Victoria Braverman – A stroll through Neve Tzedek
It took its time, but it finally feels that spring has arrived in Tel Aviv. We’ve had the occasional warm day, but we’ve had far more grey skies, torrential rain and cold wind than usual this winter.
There I go again. You can take the woman out of the UK, but you can’t stop her talking about Brexit… erm…. I mean the weather. Brexit is something I’m very happy not to talk about. We have enough problems of our own here with the upcoming general election on April 9th. But enough of that.
I went out for a quick stroll today in the beautiful midday sunshine to clear my head of all the nastiness and negativity that’s bombarding us from every direction. The Neve Tzedek neighbourhood of Tel Aviv is a labyrinth of narrow streets with a tangible sense of history and a wealth of surprises. Today’s walk took me down Rokach Street and onto Chelouche Street (which the natives insist on calling “Sloosh” and which was the setting of the 1973 Oscar-nominated film “The House on Chelouche Street”).
On the corner of Rokach and Chelouche is a pretty house, currently a glass studio, built in 1907 by Shlomo and Rivka Abulafia, who rented their attic to an impoverished writer, a new immigrant called Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes.
Shmuel would later become known as S. Y. Agnon, Nobel prize laureate. The story goes that Agnon’s balcony was immediately opposite the window of Rabbi Aharon Chelouche’s granddaughter and that Agnon fell in love with her. Margalit, the object of his affection, was forbidden to see Agnon because, well, who wants their daughter to marry a writer?
There’s no future in it. That story reminds me of my grandmother, who used to refer to her old friend Phyllis Leigh as “poor Phyllis” because of her son Mike, the playwright. Note to self: The undervaluation of creativity is not a new thing – you can’t blame everything on Bibi or Brexit.
