[In my recent post recounting my time in Switzerland for my last two years in high school (“Going to a Swiss International School,” six parts: 29 April and 2, 5, 8, 11. and 14 May), I wrote about a school trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in Part 5. I said that I drew on a travel journal I kept on that trip and promised I’d publish the journal, as well as two others I kept from foreign trips, on Rick On Theater at some future time.
[I’m going to post the journals in reverse chronological order, starting here with my 1982 trip to Israel and Egypt. (At later dates, which I’ve yet to determine, I’ll be posting the 1980 journal of my trip to the People’s Republic of China and the 1965 journal of that trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.)
[Let me say a word or two about this travel journal first. It’s incomplete, I’m ashamed to say. I don’t know why anymore, but I stopped writing before I left Israel; I seem to have gotten distracted and flaked out.
[I still have the trip itineraries, which I’m planning to use for the dates and places where my diaries aren’t specific, so I’ll try to fill in the missing portion of the trip based on that. (The other two chronicles are complete, so my inattentiveness won’t be an issue.)
[The trip, booked with Unitours, a travel service with offices in Tel Aviv and New York City that specialized in travel to Israel, was over the Christmas holiday and took advantage of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty that was signed on 26 March 1979, following the 1978 Camp David Accords.
[The treaty provided for, in addition to the cessation of the state of war that had existed between the two countries since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the withdrawal by Israel from its occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had captured during the Six-Day War in 1967, mutual recognition and the normalization of relations between the two nations.
[It was the last provisions that made it possible for the first time since 1948 that travelers could cross from Israel to Egypt (or vice versa) without having to go to some other country in between. Previously, no Arab nation would allow a traveler to cross its border from Israel, or with an Israeli entry stamp in her or his passport.
[If requested, Israeli customs officers would omit the stamp, but the traveler would still have to go to another country that permitted entry from Israel and from there, go to an Arab state. After the 1979 treaty, however, visitors to Israel could go directly to Egypt without all the folderol, even with an entry stamp in their passports.
[As a company that did business in Israel, Unitours couldn’t have an office in Egypt before the treaty was signed. After 1979, however, they hooked up with Egyptian Express Travel in Cairo and began booking trips to Israel and Egypt together.
[Tourists could book for a tour in just one country or the combined tour of both (and Unitours would take care of the travel and transfer arrangements from Israel to Egypt, though Egyptian Express would serve as the guides for the Egyptian portion of the trip.
[I took the combined trip, obviously. I arrived in Israel on Friday, 10 December, and stayed until Thursday, 22 December, when I departed for Cairo. I was in Egypt from 22 to 31 December. I was in Cairo on Christmas Day, my 36th birthday.
[As for the journal itself: I’m not going to censor my 36-year-old self—though I may explain or comment on my reportage and I will clarify facts where I think it’s necessary. I will expand abbreviations and correct misspellings and other writing errors, and I will also probably break up long paragraphs in the journal to make reading easier on the blog. Otherwise, I plan to leave what I wrote 39 years ago as it was, come what may.
[An explanation of my commentary format: Insertions I’ve made since the writing of the journal in ’82 are enclosed in square brackets. If the comment is also italicized, then it’s based on information that dates from after 1982—information I couldn’t have known at the time. (I make an exception for life dates that I’ve added; I think it’s self-evident that if someone’s died after 1982, I wouldn’t have known it at the time of my trip.)]
EN ROUTE & ARRIVAL
New York – Thursday, 9 December 1982
Departure by Alitalia – Reported to Kennedy by East Side [Airline] Terminal [closed in 1984] and bus at 3:15 for 6 p.m. flight. Easy check-in – Very small group apparently. One family with two small children. Oy vey! Long wait at Kennedy for 6 p.m. flight to Rome. Killed time by watching TV! [The waiting areas of the departure terminals at John F. Kennedy International Airport used to have seats with coin-operated televisions that received most New York City broadcast channels.]
Arrived Rome [Friday, 10 December] at 8 a.m. local [2 a.m. in New York] – five-hour lay-over! Pretty bad flight over, too. Bad crew and a seat by the galley where everyone congregated all night! (I think I recognized the A/D [assistant director] from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America [a movie on which I did background work, released in 1984 but filmed on locations in New York City from June 1982 to April 1983].)
[My notes don’t say, but I assume I landed at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport, the city’s main international airport which handles Alitalia and flights to and from New York and Tel Aviv.]
Rome/Tel Aviv – Friday, 10 December
Longest flight I can recall enduring. Last leg, Rome-Tel Aviv not bad, but the wait! [I spent the entire lay-over in the airport waiting area with all the shops and restaurants closed for the most part until later in the morning. Since it was 2 a.m. according to my body, I tried to sleep on the rows of molded plastic seats—a very uncomfortable . . . uuuhhh, “rack.”]
Arrived Tel Aviv [Ben Gurion Airport; a 3¼-hour flight] in reasonably good shape at 5 p.m. local [4 p.m. in Rome; 10 a.m. in New York]. Met by tour reps and sent to our hotel, Basel, for rest-up and dinner. No roommate yet (here, but out). [I had signed up to room with another single traveler to cut down the cost.]
Dinner with two older men on tour – they’re neighbors in New York – 14th [Street] and 6th [Avenue]. [I lived at 15th and 5th—a block south and a long block east—at the time of this trip.] Dinner not interesting, but okay (just as I heard). [Israeli cuisine was reputed to be bland and undistinguished—and it was.] Hotel small, but clean and serviceable.
Everything is closed, of course – Sabbath eve – and will be so till tomorrow p.m. [Jewish sabbath starts on Friday at sundown and runs through Saturday at sundown.] Kind of lost days.
Finally met Jeff Gold, my share in Israel. Nice young man living in Jersey – Computer engineer. Has family in Israel he’s locating and contacting.
ISRAEL
Tel Aviv – Saturday, 11 December
Sabbath a.m. – Met by our guide/tour manager, Simon Segali. [Described by a friend as “an excellent scholar of Israeli history and cultural history, . . . an actor, singer, comedian, philosopher and comedian.” Simon (1933-2018) was born in Budapest as László Schlesinger. His family Hungarianized Schlesinger to Székely, and when he came to Israel in 1949, he changed it again to Segali; an Israeli immigration officer gave him the name Simon (Shimon in Hebrew). A Holocaust survivor (incarcerated in Theresienstadt concentration camp in May 1944), Simon worked on a kibbutz when he first arrived in Israel and then sang opera; he switched to guiding tours in the ’60s. At the 2014 annual Wanderlust World Guide Awards, Simon received a commendation.]
Walk through hotel environs, including [Israeli Founding Father and first Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion’s [1886-1973] house and the Dizengoff Street area (closed off to traffic for pedestrian promenade). [Once the city’s main shopping street, filled with coffeehouses and cafés, Dizengoff Street was called “the Champs-Élysées of Tel Aviv.”]
[One of the group quipped that what she found astonishing was that almost everyone she saw around her on the streets was a Jew. (Though Unitours does journeys to the Holy Land specifically for Christians, the make-up of our group, an ordinary tourism trip, was largely Jewish.) The policemen were Jewish, the shop-owners were Jewish, the maintenance guys were Jewish, the janitors were Jewish, the waiters and cooks in the restaurants were Jewish, the soldiers we saw around were Jewish. Out in the countryside beyond Tel Aviv, the farmers were Jewish. Who’da thunk it!]
Nothing open but nosheries [pl. of ‘noshery,’ Yiddish-English for a place to get a snack; nosh is Yiddish for ‘snack’ (both verb and noun)], but lots of people out. Few soldiers, but I’m told they are a common sight with their weapons.
Tel Aviv seems very drab and monochromatic. New city – only 73 years since it was founded [1909]. No real style or charm. Largest city in Israel, best night-life. [In the 1980s, Tel Aviv’s population was a little over 300,000 inhabitants; today it’s 460,000.]
Lunch at hotel (same fare as dinner) and brief rest. Then Dizengoff at night – Now full of young people – including very young teenagers – out walking and café-sitting. Not wild, but animated and obviously enjoying themselves.
Simon is an amusing little fellow – Hungarian refugee from the ’40s (after statehood [1948]). Used to be an actor. Should be fun as guide. Gave an extensive briefing in a.m. – Some of our group don’t seem to listen – could be problem on tour (older couples from Connecticut).
Tel Aviv – Sunday, 12 December
City tour after breakfast, including Old Jaffa, old [Mediterranean] port of Palestine from biblical days. [Jaffa is famous for its association with the biblical stories of Jonah, Solomon, and Saint Peter. Now it’s known for its oranges.] Rebuilt as artist colony from old Turkish ruins. (Rest is Arab town.) Charming overlook of Jaffa, lighthouse (near which was house of Simon the Fisherman [Saint Peter] traditionally).
On to Tel Aviv suburbs and residential areas. Housing – all condo – is quite expensive. Most is brand-new. Went to Kfar Sava Absorption Center – for young immigrants [now shut down]. Jeff has a friend there, a new immigrant of four months.
Very interesting system of integrating new Israelis into society and teaching the language. Stays run from six months for most, but can be longer for some, especially East Bloc immigrants.
[One thing I didn’t record in my journal is the description our Absorption Center escort told us regarding the new arrivals from the Soviet countries—one reason, perhaps, that their stays were often longer than that of immigrants from other parts of the world.
[In the communist world, which was officially atheistic, religion of any kind was suppressed. Jews in the Soviet countries didn’t know how to be Jews. Boys weren’t bar mitzvahed; they weren’t even allowed to be circumcised, a tenet of the faith. Hebrew wasn’t legally taught, and the study of Torah was forbidden.
[From the earliest days of the USSR, and especially once the Cold War began, emigration for ethnic or religious reasons was restricted, Soviet Jews who applied for permission to emigrate to Israel were almost universally denied; they and others prevented from leaving the Soviet Union were known as refuseniks.
[The restrictive emigration laws were eased in the 1970s and the exodus of Soviet Jews increased with the installment of Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) as Soviet leader in 1985. His policies of glasnost (‘openness’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’) in 1986 led to a brief flood of Jewish emigrants to both the U.S. and Israel.
[New immigrants to Israel who wanted to participate in the religion had to learn from the beginning what Judaism is. (In Israel, the only approved form of Judaism is Orthodox; there are no Conservative or Reform rabbis or synagogues in Israel.)
[Then, on the non-religious side, the refugees from Eastern Europe, who’d been living under a repressive and controlled society, had to learn to live in a free one. A teacher had to take them, for instance, to a department store and a supermarket and show them how to select their own purchases.
[Some new immigrants were so stunned by the bright lighting and the abundance of choices, they literally froze when they crossed the store threshold. The guides had to explain to them that they could buy whatever they wanted or needed, as much or as little as they wished. This was an alien concept to Soviet Bloc citizens.]
British lady (with husband and two teen sons) was our “guide” – Very enthusiastic about program and aliya – Somewhat over-earnest, but engaging. [Aliya is the Hebrew word meaning ‘ascent’ or ‘the act of going up.’ It’s the word Zionists use for immigration to the Land of Israel (which today means the State of Israel); ‘making aliya’ is the term for immigrating from the Jewish diaspora to Israel and is one of the most basic tenets of Zionism.]
Saw dorm-like double room – like Hun School new dorm [the prep school I attended in Princeton, New Jersey, for my first two years of high school, 1961-63; in my sophomore year, I lived in the “new” dorm, ca. late ’50s]: obviously working concept. Very positive atmosphere and supportive.
What would it be like? Most Americans (90%) drop out and go home. Understandable.
Tel Aviv University and Diaspora Museum. Really an exhibit of diaspora life – no real artifacts – all copies and reproductions – photos and drawings. Very well displayed and laid out. Impressive display of Jewish life away from Middle East.
Study area has computer with read-out of any Jewish community in world. Can get print-out of data. Tried Uman ([my paternal grandfather] Jack K*****’s birthplace [in Ukraine]). Interesting – not destroyed as I thought and not only Jewish town (about 90% at height). Got copy for Dad.
[My father always told me, prior to this discovery, that Uman, the Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), was a shtetel, a small town in Central and Eastern Europe with a largely Jewish population which existed before the Holocaust, and that it was wiped out by the Germans in World War II.
[Out of curiosity, I looked the town up on the computer, which was programmed with the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and found that Uman was a small city with a population of about 30,000 in 1897, when my grandfather was 7. Uman, 130 miles south of Kiev, had a large Jewish community of about 17,000—57%, not 90%—until 1941, when Germany captured the city and slaughtered or transported all the Jews. My grandfather’s family had emigrated to the United States between 1897 and 1901.
[After my father’s death in 1996, my mother found a box in which he’d stashed a number of disparate items: letters from my brother and me going back to the early ’60s, papers I’d written in college, clippings from my short career in the theater, and so on. One of Dad’s keepsakes was the print-out of the Encyclopaedia Judaica article on Uman from the Diaspora Museum that I’d given him on my return from Israel and Egypt.]
Home for dinner, then Jaffa by night. Jeff off to meet cousins – but they never showed! Jaffa art galleries very disappointing – Most are starkly modern, but with very little style. Not to my taste. Other shops are “antiques.” Area very charming, but artificial.
[The transcription-plus-recovery of this chronicle turned out to be much longer than I anticipated. I’ve had to divide it up and the Israeli part of the trip alone is six installments. At present, I’m figuring on posting the whole thing together, with sections coming three days apart.
[After this first part, then, Part 2 will be published on 14 July. The installment to be posted on 17 July will be the start of the recovered journal; when I run that section, I’ll provide an explanation of the differences with the straight transcription-with-commentary like Part 1 above.
[I hope you will follow along and return to Rick On Theater through all the sections. I did a lot of traveling in my younger days, and this trip was one of the most interesting I took. Maybe you’ll see why.]
No comments:
Post a Comment