Jerusalem, Drawn&Quartered

´I wanted for someone to hiss at me. I waited for a rock to gaze my temple. Instead, I had dessert´.

For one year, Sarah Tuttle-Singer took the decision to spend as much as possible time exploring the borders and points of contact - if any - of the many quarters of Jerusalem. ´I want to live here in Jerusalem, in the Old City, and move between the quarters and understand each one, and feel a part of each one as much as an outsider like me can´.

I´ve slowly read this memoir, trying to remember the scents and the buzz and the voices of a place where I´ve spent many hundreds of hours, that I miss dearly. But compared to her, I´ve mostly walked the beaten path, moving in circle around the same areas, interacting almost with the same people, having my food fix in the same places. Most of the people, even those living in Israel for ever are probably doing the same. Not daring to threshold their own boundaries.

What Sarah Tuttle-Singer revealed in this year of wandering the beaten roads of the Old City round the four seasons was the divisions that remain but also the search for a different language and a reality that can be perceived from different angles. After all, even the heart of the fiercest Salafist enemy of ´the occupation´ will melt holding in his arms a few days old kitten. 

There is no recipe for peace or hope for one, but it is a journey through reality seen with clean eyes. Eyes who are not searching for Gd or sublime transfigurations, but for human connections and layers of memories. Because there is not only the history - with H - or the conflict - with C - that matters, but how we are part of a bigger story - with simple s - made of all the steps of the people who ever paced those stones. Like her mother, and her grandmother who kissed on a roof. 

Jerusalem Drawn&Quartered is a memoir of finding a place when you do not belong fully, or rather reaching the freedom given by the reality of living in-between languages, worlds, stories. Like the mermaid she tattooed on her arm where else ? in decade-old studio in the Old City. ´Mermaids are a lot like immigrants that way. To others, we are both a little familiar, and a little frightening. To ourselves, we belong in both places, but not really in either´. 

Israel remains a country of people and many histories, of blood, tears but nevertheless of survival. This feeling gives you strength, even in the most hopeless world. No matter what NYT will try to make you believe, it´s one of the happiest places on Earth, one of the places I always feel happy, and I can´t only wait to be back and see with my own fresh eyes some of the places featured by Sarah Tuttle-Singer in this perceptive memoir, including the tattoo parlour.

Memories of the Everyday Jerusalem

 

One can miss a city, fully. Its smell, sounds and first and foremost, its people. Every single one of them, because each and everyone of them are creating the city, that special feeling and the memories one can miss.

Jerusalem. The city of sinking sun - in the original German translation from Russian by Jennie Seitz and Friederike Meltendorf: Jerusalem. Stadt der untergehenden Sonne - by the writer and scientist Alexander Ilitschewski has the evocative power of a memory trigger. Ilitschweski which is born in Azerbaijan during the times of the Soviet Union and lives in Israel after studying physics and mathematics in Moscow and a short exile in California is not a tourist. He is walking the streets not like a tourist looking for the excitement of the new discoveries, but with the comfort of the everyday connection to the place. He knows its history which alongside with the everyday connections create a particular human geography. 

Ilitschewski´s writing is precise and informed, empathic and curious. It reveals the beautiful diversity of this city of huge contrasts, where languages and cultures and traditions and modernity meet or sometimes bluntly clash. A beauty which is not aesthetic but based on the soul of the place. A beauty that suits both poetry and prose, gently intermingled in Jerusalem. 

It is a different kind of book with an unique strength and a writing which seems to come as a profound human need. The writing seems to come less as an exercise of self admiration but rather as the result of the pressure to share the story and the experience.

My literary journey back to Jerusalem was intense and punctilious but it was so good to be back, also for the sake of discovering a different way of writing about places. Being personal and directly connected to the place is not a sin, rather the opposite, enriches the quality of the writing.

I am enamorated with the cover of the German edition, a perfect visual rendition of the writing that I couldn´t have enough of.