"Alte Sachen": From The Life Of An Arab Scrap Dealer In Israel - a Middle East Short Story

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Today the pains were real, often tough, and present most of the time while walking, lying, seated, or standing. He kept pretending Aba was right next to him and he would talk to him, keeping up a constant stream of narration that was even more unnerving than his silence. The huge Antalya airport should easily win the first prize for the most dreadful landing space on earth.

Shoni cut out the articles about the afterlife and reincarnation and pasted them up on the wall with duct tape.It was eye-opening to read about the bedouin dwellings, olive groves and checkpoints, I could visualise them clearly from his talented descriptions. If you haven’t done it yet, watch the above a little video clip by the ARD’s (first German television) Israel Video Blog. I kept repeating it, sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, but you wouldn’t shut up, you just kept talking and talking and I couldn’t sleep, I’m sorry.

Using images from Gazit’s German and Israeli family archives along with her own photographs as resources for an animated video installation. In Walking Shiv’ah, a daughter takes her demanding, crippled mother in a home-made rickshaw on a difficult and dangerous seven-day trek to find out which of the family’s soldier sons has been killed in the war. The parents believed their child was the reincarnated spirit of some Frenchman who had died on the day their son was born. We saw turtles with old necks, just like hers, their shells shining like shields, the quicksilver leap of saffron spotted tree-frogs, the bright plumage of eggshell-blue birds. Despite their differing viewpoints, another soldier assists her when a settler is violent, and she finds herself sharing the story of her son’s death, and life.It speaks truth of the best and worst of human nature, and Friedlander tells these stories with a compassionate and powerful pen. The Man Who Sold Air In The Holy Land is a collection of eleven short stories by Israeli-born author, Omer Friedlander.

Friedlander is a gifted storyteller and each short story left me longer for more of the character's tale.Every single story is tinged with sadness, perhaps a fair reflection of those raised in the perpetual war zone.