A New Leaf

Dear Family and Friends, and Friends of Friends of Friends,

Ever since this past April when we in Haifa ceased having to go into our shelters to avoid being hurt from an enemy drone or missile, I’ve been thinking about what to write about in these epistles. For two and half years from October 2023 to April 2025, I wrote about what it was like for me to live through this terrible time, but now I do not want to write about this terrible time. I do not want to comment on the daily news or pretend to explain things. . .

רק על עצמי לספר ידעתי

wrote the Israeli poet Rachel. I can only write (tell) about myself. Sometimes I feel ashamed to be an Israeli. Yet, I am amazed at the strength of my love for the place. I often think about German Jews who loved their country until they realized it was too dangerous to stay. Sometimes I play with those kinds of calculations, but in truth, I can’t imagine leaving Israel. It would be an annulment of fifty-nine years of my life. When I vowed in 1966 to come here, I always referred to the long haul. So, I will stick it out and raise my fading voice as much as I can, but no activist will I become at 81, for I have other plans.

Over the years, I have written many essays, poems and stories that fill up a whole book case. Now I am going to put the essays in a collection or two or three and I will complete the stories and send out the poems. For many years I had a good friend in Bak’a named Jean Kadmon. She was a Rocky Mountain woman from a small mining town near the Continental Divide. At the University of Chicago where she studied Anthropology, she met an Israeli from Haifa in 1949. They married and she moved to Haifa in maybe 1950. About fifteen or twenty years later, I don’t remember the exact dates, she left Haifa and her husband and two sons and moved to Jerusalem. When I met her she lived in an old house at the end of Zerubavel Alley in Bak’a, within sight from my roof porch at 41 Bethlehem Road. Her apartment had once been inhabited by Boris Schatz, who established the Bezalel School of the Arts in Jerusalem in 1906. Yichus.

Jean was a poet, writer, sculptor and artist. Her living room was a huge atelier with floor to ceiling windows. She filled the empty walls and tables in the room with her bizarre sculptures and paintings of the Jerusalem hills. She hosted poetry evenings at her home and always welcomed me when I came to visit. On one of our first Shabbatot on Bethlehem Road, Jean climbed the sixty-seven stairs to my roof porch and we watched the sun set over the western part of the silent city. This was a magical time of the week, even though the same sun set in the same place everyday. On that visit Jean became the first and the last person to tell me I was a poet. In my late twenties, that was an important message.

Jean had an unusual story for someone living in Bak’a, as the neighborhood was full of immigrants from North Africa and DP camps in Europe, along with a few Armenian families who stayed during the War of Independence. Her father, an engineer, used to take her to drilling sites in the Northwest and in Canada when she was a teenager and she’d sleep in a tent at the drilling sites. During the day she’d help her father. She also told me that when she was a little girl who sucked her thumb, her father constructed gloves for her hands made out of pieces of tin. Tin mittens, she called them, to prevent thumb-sucking. It made me feel fortunate that I only had iodine painted on my thumbnail.

In her 70s Jean started riding a bike around Bak’a.

After I left the city in 2005, I visited infrequently. On each visit she was working on another manuscript. She was putting her creative literary life in order, she explained. Unknowingly to me, she was teaching me what it means to be a writer, its demands, disappointments and joys.

Now, twenty years since her death, I am doing what she did.

I do not plan to send short submissions and wait for replies. I’ve had enough of that. Once I waited nine months for a rejection letter of three pages from a well-known memoirist. In the old days you couldn’t send out simultaneous submissions. Everything was by snail mail, and Israel’s snails were especially slow.

What I’m going to do now is share my writings with you, my loyal readers, who have accompanied me during the past months and years of war. Maybe I’ll send something that appeared in The Jerusalem Post thirty years ago. Etgar Keret, a wonderful Israeli writer whose Substack I recommend, does that often. He recycles old pieces.

From now on, don’t turn to me for learning about what it’s like to live in Israel in the second half of 2026. Come only for Judy’s short familiar essays (under 1000 words) that appeared in the 1980s and other improbable stories. The present will no doubt seep in, but the past is also kosher. I promise to keep Epistles free. Whoever heard of paying for epistles??

Thank you for your support during the trying times. I couldn’t have gone through it without you. And if they start again, I will definitely need your support. But for now, now I am turning over a new leaf.

With love and appreciation,

Judy

PS _ Welcome to the new folks who have signed up for the Epistles in the past month or more. I assume you are friends of friends of friends, etc. Now you are a friend of mine! I’m not savvy in all the techy ways of Substack, so please consider this a Welcome Letter. I post minimum once a month and maximum once a week. Feel free to share with your friends if you like what you read. I mention Bethlehem Road a lot because I lived in Jerusalem’s Bak’a neighborhood for 38 years and Bethlehem Road is the main artery. I also wrote a book called Bethlehem Road: stories of immigration and exile, which is available on Amazon, Bookshop and Barnes & Noble. If you buy it and read it and even like it, feel free to give a 1-2 sentence review on Amazon. That pushes sales, apparently. Currently, I live in Haifa with my partner David. I have three children and five grandchildren, and now, forgive me, I need a nap.