Love and Darkness

• Mekor Baruch and Kerem Avraham have changed from middle-class neighborhoods to poverty. Trash litters sidewalks and streets. (Fortunately http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/cats.html ) A friend says that the municipality stints on garbage collection because property owners don’t pay their taxes. A sound truck drives slowly through the narrow streets announcing free distribution of used clothes "on hangers."
  The children, however, look healthy and clean.
• A walking tour takes me through the streets where Amos Oz (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/oz.html ) lived from birth to the beginnings of adolescence. "There is the building where his mother lived as a student. Here was the apartment of the poet Zelda ( http://www.jhom.com/topics//trees/zelda.htm and http://israel.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=3156&PHPSESSID=fbd63995fae3eefd90251b1feb9a7662 ), his first-grade teacher and first love."
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/beit-hakerem.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Jerusalem, Israel