Salad Days

Nothing says summer like potato salad. When the weather turns reliably hot I find myself craving its creamy and crunchy pleasures. It’s only a matter of time before I boil and chop enough for a great big bowlful.

Of course, they do make potato salad in the kibbutz. But just between us, it’s pretty awful. No onions, no celery. Instead, they add canned peas and carrots. Ghastly. In fact, there are a number of classic dishes they get horribly wrong: artichokes with mayonnaise instead of garlic butter, potato soup made with chicken soup powder instead of leeks and cream, roast beef that has been boiled until you can mash it with a fork.

You get the picture. I find myself wondering how kibbutz cuisine took this left turn into dreadful. The pioneering generation came from countries with rich culinary traditions – Germany, Hungary, Russia to name a few. So what happened? Did the Old Countries forbid cooks to emigrate? Did you only go to the kibbutz movement if you lacked the cooking gene?

I have a feeling this will remain a mystery. If you try to ask people they get all defensive – “What’s wrong with the food? It’s wonderful food! Be grateful you have something to eat!” – so I‘m not going there. Tonight I will be welcoming summer with my traditional steak and potato salad feast, convinced it will be delicious. The rest of my comrades don’t know what they’re missing.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I guess this qualifies as old-home week. My ulpan roommate has been visiting from England. Last night as we sat in the lounge after Shabbat dinner, who breezes over but Bernard, an unforgettable Scot who had also been in the ulpan with us a hundred years ago and had not been seen since. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I mean, what are the odds?

Merle has, I think, often regretted that she didn’t stay in Israel and so she arranged this little trip to investigate the possibility of rectifying the mistake. It’s impossible not to like her. She’s mad, outgoing and says exactly what’s on her mind. The precise opposite of me. So I did what I could to help her with her mission. I got her into the kibbutz guest room – I think there’s only one or two of them, so this took a bit of luck – and tried to be encouraging about the prospects of finding work and a place to live. But the whole project quickly tanked: Merle cannot take the heat.

I suppose if you live in a perpetually chilly place like Liverpool you can forget the sultry challenges of an Israeli summer. Still, in true British fashion she spends her time walking all over central Israel in the heat of the day. There is something splendid about the British can-do attitude and refusal to surrender to tropical torpor. All of which brings me to Noel Coward.

I’ve been humming his song all week. “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” Associating Merle with this immortal send-up of British colonial behavior is not quite fair to her (Sorry, sweetie!) because the poor woman is melting and will soon make her escape to cool, green England. But I couldn’t resist. Anyone who has two and a half minutes to spare can catch the great man himself singing his song on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdEnxNog56E

A Pretty Picture

Isn't this a pretty painting? More about this later. Building a house anywhere is a monumental undertaking. But when you build in a kibbutz, or to be more precise, on a kibbutznik’s budget, the task is awesomely overwhelming. So when my turn came four years ago I put every shekel I could scrape together into the structure – windows, floors, cabinetry – those things that could not be easily changed and put off buying furniture until I had amassed some more money.

I like wood, solid wood. But because I am a humble kibbutznik there is no way I could afford the solid oak furniture of my dreams. Instead I had to settle for mahogany and rosewood. Yes, that’s right, in this upside down world the luxury woods of the past are now imported cheaply from the Far East, which is how I could buy a French-style solid mahogany sleigh bed last year. This completed the bedroom except for one galling thing: the great, big empty space over the bed.

This brings me to the painting. It’s a reproduction of a screen by the Japanese artist, Ogata Korin, offered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s beautifully serene, perfect for the lilac bedroom. Last month I finally pried open my wallet and ordered it, only to be disappointed when I got a message from Customer Service saying because the piece is so large – about a meter long – there would be an extra $174 shipping charge and offering the option to cancel. I did. However, when I got my credit card statement this month I found I had been charged for the painting at the original amount.

My very polite question to the Customer Service lady resulted in a very apologetic reply, saying that the cancellation had been duly sent to the warehouse who shipped the painting anyway and cancelled the extra shipping charge. She said if I don’t want it I can refuse to accept it and they will credit my account when they get it back. But I do want it. And now I have a dilemma. I don’t want to stiff the museum for the extra charges, but the mistake was not mine, I have behaved quite properly, and I can’t afford the extra money. If I return it they’ll have to pay the extra charges twice. So assuming it doesn’t come postage-due, it looks like I’ll be getting the painting after all. And I can kiss the great, big empty space good-bye.