An Aliyah Journal

The open concrete area under the block in which Yuri lives, is filled with large wailing women. They sit on plastic chairs between pillars in a large square clapping their folded hands over their chests in grief, lamenting the tragic and sudden loss of the father of my friend Yuri. In the cultural code of the Kazakhstan, they are all dressed alike for the occasion, wearing finely decorated black and dark blue summer dresses and patterned scarves to cover their heads. I am noticeably out of place in my jeans and my genes, dwarfed by their heavy bodies and swollen legs which show out beneath mid calf hemlines. They are, each and every one, magnificent, with eastern european faces that express a lifetime of experience; expulsion, war, famine, migration, poverty, loss, grief and suffering. These are not women who care about carbs, these are women who work two jobs a day to pay for their children's fake designer jeans and tobacco and Hash habbits. I have noticed these heavy set women w

Sanitation was never my strong point. I mean of course I wash my hands after I go to the bathroom and sometimes even before, but I was never one of those moms who carried baby wipes in my bag and who bathed my children every day. I believe a little 'shmootz' is a good thing; it builds a healthy immune system. Still there are some places even I will not go. After a long day rushing around, I found myself in the supermarket late at night in desperate need of a change of tampon. A woman knows these things, not by the time on her mobile phone, but rather by the intuitive knowledge that if she does not get to a bathroom soon, even the most lax sanitary boundaries will have been crossed, and so it was that I found myself searching for the toilets in the ludicrously cheap King supermarket in the Arab Village of Urm El Farhem. A friend had told me about her husband's shopping experiences in the town and I was keen to find an alternative to the local Zichron supermarkets, the cheap