Tel Aviv Wake Up

October 29, 2009

When I first heard the sound, I thought it was a dog crying out. I looked around at the other Tel Avivim sitting on the plant-edged patio at Bugsy’s in Florentin and they didn’t seem alarmed.

So I focused on the menu. A glass of wine? Or a lychee bellini? Eggplant with tahina? Or sweet potato French fries?

But then I heard it again. It was a child shrieking. There was no laughter—it was a pained cry. Animal-like, guttural.

The waitress came and asked us if we were ready to order.

Was I imagining this?

I looked again at the other people, sipping wine and beer, tucked into their meals and conversations. I turned to the waitress and told her I needed another minute.

“Do you hear that?” I asked Boaz.

“What?” he answered.

The scream again.

“That,” I said, pointing into the air.

“Ah, it’s nothing,” he said. “Just a kid throwing a temper tantrum.”

The father bellowed from somewhere above us, and I heard the boy again, louder this time.

“You think?” I asked.

I pushed my chair away from the table, but I didn’t stand. I hovered, somewhere between sitting and walking. I faced the sky, craned my neck, as though I would see something.

“We can’t just stay here, listening,” I said.

“What are we going to do?”

But I didn’t know. And so I sat down hard in my chair. I gave my order when the waitress came. And I remained uneasy, unable to concentrate on dinner or discussion.

Many Israelis come to Florentin because it’s our version of Soho, albeit smaller and grittier. But for me, Florentin is something else. It’s where gentrified Neve Tzedek , Arab Jaffa , and foreign-worker-heavy Shapira converge. It’s an outdoor gallery filled with spray-paintings and wheat-pastings, scribbles, and posters in English, Hebrew, Arabic, and occasionally Russian or French. A visit to Florentin is for me a way to read the country—in its street art, and, figuratively, through people.

And I was disturbed long before I sat down at Bugsy’s.

A few blocks away, I’d found a poster on the wall. Black and white—its language equal parts damning and flower—it was reminiscent of a religious decree:

Tel Aviv wake up

Just a few days ago, two Arab girls were prevented from entering Dizengoff Center due to their ethnic origin and what they were wearing. It was without any justification…

And no one is speaking up.

Woe to us that things like this are happening these days. [This is] disturbing the foundation of Israeli society.

And in the next hate crime [we] won’t be able to say, “We didn’t spill this blood[.]”

I’d stood, in the dark, staring at the black letters, thinking about the shades of meaning. Who would be committing the hate crime? Whose blood would be spilled? It didn’t matter, the writing suggested, either way, the responsibility was ours to bear.

What about the teenagers who were turned away from the mall? Could this really have happened in public, in the heart of Tel Aviv, oasis of liberalism?

And if it did happen, why hadn’t I seen it in the newspapers? Why hadn’t I—a local journalist—heard anything about it?

I was also disturbed to see that the edges of the open letter were ripped . In tolerant, multicultural Florentin, of all places, someone was trying to quiet this voice of dissent, was tearing at the last line:

This isn’t the time to stay silent!

There we were, quiet at Bugsy’s as screaming fell from the air. The poster’s last words fresh in my mind, I felt reproach coming from that boy’s throat. He was pointing a finger at me, at all of us, for sitting there as he suffered. His was the collective voice of every pain we’d ignored, that Israel had turned its face from.

I stood and I waved to the waitress.

Before I could begin, she asked me, “Do you hear this?” and she pointed towards the sky. “It’s really worrying, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Something isn’t right here.”

It took me days to figure out why.

Several nights later, I awoke to the plaintive meow of a kitten, lost in the stairwell of my apartment building. I imagined it—small, alone, frightened. I listened. My chest ached with each cry.

I tossed and turned. I got up and I had a glass of milk. I thought to go outside and offer some to the kitten, too. But I couldn’t bear to see it. So I stood in the kitchen—exhausted and sad, like Israel.

Tel Aviv Wake Up

Mya Guarnieri

Arts and Culture