the Japanese martial art, Aikido and then trained as a psychotherapist.

Aikido, a complex combination of self-defence, philosophy and religion, is considered controversial in the world of Mixed Martial Arts as its critics claim it is ineffective and can cause small joint injuries. This, indeed, happened to the author who accomplished some of her training in a cast!

Her memoir is short, running to fewer than 100 pages. I suggest it would be better served either as an even shorter Aikido manual with a full glossary of the relevant Japanese terms or alternatively, as a full-length memoir in which she fleshes out the characters and backgrounds of her Jewish Communist parents, other family members and acquaintances.

** My Walk on the Aikido Path is available from Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.

© Natalie Wood (08 May 2021)

Three Rabbis – and a Rom-Com!

2021-04-26T13:39:00.001+03:00

The idea of linking a 20^th century comic British film, two ancient Talmudic sages and some serious Torah study sounds like a work from the theatre of the absurd.

But hang on …

Lights! – Camera! – Action!

Enter centre stage, Rabbi Dr Gil Nativ, the immediate past incumbent of the Kehilat Hakerem Masorti Synagogue, Karmiel, whose Sabbath morning sermon to a mixed crowd of regular congregants and visitors on a Masa Israel trip, combined the day’s Torah reading, local 3^rd century CE celebrity savants, Bar Kappara – with ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’!

Rabbi Nativ, a third generation Israeli who fought as a paratrooper during the 1967 Six Day War, was speaking barely three kilometers (about two miles) from the Bar Kappara family tomb in the suburb of Givat Ram.

Noting that those in the Masa Israel crowd would not have been born when the movie was first released in 1994, Rabbi Nativ explained that the Torah employed ‘unique’ Hebrew terms to list sexual offences like homosexuality, bestiality and intercourse with two women (mother and daughter), all of which sins carried the death penalty.

He added that Bar Kappara expounded on the words’ meaning at the wedding of Rabbi Simeon ben Rabbi – “An amazing similarity to the wedding speech of Hugh Grant in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’.

Rabbi Nativ may also have observed that the movie presented a gay relationship of stability and affection that was in stark contrast to those of the brief, faithless heterosexual affairs around it.

This is exemplified in the funeral oration given by the surviving partner when his lover dies and he recites ‘Funeral Blues’, a universally loved poem by Anglo-American W H Auden – also a homosexual.

Indeed, Hugh Grant, as Charles says:

“Ladies and gentlemen, l'm sorry to drag you from your desserts. There are just one or two little things I feel I should say, as best man. This is only the second time l've been a best man. I hope I did OK that time. The couple in question are at least still talking to me. Unfortunately, they're not actually talking to each other. The divorce came through a couple of months ago. But l'm assured it had absolutely nothing to do with me. Paula knew Piers had slept with her sister before I mentioned it in the speech. The fact that he'd slept with her mother came as a surprise, but I think was incidental to the nightmare of recrimination and violence that became their two-day marriage. Anyway, enough of that. My job today is to talk about Angus. There are no skeletons in his cupboard. Or so I thought. I'll come on to that in a minute. I would just like to say this. I am, as ever, in bewildered awe of anyone who makes this kind of commitment that Angus and Laura have made today. I know I couldn't do it and I think it's wonderful they can. So, back to Angus and those sheep”.

The film was conceived and written by Richard Curtis, whose father was a Czech refugee of Italian heritage and whose own long-time partner is Emma Freud, great granddaughter of Sigmund.

© Natalie Wood (26 April 2021)

A Government of ‘Concerned’ Israelis

2021-04-07T16:26:00.001+03:00

Israel’s Yesh Atid Party leader, Yair Lapid continues to call for a government of consensus, based on pluralism and mutual respect.

Responding to a ‘scathing’ and ‘insulting’ media debate concerning the political bias of any new government, Lapid has retorted in a message to party supporters:

“The answer is that this will be the government of concerned Israelis. Those who think … it is much more important to take care of livelihoods and peace at home in Israeli society. Suspicion will lead us nowhere. We must make a ‘leap of faith’, he urged and so build a government that is based on the fact that we believe that other people, who think differently, also want it to be good here”.

Mr Lapid, who has offered Yamina Party chief Naftali Bennett first crack at a rotating premiership in any putative joint government, noted that while incumbent premier Benjamin Netanyahu had been given the mandate to form the next government, “that does not mean we stop working.

”The goal was and remains … to form a national consensus government, which will address the deep crisis we are in”.

The government Lapid proposes would include three “distinct right-wing parties (Yamina, New Hope and Yisrael Beiteinu), two centre-right parties (Yesh Atid and Blue and White) and two left-wing Zionist parties (Labour and Meretz).

“This means that no-one will get everything they want, but there will be a balance that will force us to focus on practical goals: the budget, health, education - the urgent need to lower the flames in Israeli society. Along the way, we must also change our flawed system of government.

“No-one will abandon his ideology, but right now we have more urgent problems. The children have not been in school this year; hospitals are collapsing. We need to prepare for the day when hundreds of thousands of Israelis will stop receiving unemployment benefit. These problems are not of right and left, but of real people who have real lives. They will not be resolved by headlines but by ministers who come to work”.

© Natalie Wood (07 April 2021)

Why This Writer Turned to Crime!

2021-03-03T18:58:00.001+02:00

There is nothing professional writers enjoy more than some serious literary research.

Today, for example, I have followed an intense social media thread about the use of apostrophes with plural possessive nouns and now I have the pleasure of hosting a piece that includes the word ‘up-lit’ – a genre of which I was previously unaware.

All thanks for this new knowledge is due to my friend and fellow Anglo-Israeli MIRIAM DRORI, who was born and brought up in London and now lives in Jerusalem with her husband and one of her adult children.

Miriam has written romance, historical fiction, non-fiction, ‘up-lit’ and crime, not all of which are currently available. She says that she writes to entertain readers. If they also learn from her writing, that’s an added advantage.

Below is a first-person account of Miriam Drori’s writerly journey and how and why she’s produced her latest book. **

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Why Write? Why Crime?

Back in 2002, when I was almost fifty, I added my name to a list of ‘old girls’ of my school. I didn’t expect anything to come out of that, but it led to a few new friendships and a series of daily emails with another former pupil, in which I wrote, among other things, about problems I’d had since our school days, and she told me about ’social anxiety’.

I joined an online forum for people with social anxiety and the posts I read there created in me a passion to raise awareness of this common but little-known problem. Writing was clearly the way for me to do this. I was a technical writer at the time. I knew I could express myself in writing, better than I ever could in conversation.

My first project was a guide to social anxiety, explaining what it is and the different ways in which it manifests itself in different people. I included numerous quotes from people I met online, who agreed to let me use their words as long as they weren’t identified. This book was eventually published as Social Anxiety Revealed.

Why did I move on to writing fiction? I suppose I thought that would be a better way of attracting those who thought the topic had nothing to do with them. In reality it affects everyone, because we’ve all met people who have been restricted by social anxiety. Everyone should know how to react to them and with them. I didn’t limit myself to writing only about social anxiety, but I didn’t lose sight of my passion.

Little did I know what I was letting myself in for. The more I read about creative writing, the more I realised how much I didn’t know. And yet, I found myself enjoying the process. I used lunchtimes and travelling times to do the exercises from my latest how-to-write book, and I discovered things about myself. The most important thing I discovered was my imagination. I thought I didn’t have one, but I think everyone does. If yours is hidden, you should find it, because when you do, you’ll discover yourself.

After writing romance, historical fiction, ‘up-lit’ and more, why have I now turned to crime? It came from a “what if” question that wouldn’t go away. When I first tried to write a novel, I conjured up a main character with social anxiety and a plot that wasn’t very exciting. Fortunately, I wisely discarded that novel, but it taught me a lot about writing, and gave me a character who remained with me. Two “what if” questions niggled at me:

· What if he was accused of committing a murder?

· What if he was sent to Japan to represent the company where he worked?

The second question won, and turned into my novel: Cultivating a Fuji. But the first question kept crying out, “Me, too!” until I was forced to listen. I couldn’t use the same character in a crime novel, so I changed him. I put him in Jerusalem, instead of Bournemouth, UK. I changed his name, to Asaf, and his profession, and brought in new characters to interact with him … or to try to interact. One of those characters is just as much, if not more, of a main character as Asaf is. Nathalie is a new immigrant from France. She’s intelligent and feisty, and refuses to listen to the advice thrown at her from all directions.

** This crime novel, Style and the Solitary, will be published by Darkstroke Books on 26 April 2021
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Miriam Drori may be found online at https://miriamdrori.com/ and on social media.

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© Natalie Wood (03 March 2021)

Murder, Mayhem – but No Medicine!

2021-02-16T22:27:00.001+02:00

Fans of Israeli detective novelist, Sivan Kish call her ‘the Israeli Agatha Christie’.

But it may be an even greater compliment to dub her ‘the Israeli Josephine Bell’ as the latter was not only a British ‘queen of crime’ and a co-founder of the Crime Writers' Association but also because Kish, like Bell, is a doctor.

However, unlike Bell, Kish reveals that despite ten years in Italy during which she graduated with a medical degree from the University of Rome, she has never practised as a doctor.

Instead, she explains: “I decided to return home to Israel where my life took another direction from that I had originally planned as I got married and had a baby.

“You could say that I am the doctor who ‘never put her hands on a patient’ because I ended up doing other things, one of them being homeopathic medicine, which I studied for four more years here in Israel.

“Today when I look back on my life, I realise it was all meant to be like this; to bring me to my real destination in life – not to practise medicine, but to be a writer”.

Now living in Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv, Kish is the youngest child of mixed Polish and Libyan parentage.

She says: “I have a brother who lives in New York, USA and a sister in Giv’atayim, Israel. I am the youngest in the family by many years, so I kind of grew up alone with my imagination and creating stories to keep me company.

“Since I had almost no friends until I was aged eleven, I used to sit alone in the school garden at break time and again, made up stories. The heroes were my imaginary friends and companions and when I returned home from school I wrote everything down”.

Kish adds: “As a child, I read all the time - everything that was in the local library - and there came a point when there were no books left in the children’s section for me.

“My favorite poet was and still is Rachel. Even now I read a lot and gain inspiration from writers including Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Robert Ladlum and Dan Brown”.

But despite her great empathy with English language writers, Kish reflects: “I write in my books about Italy, and the stories all take place there, in a police station in Rome. So I believe that if I hadn’t gone there to study medicine, I wouldn’t have become an author and wouldn’t write these books”.

She adds: ”Writing now is like going back to Italy in my imagination. I always knew that I wanted to write a detective novel and since everyone told me I had a talent for writing poems, I thought I must also be able to write novels.

“So I wrote one page and when everyone in my family thought I had copied it from somewhere, I understood its worth and since then I haven’t stopped writing. When I work, I often feel that it’s not me writing but that the stories’ characters write themselves. They live in my head and I can see them and hear them very clearly in my imagination. They are like my second family”.

Does Kish, as an Israeli whose son has completed IDF service, ever tackle Jewish or Israel-related themes?

She says: “In my second book I include characters from the Jewish community in Rome while in my third the heroes visit Israel to resolve an important archaeological murder mystery in Jerusalem that is based on a real-life discovery”.

And future plans? Does Dr Sivan Kish see a change of professional direction? Would she consider writing in a different genre; use her medical knowhow or publish in English?

She says: “I have a hard time seeing myself writing anything different from a detective novel. But you never know and can never say ‘never’ in life. A couple of months ago, for example, I started to write my fourth book – about a murder in high society …”

Meanwhile, there are outline plans for her first book, ‘Despicable Fields’ to appear in English translation in the United States – but not in the immediate future.

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Book purchase and delivery details are available on Sivan Kish’s website: https://www.sivankish.com/

© Natalie Wood (16 February 2021)

The Road to the People on the Beach

2021-02-05T23:33:00.001+02:00

To scan the first pages of

The People on the Beach is to be drawn into a Holocaust story with all the hallmarks of a compelling thriller.

But because much of what Rosie Whitehouse writes has been documented elsewhere, her book’s immense power lies not only in her effort to find remaining survivors but in the highly personal and conversational tone in which her material is penned.

Whitehouse, an award-winning ‘road trip historian’, here employs her investigative skills to trace, meet and interview the ageing remnant of more than 1,200 refugees, who in June 1946 had entered Mandate Palestine as illegal immigrants after a voyage from Italy on the Josiah Wedgwood, a converted Canadian corvette disguised as a banana boat.

Such is her attention to detail, the author’s travels take her to Vado Ligure, the secluded north Italian port from where the Wedgwood sailed and where she chats to an elderly fisherman working on his nets and extracts vital details of the incident from his fading memory.

She uses a similar technique when meeting survivors in Israel; painting vividly entertaining portraits of their homes, their characters and their warm hospitality.

Then there are painful accounts of visiting Poland and the Ukraine; meeting some of their barely existent Jewish communities and walking through the Sosenki pine forest (the scene of the second ‘Babi Yar’) with its recently vandalised memorial.

Next comes the half-forgotten and cosmetically disguised former death camp at Sobibor; also the house, Whitehouse believes, that is wrongly marked as having belonged to Israeli laureate, Amos Oz’s maternal family in Rovno and then on to Auschwitz and its grey mass of often wholly uncomprehending tourists.

Whitehouse, in private life the wife and mother of foreign correspondents, Tim Judah and Ben Judah, discussed her book earlier this week with another journalist, Mancunian Gita Conn during a Zoom-streamed event hosted by the Menorah Cheshire Reform Synagogue’s ARK group.

The event attracted about 70 people.

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“Like Clay in the Hands of the Potter”

It is perhaps pertinent to conclude here by examining the man for whom the refugees’ ship was named and who is still memorialised via street names in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa and also at Gan Yoshiya, a moshav in central Israel with almost one thousand members.

Colonel (later, Baron) Josiah Wedgwood, the great-great-grandson of the celebrated Staffordshire potter, was a highly complex individual and an outstandingly gallant old-school English gentleman who agreed to take the blame and so faced undue public opprobrium in an adultery case after his first wife left and later divorced him.

Although recalled generally as both a Liberal and Labour politician, the international Jewish community will forever regard Lord Wedgwood as a fearless, devoted Christian Zionist following his initial contact with the Zion Mule Corps while serving during World War I.

It was about a year later, he said, that he began to learn about Zionism as ‘a creed’.

Col Wedgwood first visited Palestine in October 1926 and subsequently challenged the British Mandatory government's policies there, accusing the administration of hindering the country's social and economic development.

In 1942, during the height of World War II and so the Holocaust, he wrote the preface to a booklet, Stop Them Now, the first English language public report about the non-stop destruction of the Jews in Nazi Europe.

In it he wrote:

"The Huns and the Mongols, Tamerlane with his mountains of skulls, all these demons of long ago were patterns of chivalry compared with the pureblooded devils into which Hitler has converted Germans”.

Baron Wedgwood died in 1943 and three years later the HMCS Beauharnois was renamed as an Aliyah Bet (illegal immigration) ship in his honour. Later still, it became part of the Israel Navy, named INS Wedgwood (K-18).

© Natalie Wood (05 February 2021)

Not Bedtime Reading!

2021-01-30T16:21:00.001+02:00

The stories in Tamel Wino’s debut collection** start in an sinister emotional twilight and peak at what Tennessee Williams’s fans may see as a “lurid nocturnal brilliance”.

All bar one of the pieces in Ékleipsis is written in the first person; most include a scene in a building’s basement and each is reminiscent of an old-fashioned ‘true crime’ melodrama. You couldn’t make them up? Hang on! The new Canadian kid on block just has!

It is always refreshing to discover a new natural-born writer and while Wino makes some mistakes, the stories are a damned good, extremely frightening read. But not at bedtime!

** Ékleipsis is available from Amazon in Paperback ($7.99) or on Kindle (FoC).

© Natalie Wood (30 January 2021)

When the Cradle Still Rocked

2021-01-29T20:54:00.001+02:00

Barely three months after the end of World War 2, hundreds of bewildered Jewish children were flown from what had been the hell of Nazi Europe to the Lake District, an idyllic rural spot in north-west England.

The story of the ‘Windermere Children’ is now well documented but what makes one girl’s experience stand out is that she attempted to keep it secret from her own children in order to protect them.

Indeed, says Vivienne Margolis, it was only after a chance sighting of her mother, Viennese-born Judis Singer’s passport during a family holiday that the truth began to emerge.

Margolis, an Israeli citizen from Manchester working in a senior role at a biotechnology company and herself the mother of five, says she had previously believed that both her parents were native UK citizens.

But after she noticed that Judis’s passport named Vienna as her place of birth, her father felt forced to reveal her mother’s time as ‘Displaced Person Number 228’.

She had been among about 300 Jewish children who, on 14 August 1945, boarded one of a squadron of 10 converted RAF Stirling bombers that flew from Prague in former Czechoslovakia.

The passengers were split into groups of 30 per plane, with 15 sitting on each side on the floor. About eight hours later, they landed near the Lake District at RAF Crosby-on-Eden.

The children were the first intake of the now famous pioneering rehabilitation scheme, in which boys and girls from liberated Nazi labour and concentration camps were given a chance to begin life anew after the horrors of the Holocaust.

After landing, the children were driven to the Calgarth Estate at Troutbeck Bridge, a mile from Windermere.

What was their physical and mental state? How did the adults employed to care for them begin to repair the damage done to individuals, who were often the only survivors of large families? How did they communicate when they spoke no English?

These were among the enormous challenges faced by both sides at Windermere and which were recorded in a recently rediscovered daily journal penned by Austrian-born art therapist, Marie Penath and which has now been published as ** Rock the Cradle.

Meanwhile, Judis Singer was among those from the ‘Windermere’ group to settle in Manchester where she and her future husband, Louis Ingleby helped to establish Bury Hebrew Congregation, and he was elected its first vice president.

Vivienne Margolis has begun to share her mother’s story with Israeli audiences and this past week she addressed a Zoom-streamed Karmiel English Speakers’ Club session marking international Holocaust Memorial Day.

** Rock the Cradle is available in the UK from Waterstones and
Amazon.co.uk or overseas via 2nd Generation Publishing.

© Natalie Wood (29 January 2021)

If Trees Could Talk!

2021-01-26T20:11:00.001+02:00

I’m beginning to wonder if Israel’s ancient trees could talk, what they would tell future generations about living through this time of plague.

Would they confine themselves to discussing the horrendous effects of the physical Coronavirus Pandemic on its citizens or would they delve deeper and suggest that the disease is a striking metaphor for the growing social and psychological ills that beset the modern Jewish state?

I ponder this as we prepare to mark an odd confluence of international secular Holocaust Memorial Day followed swiftly by the popular Jewish festival of Tu B’Shvat – the so-called ‘new year for trees’.

The latter offers a singular opportunity for environmental groups like Greenpeace Israel to promote their campaigns while the Jewish National Fund, the charity most closely associated with land development and afforestation in Israel, wastes no time in urging supporters to help its work by purchasing ever more trees.

So this year, even as we discussed lighting a memorial candle on a day recalling the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp, we bought trees for the JNF’s Gilon Forest.

This spot is, in truth, barely more than an oversized wood on the outskirts of Karmiel. But it is somewhere we have enjoyed a stroll and a picnic.

It is also a place where my husband has proved one may snap a decent photograph using a smart phone and further – it is yet another telling example of Karmiel’s prowess as ‘countryside in the city’.

So, as the above illustration shows, our gift of trees has been made, not only to help beautify the outskirts of our adopted city but in the best tradition of the JNF – as a ‘living memorial’ to local victims of the plague. May their collective memory be indeed much blessed.

© Natalie Wood (26 January 2021)

Tinker, Tailor–Unlikely Traitor!

2021-01-02T21:19:00.001+02:00

If you have £2.5M to spare you may fancy buying Bridges Court, once the country home of former British spymaster, Sir Stewart Menzies.

Or perhaps you prefer reading about the criminal exploits of a more junior MI6 agent with a ‘licence to kill’ or even the glowing obituaries to spy turned premier espionage writer, John le Carré, who died just as Israel nominated its next Mossad chief and even as traitorous former US naval intelligence agent Jonathan Pollard prepared for a hero’s welcome on Israeli soil.

All this was happening while I read To Catch a Spy and Traitor **, the latest novel by popular UK indie author, Toby Oliver, a former civil servant with a degree in politics and a slew of similar stories under his belt.

As a Cold War thriller, this tale shows a painstaking attention to the details of period firearms, motor vehicles and light aircraft. There is also a vivid description of a 1960s-style ‘safe room’ so Oliver may be interested to know that sleeker, modern versions have been a requisite of new built Israeli homes following the 1991 Gulf War.

That aside, I recommend Oliver decides whether he intended to produce an Ian Fleming-style glitz’n’glamour thriller or a serious, political drama. This story – which needs stern editing and proof-reading – falls between the twin genres - often reads like a black comedy and ends with less of a bang than a whimper.

** To Catch a Spy and Traitor is available on Amazon on Kindle and in paperback.

© Natalie Wood (02 January 2021)

Karmiel’s Hill of Treasured Scrubland

2020-11-24T19:39:00.001+02:00

If, like me, you’ve ever wondered why the Galilee city of Karmiel is such a great example of ‘countryside in the city’ there appears to be a very good reason for it.

The modern Israeli town is only 56 years old but boasts the protected ruins of nine separate Byzantine Christian sites.

These range from a railed-off wine press in Rabin Park to rough stonework marking the former presence of two churches at Tel Bata.

Once a fortified village, the site is located on a high hill on Karmiel’s east side and is accessed from a dirt road that starts from Yodfat Street, which leads to the car park next to the town hall.

Although a Karmieli for ten years, I was unaware that it existed until I read a local newspaper feature in which native Israeli resident and cameraman Kobi Friedman bemoaned its dereliction.

“'I spent most of my childhood on this hill with many others like me. The hill was full of natural treasures that occupied us as children, and we always knew to beware of the pits or caves that exist in the area.

“’In recent years, the hill has become the garbage can of the southern neighbourhood’”, he wrote.

But when I went to look for myself, either I chose the wrong spot or renovation had already begun as there was little evident rubbish present.

Although the main gate was locked and barred to vehicles, I was able to enter the area on foot.

The terrain is rough – after all the site’s name ‘bata’ translates as ‘scrubland’. But I saw at least one hazardous looking area firmly behind barbed wire and noticed that only the plinth holding the degel (Israeli flag) erect was despoilt by graffiti.

But as I am neither an archaeologist nor a ‘veteran’ resident like Friedman, I enjoyed a simple half-hour strolling through Tel Bata and its many pretty wildflowers, concluding with a stop at the ‘summit’ with its excellent 360 degree view of the area.

** An in-depth look at Tel Bata and the other ancient sites is to appear soon on the website of the Karmiel English Speakers’ Club.

© Natalie Wood (24 November 2020)

Why Tony’s Still Here!

2020-10-25T23:14:00.001+02:00

Anthony Wright is a medical curiosity.

After struggling to be diagnosed correctly with rare, hereditary and incurable Neurofibromatosis type 2, (N.F.2) - benign brain tumours affecting the nerves for balance and hearing leading to the inner ear - Wright ventured on an odyssey in pursuit of a return to health that almost killed him and could have destroyed his marriage.

Towards the end of his memoir, To Argue with Oblivion, he writes:

“A series of events had changed the nature of my world from an incurable condition, a disfigured face, limited support with permanent mental and psychological issues. I now had a recovery pathway; all I needed to do was put all the pieces together and implement them”.

I suggest that he has achieved this, not only via the many misadventures, strokes of luck and flashes of intuitive genius that he records but because, as a senior medic observed, he is one of nature’s mavericks.

When his strange and terrible illness began, UK-based Wright was a travelling sales manager for a Taiwanese home furnishings company. Since his extraordinary recovery he has metamorphosed into a self-styled ‘international author, speaker and trainer’.

I cannot argue with his authorial self-description but must advise him that praise ’from a former Booker prize judge’ notwithstanding, his work requires stern professional editing to iron out many repetitions, inconsistencies and much meandering if it is to achieve the warm, wide reception it deserves. It also needs a fresh, engaging title and a marketable cover design as neither presently do him justice.

To Argue with Oblivion - A True Story of Catastrophe and Recovery is presently available for free download for review from Bookfunnel or NetGalley and from Amazon via Kindle Unlimited.

© Natalie Wood (25 October 2020)

Domestic Abuse ‘Like Terrorism’ - Karmiel Mayor

2020-09-23T14:01:00.001+03:00

Karmiel Mayor Moshe Koninsky has equated domestic violence with terrorism.

The courts should impose maximum sentences on violent spouses, he told a large mixed crowd of vociferous citizens at Tuesday’s ‘Enough of Violence Against Women’ protest rally.

Koninsky, accompanied by his wife, Suzi, a lawyer, had called the emergency protest outside the Israeli city’s Lev Karmiel shopping mall, following an alleged brutal attack on a former Karmiel resident by her husband.

He said later that after leaving the protest he had spoken to the victim’s local relatives pledging all possible support.

“It's time for the courts and police to stop being forgiving! Enough violence against women! No more!”, he said.

There were two similar major protests in Tel Aviv earlier this summer and it has been reported that due to coronavirus pandemic regulations, complaints of domestic violence soared by a dramatic 112% in only one month between April and May.

· In October 2018, Mr Koninsky’s predecessor, Adi Eldar led a similar protest following a murder in the seaside town of Netanya in which a husband killed his wife in front of their three children.

· Two months later, soon after he assumed office, Mr Koninsky helped to host an indoor rally at the town hall auditorium against apparent government indifference to violence against women throughout Israeli society.

Celebrating Social Justice in Britain and Israel

2020-08-30T23:21:00.001+03:00

Against a backdrop this past weekend of unpleasant weather and political unrest in Britain and Israel, celebrations at two Progressive synagogues in both countries have helped to lift the spirits of those who were present.

The first, conducted online via Zoom technology, was a ‘special’ Sabbath morning service hosted by Menorah Cheshire Reform Synagogue’s Paraguayan-born Rabbi Fabian Sborovsky.

This centred on the 40^th wedding anniversary celebrations of Eve Davidson and Clive Gilbert and Rabbi Sborovsky highlighted the couple’s tireless efforts in the field of social justice.

Attendees, many mentioned by name, tuned in from areas stretching from Manchester to Glasgow, where Eve was born and on to Israel.

Today, in what was both a literal and figurative groundbreaking ceremony, a plaque was unveiled at a formal dedication marking the completion of a new garden at the Kehilat Hakerem Masorti Congregation in Karmiel, Galilee.

The project, much of it quietly coordinated and completed during the Coronavirus pandemic ‘lockdown’, has been dedicated to the memory of US-born émigrée, Shoshanna Yuval by her widow, Elisheva. The couple settled in Israel in 2014 but Shoshanna died only four years later.

Two shofarim – ram’s horns – were blown from a COVID-19 regulatory distance at the ceremony’s conclusion, each by UK-born Caroline Ben-Ari and Mike Cronin. Caroline’s shofar once belonged to Shoshanna, who was a keen musician.

Buxton, Silk: Game, Set - but Barely Matched!

2020-08-23T17:14:00.001+03:00

The slew of global tributes to Anglo-Jewish tennis star Angela Buxton has fallen on her lifelong fight against antisemitism.

But none, Jewish or not, has referred to her late ex-husband Donald Silk, whose particular trials almost matched her own.

A solicitor, London alderman and chairman of the British Zionist Federation during the 1967 Six Day War, Silk once recalled how he and another Jewish pupil at the Oxford Council School were bullied each Easter by a teacher who would recount the events of Christ’s ‘Passion’ and then demand: “How do we know this is true? Stand up the Jews!”

Later, as ZF chairman, Silk took Buxton and their three infant children to Kibbutz Amiad, Galilee for four months from July 1967, telling colleagues that he wanted to give a personal example of service to Israel.

In May 1980, Silk featured in an episode of The London Programme, Donald Silk - Alderman of the City and then in May 1994, his son James Henry from a second marriage, became the youngest person ever to address a public planning enquiry at a hearing in Oxford.

But there is much more to Silk’s years in London politics than first apears and the story makes me wonder, for the umpteenth time, how much any anti-Jewish sentiment is genuine racial hatred and what proportion is sparked by personal animus.

If there are no friends in business, there are at best only friendly foes in the highly competitive worlds of politics and sports. So first, perhaps we should be unsurprised that with two ultra-strong egos in a confined space that the Silk-Buxton marriage survived barely a decade.

Then we come to Silk’s later life, during which, according to his obituary in The Times, the “campaigning City of London councilman fought an epic battle to bring voter power to the governance of the City of London. Twice he was elected as an alderman, twice he was rejected by the Court of Aldermen. One of his leading and most relentless opponents was Sir Bernard Waley-Cohen, one-time Lord Mayor of London. Because City aldermen could succeed almost automatically to the Lord Mayoralty, Sir Bernard and his fellow aldermen had a veto over who was 'suitable' and who was not — and never mind the voters”.

This action could never be ascribed to anti-Jewish sentiment as Sir Bernard was not only a scion of the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy but like his father, Sir Robert had helped to further the economic development of modern Israel. Moreover, his mother, Alice died in Mandate Palestine in 1935 following a motor accident.

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All this returns me to Buxton and Althea Gibson who indeed suffered institutional racism because of their respective colour and ethnicity in an era when it was still acceptable. But I suggest they also faced peer hostility and all the consequent isolation due to a cocktail of other players’ inevitable professional jealousy stirred with drops of covert sexual tension.

It must have been easy for later champions like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova to heap lavish praise upon Buxton. After all, she was nine years King’s senior and had been at her professional peak the year Navratilova was born, thus never posing a threat to either of them.

It is proverbial that great sporting events make fantastic theatre so the main ‘actors’, just like Maureen Lipman has remarked, must find it difficult to “distinguish between wanting a job and wanting to show off”.

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The story of Buxton and Silk - and of course, Althea Gibson - gives us a chance to examine the demarcation lines between race hate and personal dislike as the former is often used to attack a victim’s perceived weak point.

This is where the estimable work of the Israel Tennis Centres serves an ace as it brings together children from throughout the Israeli ethnic divide while teaching them a great sporting skill and producing some players of international repute.

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So I close by inviting readers with personal memories and photographs of Buxton, Silk and Gibson and their extended families to share them with us here.

Those interested, please drop a note in the comments box and we’ll take it from there!

Eritrea: Little Corona but Plagued by Fear

2020-07-11T15:29:00.001+03:00

When Israel’s next ambassador to Eritrea presents his credentials to President Isaias Afwerki, he will discover a tiny country barely touched by the Coronavirus but plagued by a thousand social ills.

The problems span raging human rights’ abuses to massive rates of female genital mutilation and on to wafer-thin peace agreements with its neighbours in Ethiopia, Sudan and Djibouti.

What’s more, Bedouin Ishmael Khaldi will find he is part of a Muslim minority and that Sami Cohen, the country’s one remaining native Jew, maintains the synagogue and Jewish cemetery in the capital, Asmara while managing a private business.

Israel and Eritrea have developed good relations since the latter gained independence in 1993 and President Afwerki has received medical treatment in Israel.

However, his country haemorrhages an almost constant mixed flow of economic migrants and refugees, thousands of whom enter Israel illegally where they are grudgingly given bus passes to Tel Aviv.

There they are expected to fend for themselves and in order to exist immediately enter the black economy as they can provide no official proof of identity.

No wonder the Afwerki regime rejoices in a strong friendship with Israel and refuses to recognise ‘Palestine’ in complete contradistinction to nearby Arab countries.

This is because – despite the heinous bullying tactics the authorities use against citizens they deem troublesome - they realise they may offload them on to the Jewish state where they send sympathisers to spy on them.

Meanwhile Khaldi, a devoted family man, who is much cherished by the Jewish and non-Jewish Anglo-Zionist communities in Israel, the UK and USA, will assume the posting held currently by Ambassador Gadi Harpaz this autumn.

A Bottle of Water; a Knee on the Neck

2020-06-16T15:54:00.000+03:00

Few people reading this post will have forgotten the protests of 2015 and 2019 that followed alleged ‘police racism’ and discrimination against the Ethiopian community in Israel.

But such incidents are not confined to the country’s black minorities.

Many other private law-abiding citizens sigh and say the Jewish state harbours too many thugs in uniform.

This is because such horrible treatment is too often meted to them.

(Pictured above is Ishmael Khaldi with my husband, Brian Fink who was then chairman of ESRA Karmiel and who did much to introduce Khaldi to the local Anglo community).

My husband, for example, an Anglo immigrant in his mid-70s, was harassed, screamed at and frisked with a hand-held metal detector at Tel Aviv’s Hahagana train station when he did not put his water bottle through the security scanner at the station entrance.

It was a frightening experience for us both and ruined what had been a pleasant day.

It’s as well that I ignored my first impulse – to photograph the bullying guard – because our friend, the popular Bedouin diplomat, Ishmael Khaldi claims he was thrown to the ground and choked by security guards at Jerusalem’s main bus station in events that are alarmingly similar to the brutal death of African American George Floyd.

But this time the bullies picked a quarrel with the wrong man. So it is no surprise that the bus station authorities are reluctant to release the CCTV footage that proves what occurred.

Khaldi is an athletic former IDF man turned polished envoy with a record of fighting Israel’s corner against hostile crowds in many parts of the globe.

The incident is a bad one for Israel as a racist stain on its reputation; as an ugly imitation of the attack on Floyd and will not help it win friends at the International Criminal Court or indeed slough off the ridiculous accusations it has to field about ‘apartheid’.

It will also, most unfortunately, add weight to the false claims that US police have been trained by their Israeli counterparts in so-called ‘violence and control’.

This episode is also another bruise on the state’s sense of internal self worth and its reputation abroad as threats mount of a third intifada in the wake of the planned part-annexation of the West Bank on 01 July.

Thus far, the Israeli police have done little bar wriggle in acute embarrassment at having broken the eleventh commandment.

They have been found out!

Khaldi is a charming and endearingly complex personality:

He is an educated, worldly individual who escaped a shepherd’s life but spends much of his free time at his family’s Galilee home; a smooth diplomat who does not mind raising bureaucratic hackles over perceived injustices against his community; a man derided as an ‘Uncle Tom’ by those who say he has betrayed them but who, despite being a devout Muslim, has visited synagogues for prayers in support of his Jewish friends.

My own wish is that this time, some of the worst tinpot tyrants in Israeli society receive a punishment that fits their crime.

An exemplary prison term might just do the trick.

How Things Were in Knockanore

2020-05-20T00:24:00.000+03:00

A recent chance reference to the double Oscar-winning movie, The Quiet Man, has led me to view the movie but first, read the short story from which it sprung.

It appears that the film's magnetic draw has always included the village of Cong, County Mayo, whose enchanting, deep rural southern Irish locale persuaded even director, John Ford's technical crew to return there on holiday after production, so their families could absorb the magic for themselves.

But I digress!

Here I am discussing the original story and its author, Maurice Walsh, who became such an important figure in mid-20th century Irish letters that Éamon de Valera-then President of Ireland - attended his funeral mass when he died in 1964.

The son of a farmer from whom he inherited a love of books, legends, folktales and the theory of 'place', Walsh began working life as a civil servant, turning to write full-time in the early 1930s as his fame and popularity grew.

Maurice Walsh was also a romantic nationalist and part of a group that included figures like Nobel laureate, W B Yeats, who followed the ideas of 18th century German Enlightenment philosopher, Gottfried von Herder.

The Quiet Man was first published in the US weekly, The Saturday Evening Post in February 1933, later becoming part of his collection, Green Rushes.

From the opening words onward, Walsh fairly sets in aspic an image of a southern Irish rural life that was fading even as he wrote.

The reader gains an instant image of a wide landscaped, slow-paced idyll measured by the rhythm of the seasons and the strictures of the Church calendar.

Superficially, Walsh's story is another 'David and Goliath' in which an average-sized but skilled boxer shows he is the physical and moral superior of the towering, menacing neighbourhood bully.

On another level, it reveals an entrenched patriarchal society in which women are still used and abused as men's property and where they wield any authority via canny, sly manipulation.

Third, we are shown with consummate grace how the early resentments of an arranged marriage - here, more one of convenience - may be turned first to appreciation and at last to genuine affection.

Walsh's story and Ford's movie are prime examples of the challenges faced by the creators of one piece of art from another.

Is it plagiarism by another name? But is it artistic theft - even betrayal when the original artist has sold the 'rights' to a new owner?

I do not care one jot for the movie. I suggest that it has indeed traduced the original story and is saved only by its cinematography and a couple of individual scenes. As Walsh avoided Hollywood after a second of his works failed as a movie, I wonder if he felt he had sold his writerly soul to the devil of clapperboard tinsel town. A sin he would never commit again.

I conclude here with links to both a Youtube screening of the movie and a pdf copy of the story as it first appeared in print.

Viral Marketing with the Human Touch!

2020-05-02T23:31:00.001+03:00

We're told never to judge a book by its cover. But it's clear from the front of Mitch Albom's new work in progress that it is designed by a master crowd-pleaser.

The image of a meeting of exquisitely manicured fingertips as symbolic of the Coronavirus pandemic speaks volumes about what readers may find inside.

I am among those invited by the ChateBooks Live Book Club Facebook group to read the first two chapters of Human Touch, a novel Albom is writing in tandem with the pandemic's course and whose eventual sale proceeds will benefit the needy in Detroit, Michigan, where he lives.

As a 'teaser', these chapters do their work of introducing the characters, their setting, any conflicts and implications for the plot's eventual resolution.

As a British-born woman now living in Israel, am I unqualified to discuss American mores? Or should being equal citizens of our virtual, technologically driven global village allow us all to think and feel the same?

Just as Albom's character of Chinese heritage is unwontedly abused and attacked by a stranger, so the Mail Online has reported an alleged racial attack against celebrity London Chinese restaurateur, Geoffrey Leong.

Even as interdenominational faith leaders have struggled with the notion of virtual rather than real-time religious services and social gatherings, so Albom's Christian minister tussles with the pros and cons affecting his flock's temporal needs versus their spiritual welfare.

It is difficult to guess how a story being researched and written on the hoof will unravel.

I ask, for example, as Albom and I are both Jewish, how much the creation of 'Little Moses' - found abandoned in a wood - owes to his biblical namesake. Further, why, with a noted 18% spike in international antisemitism since the pandemic began and a history of Jewish-African American tensions in Detroit, has this important strand thus far been omitted from the narrative?

Moreover, Albom is a US star sports columnist turned all-round writer and broadcaster who found lasting international fame with his book, Tuesdays with Morrie.

This was based on his relationship with sociology Professor Morris Schwartz, who had been his tutor at Brandeis University and whom he later discovered via a televised interview to be dying from Lou Gehrig's Disease.

I suggest that a similar format, interviewing real people about their experiences would be a far more effective and honourable exercise as it would have the permanence that this well-intentioned but fundamentally flimsy money-spinner can never achieve.

© Natalie Wood (03 May 2020)

PerfectlyWritePoetry: Young Lives Dished up on a Silver Platter

2020-04-30T20:29:00.001+03:00

PerfectlyWritePoetry: Young Lives Dished up on a Silver Platter: As luck would have it, the conclusion of Israel's spring festive season coincides neatly with the last week of Global Poetry Writing Mo...

PerfectlyWritePoetry: HOW THE CORONA PASSED OVER

2020-04-20T00:12:00.001+03:00

PerfectlyWritePoetry: HOW THE CORONA PASSED OVER: My kids spent Corona Passover wandering like Arameans, skipping upstairs and down, inside and out, playing the goat, waving and blowin...

PerfectlyWritePoetry: Passover Super Moon 2020

2020-04-12T17:30:00.001+03:00

PerfectlyWritePoetry: Passover Super Moon 2020: (With apologies to Yip Harburg and Billy Rose) I s it really a super moon floating over a bloated sea lighting a way to save...