My Israel

I was thinking something, maybe there is no such thing as my Israel... I know for sure that there are my Europe, my Belgrade, my Sweden, my Yugoslavia, my Berlin, my America... But Israel? I don't know. With Israel and Israelis, I thought, I have no special ties. I have, of course, several wonderful friends who are originally Jewish, but I would also like them to be Chilean or Finnish. And I have no idea at all whether they perceive themselves that way or somehow differently. We never discussed it specifically.

Mica and Ljuba. Well, Ljuba was able to tell his girlfriend Jova, who was proud of her Volksdeutsche origin on her mother's side, that he married a Jew and had a son, therefore also a Jew, but of course that was their internal banter. And the only thing that reminded me of Mica's origin was the brass plate on the old, massive door of their apartment on the corner of Kursulina, which read - Dragićević/Alkalaj. And there, on that crate, I learned how to prepare Sephardic eggs from Mica's grandmother: they are placed in a deep pot on a layer of onion leaves and several chopped heads, garlic, laurel, peppercorns, a little wine and wine vinegar, olive oil are added oil and some water. They are cooked on the edge of the stove or hotplate for twenty-four hours. When you peel them, they smell rich and earthy of the Judean desert and the hills around Travnik and Sarajevo, of Sephardic sweets and chestnuts from their Córdoba and Toledo, from where the fanatics drove them to scatter all over the world, and to be found by Bayezid the Second in the port of Istanbul greeted with the famous words: "Those who expelled you lose, I win".

That's how I, through the miraculous ways of history, got friendship for life. It was sold to me by a wonderful old lady, known for driving a motorcycle around Belgrade before the war and being the first female paratrooper in the Kingdom and a stunt for the best tomato soup ever, which she bought from the family of her husband, Mr. Alkalaj, a pre-war textile merchant. The broth is made in a standard way, three types of onions and root vegetables are fried in olive oil, peeled and cleaned tomatoes are added, spices are added and lightly mixed. Well, here comes the twist, quite a small one, but in cooking, as in life, the best things are seemingly quite ordinary with a hidden pearl that changes everything. That's right, where all of us, from the Germans to the French and us here, would add a little white sugar or a spoonful of honey to the tomato soup at the end of cooking to kill the excessive acidity, Mrs. Alkalaj used to take a jezva, put two teaspoons of sugar and let it simmer. it caramelizes, so when it is already brown, I pour it into the broth. And that's the whole trick. But what kind. Don't take my word for it, try it yourself. Put the broth with regular sugar in one pan, and the caramelized sugar in the other. Heaven and earth.

Then the Philharmonic from Tel Aviv came into my life, when they played the Fifth so powerfully with the great Zubin during the Gulf War, then Isaac Perlman, the best since Paganini, then the dangerously dislocated Ephraim Kishon, who gave us additional support for our belief that at home really worst. Then I spent some time at Rex in Jevrejska street, we did shows, concerts and other things in the building where the pre-war Dorćol Jews used to walk, you could hear the music and their steps at the dances that they once organized there. So at the Fest, we watched the terrible nine-hour fresco about the Holocaust - Shaw by Claude Lanzmann and later Spielberg's genius Schindler's List.

And even before that, two people from the tribe of Israel became my housemates, so I could ask questions with them every day and mostly listen to what they had to say. And they had, exactly. About what to look for – Oh, let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone, let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon. Show me slowly what I only know the limits of, dance me to the end of love. The latter comforted me when it got really hard and reminded me to never despair because anything can happen: I was burnt out from exhaustion, buried in the hail. Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail. Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn - As in, she said, I'll give ya shelter from the storm. Later I met both of them in Belgrade, we sang a little together, they from the stage, I from the audience. My friends from the tribe of Israel and me.

And then the sixth of January came. I watched, like everyone else, how savages massacre entire families in kibbutzim, how they hunt in the bushes and shoot children at a rave party, how they make fun of the living and the dead, how they then celebrate their monstrosity in the streets of Gaza.

That's when I saw that video that I don't want to and could not forget: four girls covered in blood, hands tied, shocked by the savagery, confused by the senselessness. And among them one face, also bloody and eyes that look out from that blood and search. An interlocutor among his jailers, someone not to blame and condemn him, but to explain to him that he is wrong. Naama Levy. I found out later. Activist of humanitarian organizations to help Palestine, organizer of workshops for young Palestinians and Israelis, fighter for a new life on the sand they share. He looks at monsters without fear and searches. And then I realized that she is my Israel. A girl who is looking for friends on the other side of the wire, who was abducted by the compatriots of her friends, dragged to one of their lairs, abused there terribly and held prisoner for a year, and she looks at those beasts with a bloody face and torn clothes and still wants to explain to them that it is possible to be a human being.

Bring her back home. However you know, regardless, at any cost, I'm not interested in anything, no matter what. Just bring her back. My Israel cannot do without her.