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Hey podcast people, what we got for you this week is a very special episode, removed from all the screaming headlines and important social media posts of the week. We will be back next week with something more like what we usually do now onto our show, which does not contain explicit language but does contain references to love. Some of it unrequited, some of it the other kind of this is TLV1. Last week, just before Tu be Av, a friend sent me a thing about a new app. Really a new version of an app that's been around for a few years in a Russian version from St. Petersburg, but last week for Tuba. The app was in Hebrew for Tel Aviv, but already I have gotten ahead of myself. Tub AV, the 15th of the month of AV is here, a holiday that celebrates love. It occurs under a full moon and the Mishnah Ta' Anit 4 says in the Steinsaltz translation quote Rabban Shimon Ben Gamliel said there were no days as joyous for the Jewish people as the 15th of AV and as Yom Kipp as on these days the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in white clothes, which each woman borrowed from another. Why were they borrowed? They did this so as not to embarrass one who did not have her own white garments. And the Gemara expands the thing explaining in tractate ta' nit 31a that all Israel borrowed one from the other, so that a girl with no fine white gown would feel no shame with which meant too that the boys watching the girls maybe yearning for a match, they could tell who before them danced with grace and energy and joy, but they could not tell who among those dancing before them came from wealth and promised a dowry. Rashi writes that even the princess herself danced in a borrowed dress. These days on Tuba there is still dancing, some of it, no doubt, in clothes borrowed from a friend's closet. But mostly Tu Bav has come to be a day of Love when your WhatsApp feed fills with discount codes from florists, chocolatiers, and wineries, and when romantic restaurants are booked solid weeks in advance, and when you see couples holding hands making their way to the sea just before the sun starts to go down. The new app is in this spirit. It is called Michtave Ahava Love Letters, and when you open it you see a map of the city mostly covered with blue pushpins, from Kibbutz Galuyot street in the south up to Tsahala in the north, and on each pushpin is a year and a name and a photograph of A face that goes with the name. The brief explanation you get of the app on the app says, quote, love letters was born of a wish to make the city speak to us in the language of love. The project was thought up and carried out by the director and producer, Semyon Alexandrovsky, out of a belief that love letters are part of the living memory of the city and that even many years after they were written, they can make people meet. End quote. Semyon Alexandrovsky is full of beliefs like that about cities, about love, about memory. He was born in a place called Perm, on the Kama river, just west of the Ural Mountains, a thousand and some kilometers east and a bit north of Moscow. It says something about the City that from 1940 to 1957, Perm was renamed Molotov after Vyachevslav Molotov, Stalin's foreign minister, a man man who also gave his name to the Molotov cocktail, an improvised firebomb in a pop or wine bottle that, because it is cheap and easy to make, was and remains a favorite of dissident militias, partisans and terror cells everywhere. Perm Neymatov Ney Perm was a gray Soviet city, the principal occupation of which was transforming metals and minerals mined in the Urals into guns, bombs, missiles and aircraft engines. The place was also the center of a network of forced labor camps for dissidents. A gulag named Perm36 is today a museum of political repression. Semyon Alexandrovsky was born in Perm in 1982, at the twilight of the Soviet empire. The old system was there faltering, and he got in Perm the foundation of a fine Soviet education in math and science. But he was only eight when the Berlin Wall fell, and after which his family, like so many other Jewish families, Israel to Tel Aviv, where he went to the mostly Russian Holz Technical High School, which offers as close as his city has got to a fine Soviet education in math and science, at which Semyon Alexandrovsky excelled, though at the same time he fell in with a theater crowd, getting a spot in an acting studio run by Igor Mushkatin, who had got some renown at the Leningrad Theater Academy. And at 20, Semion Alexandrovsky was all in for theater, and he got himself accepted to the St. Petersburg's State Theater Arts Academy, graduating after five years, then acting in local theater laboratories, making a name for himself in festivals, winning prizes, and starting with his wife, a theater scholar named Anastasia Kim, something the two called the Pop up theater, where they raised one show after another, each of which was well done, different, like their first, called Fuel, a monologue, a TED Talk, really, by the great Russian physicist David Yang, about at first atoms and space, but soon also about ambition and memory and death. After that, Semyon Alexandrovsky did a show where you buy a ticket, one of eight you can get on any given night, and you go to a bar in St. Petersburg at the time on the ticket, and the bartender gives you a beer and headphones, and you put on the headphones and you hear Semyon Alexandrovsky reading poems one after another by Charles Bukowski, translated into Russian Spark and the Genius of the Crowd and IBM Selectric. That show is called behind the Bar with Charles Bukowski. And five years ago, in the Corona, a desolate moment, Semyon Alexandrovsky had the idea of searching the archives of St. Petersburg for love letters. And he built the Love Letter app, and with it you could walk the streets of the city. And here, in the massed isolation of the corona of 2021, a letter, for instance, Anton Chekov got from Olga Knipper. She wrote it late at night after seeing a performance of Three Sisters on the national stage. And she says, quote, I am a little tipsy just now. My Anton dear, forgive your desolute wife. After the performance, we gathered in the director's office and had a feast. There was cula, bayaka, caviar, salmon, tea, fruit, wine, champagne and chatter. We drank to your. My darling, I don't know where or when we will see each other, but I know that I shall smother you in my arms and cover you with kisses. You had better watch out. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Semion Alexandrovsky came back to Israel. His mother had never left, and it was still home he had often visited in his two decades in the Russian theater, although the place was new for Anastasia, Kim and now their two girls, Maya and Sophia. In the Love Letters app, you pick between two modes. In the one, you go to the map and you click on a push pin and it plays a recording of an actor reading a letter sent or received that the address the pin points to. In the other, which is called the tiul mode, or stroll or hike or wander mode, the app follows where you are and when you go by any of the dozens and dozens and dozens of addresses where a love letter came or went, whatever you are listening to, the app breaks in and plays the letter sent from or sent to the place that you've just come to which is how it happened that on Tuba Av I was walking up Nordau Boulevard with Lucy the dog, listening to men on the radio talking about Iran, of course, when the radio went quiet and then all at once there was the sound of a man reading a letter to a Rachel, and I understood that Lucy and I had just walked by the building where Nathan Alterman and Rachel Marcus lived for the last decades of the National Poet's life. The letter that broke into the news was written by Nathan Alterman in New York, where he was to be with his daughter Tirza Attar, now 21, just out of the army, newly married to a man named Oded Kotler, the two of them in New York to study acting by the method at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse School. The letter goes in part. My dear and beloved Rachel, I am writing to you in the early quiet morning in the hotel room where I am staying. The children are surely still asleep. Oded must get to school earlier today, and Tirza and I arrange that after he leaves I will telephone their apartment with a wake up call to make sure that she too rises in time. This is one thread of our shared life, and in the small details of our daily existence now being woven here between the children and me, I should explain that it makes me happy to be useful to them from time to time, even in matters of no consequence. At this moment I am serving as an alarm clock, and I tell you that no wristwatch or wall clock has ever felt as important as I do. It is true that my journey here was not undertaken for some trifling matter. It was very necessary, even imperative. Our Tirza's worries and uncertainties had brought her to a state of extreme emotional strain. Lesser difficulties joined them, things that in another condition might not have troubled her so much. But in her agitated state every little thing takes on importance and crushing force. At times she fought it, even with psychiatric medication, whose effects were not always beneficial and sometimes added to her difficulties. A strong and wonderful child, she fought all this with strength and courage and usually all alone. The heavy cloud, though, has dissolved and is gone. Joy and desire and the powers of life and work fill her once again. My coming did not bring about this change, but there is no doubt that my journey here mattered. I am here now with her and with Oded, and there is no doubt that I must remain a while longer so that this wonderful change for the better may grow stronger and wider and become permanent. This child's wonderful emotional powers, her excellent achievements at school, the place she holds in the hearts of her friends, men and women alike, the high regard of her teachers, and in addition, the voices of poetry beating within her that she now turns into marvelous pages of verse and prose. All of this is coming back and filling her life again with meaning and purpose. Rachel, do not miss us too much, or rather do miss us very much, but without agitation or worry. Miss us happily. And with that I shall stop for now. Yours, Nathan. P.S. when Tirza, Oded and I went out, we found your letter in the mailbox. How beautiful it is. Such warmth and such spelling mistakes do not exist anywhere else in the world. Another kiss and every good wish. Nathan what I knew walking with Lucy last week that Nathan Alterman could not know when he wrote the letter from New York, where he had gone to be with his daughter and her new husband after her breakdown in New York, is that 15 years after Nathana Alterman wrote this letter to his wife, Rachel Marcus, herself a famous actress at the Camari Theater, their girl, Tirza Attar, who had by then achieved fame as a poet, a lyricist and a writer that finally let her escape the shadows of her parents fame. She died from a fall from a six story window in her apartment just a few blocks from her parents place near the river, and the family told the papers that hanging the laundry she had lost her balance and fallen. Had Lucy and I walked down Rothschild another boulevard, the talk of Iran would have been interrupted by this beseeching letter sent in 1916 to Dov Hoz by Rachel Witkin. At this difficult hour I come to add yet another perplexity to the perplexities that already beset you. I am sorry, but I cannot put off this moment any longer. The lines that follow will bear witness to the justice of what I am doing. I do not doubt that you are a man of integrity. If I doubted your character, I could not speak directly to your heart. That is what I am doing now. Do you remember that at one of our gatherings several months ago, I sent you a note containing these There is a soul who yearns for you in love. Several months have passed and the situation has changed. The soul who yearned for you in love is now dying of love for you. When this modest and pure soul touched the fire of God, she was wholly consumed by it. Being free of all impurity, she was offered up whole upon the altar. She chose to endure the anguish of her silence to the end, rather than cast a shadow over the life of the man who is dear to her. But I, the only person who sees and knows, can remain silent no longer I now regard my silence until this moment as a single sin. To remain silent any longer would be murder. In order to speak directly to your heart, I shall turn to the facts. For no truth is more sacred or more terrible than this truth. For a full year, Shulamit has been tormented by her love for you. How this love entered her heart, I do not know. She concealed it all within herself. After several months of inward suffering, she fell gravely ill. For a long time, her doctors struggled to understand her illness, but could not determine its nature. Finally, they sent her to Jerusalem. The doctors there, too, found her illness to be quite out of the ordinary. They agreed that it had been brought on by tremendous emotional strain and a violently troubled inner life. The doctors remained of the opinion that her illness was solely the result of an unnatural life, of an inner storm forcibly held in check. The only remedy, they said, was a quiet life, peace and spiritual equilibrium. They warned her most emphatically to guard against any inner disturbance that might bring on a third attack. If that happened, they said, her life would be in danger in a short time. This fatal love has undermined her health to its very foundations. And now, only some two weeks after the second attack, she has fallen ill for the third time. Imagine the state of her family and the bewilderment of the doctors, especially since no one knows the truth. If you wish to know what caused this latest illness, I will tell you. On Friday, you summoned the members of the Youth Movement chapter to a meeting concerning your departure to join the Ottoman army. That news alone was enough to lay her low. Your present situation with the army and the fear that you may leave Jaffa are consuming what remains of her strength. In recent days, her suffering has become so great that she wished at last to speak to you herself, but could not summon the strength. I can no longer bear the responsibility of my silence. And so I turn to you. To whom else could I have turned? From whom could I ask for help, if not from you? You must understand that this letter is not an accusation. These words come from the depths of my heart, and I address them directly to the depths of yours. I implore you, by everything you hold sacred, to search your heart. Might you find there some faint echo of the suffering of this unhappy and precious soul? Might the dew that could restore her to life lie hidden in the secret places of your own soul? Should that dew be allowed to dry up unused while a woman's life is needlessly extinguished? My brother, it is with this appeal that I turn to you. We are all brothers and sisters in suffering. And yet we remain strangers to one another. It is difficult, terribly difficult, to bridge the abyss that separates one heart from another. If, after so many sacrifices, I have succeeded in building a bridge across that abyss, if I now stand at the door of your heart and knock, then let these words enter and let them draw salvation from within it. If your heart does not yet incline toward this young woman, it is only because of the distance between you. Take some steps to overcome that distance. This soul will reveal herself to you in all her simple radiance. If not in love, then in fellowship and friendship. End quote Dov Hoz, when he got this letter, was 22 years old. He'd come to Tel Aviv from Orsha in Russia. When he was 12, three years before the city split from Jaffa, and he studied at Gymnasia Herzliya and joined the Young Guard. And it was in school and the Youth movement that his paths crossed with Rachel Witkin and with Shulamit, who was not bearing up to the love she felt for him, especially now, after it became known that Dov Hose was off to Constantinople for officer training in the Ottoman army, destined to move from there to a posting near Damascus. I have tried all the archives, and just what happened to Shulamit, I have not yet been able to learn. I do know, though, that two years before he got this letter from Rachel Witkin, when he was just 20, already working in the fields of Degana, Dov Hose wrote a letter of his own to Rivka Schertak, whom he met also at Gymnasia Herzliya. She was two years older, but she'd taken time off to devote herself to the piano. Her talent for the instrument was celebrated throughout the city. And it was Rivka Schertach, the recipient of this letter, whom, in the fullness of time, Dov Hose married. Rivka. Viva. My dearest Rivka, your latest letters swept over me in a sudden delightful wave, and I grew so warm, it seemed to me that warm breezes and caresses were blowing from every quarter, from Jaffa, from Gilead, from the Kinneret, and my heart beat with such rhythm so melodiously, while a wondrous, hushed music poured out all around me and held me spellbound. Rivka, the hours we spent in Gilead are very dear to me and deeply engraved in my memory. Whenever I recall them, my eyes open wide and my heart beats again as it did in that lovely time. Nor shall the moment when I reveal to you my secret, the secret I had kept within me ever fade from my memory. And why did I not give the flower to the one for whom I had intended it, when nearly three quarters of a year had passed since I picked it? Do you know, Rivka, there are moments when silence weighed heavily on me. On the day of my departure, I thought, this evening I will come in. I will tell you at least a few words of what is in my heart. I will hear your nightingale song one last time, carry its final notes with me, and then set out on my way. But I was detained and I did not come. And now, ever since my return from Gilead, I have waited for the same wind to pass again over the strings of my heart and pluck once more that magnificent exalted melody. That moment has not yet come, my dear Rivka. I am now working out in the open fields. Lately I have been harrowing besides the Jordan. I have seen Mount Hermon redden and the Jordan with its whispering weeds. Happiness and joy are spread over everything. Tomorrow I begin to sow to my delight in the very place that I plowed beside the Jordan. Warmest greetings from your friend Dov Dov Hose and Rivka Schertach were then at the start of everything. They would marry in Vienna in 1921, and Dov pose was zealously everywhere over most of the next two decades. Recruiting for the Haganah, Jewish Defense militia leader in the Histadroot labor union, giving fiery speeches at meetings, off to London to build ties with the Labour Party there, elected deputy mayor of Tel Aviv, creating a company called Aviron Airplane that ran flights up and back in the tiny country and trained pilots who would become the first flyers of the Israel Air Force once the state came into being. Stay Dov Airport in Tel Aviv was named for him. Rivka Shertak kept studying music in Palestine and then London, and The couple had two girls, Tirca and Tamar. On December 29, 1940, Dov Hose and Rivka Schertak were driving back from visiting a Haganah friend in a British prison. Their oldest, Tirca, was with them when Dov Hose lost control of the car and the three were killed. Rivka Shertak did not live to see 14 years later, her brother Moshe Charet, sworn in as Israel's second and prime minister. On September 9, 1940, Ruth Dayan, a 22 year old nurse living in Tel Aviv with a baby, her first Yael Dayan, wrote this letter to her husband, Moshe Dayan. Where shall I start? I am still shaking. Perhaps I Should begin at the beginning. As you know, I have started working in the emergency room at Hadassah Hospital here in Tel Aviv on Monday, that is yesterday. I put Ulic Yael down to sleep at half past one in the afternoon and went to work until evening. Only Tziporah was at home, standing in the yard, doing the wash. At Hadassah there were only two of us trainees, and we complained that there was no work. An hour later we heard what seemed to be an earthquake. The window panes shook. I thought the building was falling. Before we had time to think, the wounded started to arrive. Not a few of them, but dozens. I saw children torn in two, babies without arms or legs. People breathed their last breath beside me. I think I lost all feeling. I worked quietly. I went up to the operating rooms. Bandaged wounds sent strangers away through hours of work. I knew that bombs had fallen in the neighborhood where Ulic was, but I did not let myself think of it. I knew I was on duty only from time to time. I whispered Ulic to myself to give myself strength. In the corridor I met an English policeman carrying a child about Ulic's age. The child was filthy with ash. I went over to take the baby and he said, no use, he's dead. All the while I thought that maybe it was Ulic, and I had not recognized her. Even so, I went on like this until 8 in the evening, when at last the rooms had emptied and all the casualties had been and moved into the hospital wards. They asked whether I wanted to go up and work in the operating rooms. I asked to find out first where my daughter was. Of course they let me go at once, and it seemed like they already knew what had happened. Two other nurses went with me. All along the way there was ruin and desolation, houses destroyed, the shacks on Bogorushov street were burned, and it was already dark. I reached the house and everything went black before my eyes. It was nothing but a shell. Everything was wrecked. The walls, the cupboards, immense holes in the walls, and inside, one heap of rubble on top of another. I called for Ulic, but she was not there. At first I did not believe she was safe. I thought they were lying to me, that something had happened to her and they were hiding it. Then they explained that Ruuma had taken her to a friend's house because it was impossible to remain in our house. I ran like a mad woman, and I will never forget our meeting. All the tension and outward calm gave way, and I truly wept when she put her arms around Me and cried Ima. The first thing she said was that Abba Moshe must come and take the little girl out. Walking with Ima, she too must have understood something, for she hugged and kissed me so fiercely. My darling, if only you could understand the hell I passed through yesterday. Only when I held Ulic healthy and whole, did all the heart horror of the day passed before my eyes. Then I learned what had happened to her. She had been lying asleep. Tzipora was standing in the yard doing the washing. The bomb fell about 7 meters from the house and from Tziporah. Tipora at once threw herself to the ground and that was what saved her. After the bomb exploded, Tipora cried the child. The child. Inside the house it was dark with dust and smoke. They found Julik sitting on the sofa and crying, covered all over with plaster and lime. Everything around her was destroyed and she was the only thing in the room. Everything around her was destroyed and she was the only thing in the room unharmed. The fragments reached the inner wall and tore immense holes into it. My dear boy, can you understand what a miracle occurred? Can you even take in what happened? Naturally, we did not close our eyes last night and I decided at once to take Ulic to Jerusalem. All night I feared there would be another bombing and that this time there would be no miracles. In the morning I went to Hadassah and asked for time off to travel. We went to Jerusalem. I was on edge the whole way. My stomach felt hollow and I was cold to the bone. No one knows what Ulik felt or thought when she heard the explosion. Maybe it put a strain on her. In any case, she is vomiting and complains of stomach pain. The doctor hopes she will be well tomorrow, and then I will return to my duties at the hospital. The city will surely empty somewhat in the coming days. My dear boy, on days such as this, how I need a broad shoulder to lean on, one that can hold me up. I do not think I have the strength to laugh anymore, except with Ulic. How will I leave her, our little girl, to go back to work? I do not know. All sorts of people telephoned to congratulate me and came to visit Ulick. All our clothes are full of holes. There is even a fragment lodged in Ulic's baby carriage. After a great deal of effort, we found her sandals, though in the meantime they had brought her new shoes. I hope she will rise tomorrow entirely well. The side of the house is terrible. The furniture is broken. Not a single door is whole. Father says there will be compensation. I will certainly Finish my training in another week. And of course, right now I have no idea what I will do afterward. If we live and dilde, then it feels as though they mean to destroy Tel Aviv, judging by the leaflets they dropped over the Arab villages. But know that I do what I do willingly. And if anything happens to me, remember our Ulich who was saved by a miracle. Why can we not rejoice in it together? Think of me often, Know that I am calm and that I am trying to fulfill my duty faithfully. And when shall we see one another? And how Today we discovered two scratches on Ulic. The world has gone mad, my dear boy. End quote. On the day the letter describes the day the Italian bombers attacked Tel Aviv, Moshed dayan, Ruth Dayan's 24 year old husband and Ulic's father, of course, and the commander in the Haganah. He was in a British jail with 42 other Haganah officers, as he had been and they had been for almost a year, first in Akko and then in Misra. In 1946, a letter came to Adamakon street, number 8, across from the Gratzkold, to Shulamit Shamir, all the way from Eritrea, where her husband, Yitzhak Shamir, a leader of the Lechi underground, was exiled, also in a British prison. 37 years later, in 1983, Yitzhak Shamir would replace Menachem Begin, to become Israel's seventh prime minister. Now he. My dearest, My first letter from exile. I came here about 10 days ago. For several days I was kept apart, and after that they brought me here, to the camp of my brothers in fate. I will never forget the morning of August 22, when I was exiled from my homeland, from my own country. It was a morning flooded with sunlight, and I came out of the darkness of my cell into the great light of an Eretisraeli morning. I surrendered myself to the caresses of our sun, which I love and miss so much. And I scarcely saw the gang of guards charged with the shameful task of driving me from the homeland. They surrounded me on every side, waiting for the drone of the airplane, a sound no doubt very pleasing to their ears. I looked around me. I fixed in my mind our incomparable sky, the green fields, the hills of Judea visible in the distance. I drew a deep breath of our life giving air and flew off. It was the first time I'd ever been on an airplane. I cannot simply say that I felt pain, that my heart tightened, that my blood boiled and my arteries throbbed, that would neither convey nor rightly describe what I felt, what raged within me in those moments, above all the humiliation, hurt that a son of our homeland could be torn from this homeland by a malicious and cruel hand. Something happened inside me at that hour. Something that will never be erased or forgotten so long as a spark of life beats in me. The flight lasted six hours. Along the way, I saw only sea and desert, not a sign of human life. When the airplane landed, I stepped out into a foreign land. Everything here is strange. The sky is always clouded and gloomy. At home, everything is warm and radiant. Here there is gloom, rain and mud. Even when the sun emerges for a moment from among the clouds, its heat is stifling, not like the sun of the homeland. Maybe I exaggerate. Everyone here says that the climate is very pleasant and healthy. Maybe it is. But everything in our world is relative. Maybe the country is beautiful and the climate mild, but these things, God knows, are not for me. Everything in me longs and cries out for home, for the homeland, not only for the concrete things with which and among which I live there, but for the whole expanse. Earth, sky, air, sea, the din of the city, the landscape. Conditions here are not so bad. One can live. Evidently, one grows accustomed to it. I have not yet. I have not yet begun to study or read. The paralysis and idleness weigh on me. Imprisonment, for a man like me means nothing other than mental suffering. That, to be sure, is no small thing. I have met many friends here. They say this is the first time they have not rejoiced at the sight of me. Me in prison. I met many who I knew when we were in prison together at Misra. On some, the passing years have left their mark, Furrowing their faces, whitening their hair, and so. On others, I find exactly as I left them, as though the years had not passed at all. I am in the west, but my heart is in the East. Political news from the world scarcely interests us at all. By contrast, every piece of news that reaches us from home, even if it is of no importance, arouses interest, sends out ripples, and at once becomes the subject on everyone. I wake very early every day and do not know why. Now and again, as I open my eyes, I see you and the boy. Sleep still lies upon your face, and your eyes are wide open, a flush blooming in your cheeks and on your lips. Ah, your lips. The boy stands in his bed, laughing and rejoicing. For him, the day began long ago, and beneath him is a small, charming puddle. My dearest, I've been cut off from everything dear to me. Sometimes it hurts and torments me, yet sometimes it becomes a source of joy and encouragement. Here I am bound and made powerless, while a great part of my life, my soul, my very being, goes on living and growing somewhere far away. Only one part of me is imprisoned. What I built, what I created, exists and lives and grows. My son, what are you doing? How are you managing? How do you live? With whom do you leave the boy? When you go out shopping, how do the neighbors treat you? Everything about you interests me. Everything matters. Write in detail, do not stint on words. And again, my dear wife, do not grieve. Do not think too much about me or about your loneliness. It will add nothing and heal nothing. Preserve your strength, guard your body and your nerves. All manner of things will happen in life, and we must accept the good and the bad and go on. Send me photographs of the boy so that I may see him, if only from afar. If once you complained and perhaps thought that I did not think of you, that I did not see you then, in this, my dearest, I believe you now have no grounds for complaint. It seems that I truly am a husband to a wife and a father to a son. A family is no accidental thing. It accompanies you wherever fate may carry you. I am with you at every moment of my long days and nights. Enough. I will write again next week. Until then, be well and very, very strong. Offer me your lips. Like this. Like this, firmly and warmly, as in those days when we were young. And now go to the boy. Embrace him and kiss him in the name of his father in a foreign land. Tell him that his father loves him very, very much and places great hopes in him. And now farewell. Farewell. And another kiss. And more and more. Your husband. P.S. if you can, send pajamas, sandals, not slippers, sports trousers, socks and the like. Also newspapers and magazines. Do not forget the newspaper of the Achtuta Avudah Movement, Ma' Arachot and any other interesting newspaper you may find. In January 1947, after five months in prison camp in Eritrea, Yitzhak Shamir and another inmate escaped through a tunnel of their own construction, dodging their way to Djibouti, a French colony, and getting for themselves asylum in France, where Yitzchak Shamir stayed until the state was declared. In 1948, while he was in France, British police arrested Chulami Shamir and held her too, until the state was declared, despite a hunger strike she undertook. Yair Shamir at two and then at three, stayed while his parents were in prison, living with one Lehi militia member and then another, passing from home to home of his parents comrades for the last 10, maybe 15 years of Yitzhak Shamir's life. He died in 2012. I saw him most every day, taking his daily constitutional on the boardwalk, where I ran early each morning, a secret Service agent following closely behind him. Every morning I said hello, and he would tip his head in acknowledgment, his face fixed in a grimace, the only expression you ever saw on the man. He was grizzled. And yet this was the man who dreamed of a flush blooming on the cheeks and lips of his wife, who wrote, ah, your lips. I don't know when it was that I heard that he had dementia, but his routine did not change after that, and neither did our daily exchange on the boardwalk, a hello and the slightest nod of recognition. The years when the Shamirs wrote back and forth, the years between the war and the state were years when first tens, then hundreds of thousands of survivors tried to find a way to Palestine, often without success, as the officers of the British Mandate had all but closed the borders. One survivor who did make it in 1946, was Yechel Dinor, who right away took to writing under the pen name Ktsetnik, after a Nazi acronym for concentration camp inmate, about what he had seen in the death camp to which he was sent, the place he called when he testified at Eichmann's trial, as if in some kind of trance. Planet Auschwitz. Just before he fainted and was evacuated from the courthouse to the hospital, Nina Ascherman, the then teenage daughter of Tel Aviv's leading gynecologist, Yosef Ascherman, read Yikael Dinor's first book. Salamandra, it was called. It was published in 1946, and Nina Ascherman went to look for the book's author, asking after him in the streets of Tel Aviv, eventually finding him unwashed and unshaven on a bench on Rothschild Boulevard, not far from the dark basement room he rented. And she took him in and she cared for him, pressing him to shower and always to eat, eat, eat, which is why he left in 1947 in her box on Idd street, her parents apartment, a note that went. Nikki, beloved of my soul, my graceful gazelle, Very well. To set your mind at rest, put aside a few vegetables or pieces of fruit for me, and let your spirit be still. Master of the universe, why can a man not see the full radiance of the pearl when it rests upon the very apple of his eye, but rather only when it is some distance from his pupil. Yours awash in longing and love without end. To honor your wish, I shall go in to your mother now, rummage in her refrigerator and take a few vegetables, since she is there. A year after that, Yechiel Dinor and Nina Ascherman married in her parents apartment on Idlesen with the rummageable refrigerator. But Ktsetnik never fully settled into domesticity. He would need at times to be collected from benches in city parks. And in 1951, Nina now Dinor got this note from her husband. My beloved, dawn will soon break. I am sitting now in my old place by the sea, one of my notebooks beside me, the street lamp behind me, and I do not know how to begin explaining my anguish to you. I think of your joyful face were I to show up now at home, and my every cell can feel your embracing arms. Months have passed in pain and longing. How can I return today? How can I come home to you empty handed? Soon I will go to Hadassah Park. There, in the clearing where I burned House of Dolls the first time, I will burn it a second time. 21 notebooks that Aunt Rachel the teacher filched for me from her classroom at school. 21 notebooks of pain, of days and nights. I am holding them now in my hands, pressing them to my heart. And with these same two hands I will place them on the fire. And so, my beloved, I cannot come home with the notebooks in my satchel. First I must put them into the fire, notebook by notebook. No angel will stay my hand. But you, my beloved, you are the angel from whose eyes the cry will come, My love, do not lay your hand upon them. And so our house is closed to me. Sometimes I ask myself, perhaps I shall put this letter in our mailbox for you. Go back to my hole, my burrow, and begin everything anew. My beloved. Oh, I know what you must endure when week after week you must go to Bernstein to get the few pounds we live on advanced against the very book I am now about to burn. I know that under no circumstances will you agree to accept help from our parents. If only you would at least speak with Perelman or Berkowitz so that you would not have to see Bernstein's face. If only you would allow your mother to help you. If only I could burn my own two hands first before I burn the 22 notebooks once again. I know, my beloved, that you are the only person in the world capable of understanding me. You remember the time before, in the morning, while it was still dark outside, I went to the Hapoelatair printing house and I asked Chufin, the manager, to show me the manuscript of the book that Bernstein had sent him to print. I have to make one small correction, I said. I took the manuscript, went at dawn to Hadassah park, and I burned it. You, my beloved, were the only person in the world who embraced me and understood me. You kissed away my tears and sent me to begin again. Will you not understand me this time, too? I will leave this letter for you in our mailbox and go back to my shelter. See, my beloved, I brought the notebooks as far as your door. And at the door of our home, looking out through the darkness of night toward Hadassah park, could there be any greater pain than this? I will turn away from our door without seeing your face. See, my beloved, the burning punishment I inflict upon myself. And you are the only person in the world who will believe that I could not appear in our home empty handed. Your sorrow is my punishment. It seems that I must pass through hell a second time. It seems that I have failed because I was not yet refined and purified enough to be worthy of touching this sacred subject. Now I feel that by burning myself and immersing myself, by passing through seven clean days in your pain and mine, I will be worthier and purer too when I approach the subject anew, cleansed of any residue, of carnal desire of any sort, only you will understand me. I so long to be worthy of you, my beloved. You are my support, my fate, yours in this and in love. End quote. And Yikiel Dinor burned his notebooks on that night for a second time in Hadassah park, at the foot of City Hall. And Nina Dinor, she told Yikael Dinor to write the book for a third time. And two years later, in 1953, the book, a House of Dolls it was called, was published by De Vere, and it was and is one of the most important books ever printed here, setting into motion a reckoning with the Holocaust that took decades and still continues to this day. Another person who came from the war was Tanya Zvi, who survived Bergen Belsen. Her parents and her sister did not. And though she was a teenager, alone, she got herself on a clandestine immigrant ship to Palestine. It was called the Olua, but they renamed it the Chaim or Lazaroff. And after the birth she was in took on water. She met on board the Moscow Born, now Eretz Yisraeli, head of the secret operation a 25 year old codenamed Arthur, who was in fact Lev Lifshitz, which name he changed to Arye Eliav and everyone called him Luva. But when the ship reached the Bat Ghalim port in Haifa, British soldiers were waiting for it. The passengers did not have immigration papers, they were illegal. And Tanya was sent back to DP Camp 66 in Cyprus. And Luva Eliav he slipped back to his underground immigration work in Palestine, which by and by brought him to Cyprus. And when he got there, he looked up Tanya Tzvi. He had spent hours going through the manifest of the Chaimer Lazarov until he figured out her name and the two met again. And not long passed before they were engaged. Soon Luva Eliav was back in Palestine and nine months would go by before Tanya Zvi would be allowed to make the trip. And it was in that interval that she wrote to him. My Arthur, I received both your letters, one by way of Chanuch and the other through the post. I was very happy to get them. I have decided to be a good girl and answer at once. But do not think that this is the only reason. You understand, surely, that I want to speak to you and hear from you. And since for the moment there is no other way, we must do our best and manage it on paper. My gifts in Hebrew are limited and I find it hard to compete with you. It must be said you write beautifully. I hope that with your help and through our common desire, we shall be able to withstand the struggle and create the life together we both want. Darling, do not worry. Do not think too much. We shall see one another soon in our country. It is a good feeling to know that a dear friend is waiting for me there. I long for a quiet, settled corner of our own. Together we will be able to create it. Today I am free from my work. I managed to rest and enjoy the radiance of the blazing sun. It is hot outside, but beautiful. Everything across the open spaces is green. It is a pity that the barbed wire fences keep us from enjoying nature. I will not have to endure this much longer. And soon I shall enjoy the beauty of our country. There is no news with me. We work and pass the time. I feel well, only a little tired with every. Every day that passes. I am happy because I am drawing closer to my goal. You asked me for a photograph, but I will not send one. The original will arrive in the country in just a few weeks. I have chattered a great deal. That is enough for this letter. I wish you and your Family, a happy holiday. Many warm kisses. Yours, Tanya. And as Tanya Zvi had written, soon after this letter came the original Tanya Zvi herself arrived in the country. And months after that, Tanya and Luva Eliyev were married in Tel Aviv. The two had three kids, Zvi, Ofra and Eyal. One important assignment after another followed for Luva Eliyev, first in Moscow and then in Tehran. And in 1956, during the Sinai campaign, just before Luva Eliyev set out for Cyprus, and from there, carrying French papers to Port Said, he wrote to his family, Tani, my wonderful one and only, my dear Tzfika and Ofra. Today I am setting out on a journey from which I do not know whether I will return. I go in fear, but with a whole heart. I want to be with you for many, many years, but I do not know whether that will be granted to me. We were born into a terrible generation and this is our fate. I am going so that life will be good for you, my darlings, and for the sake of our country, which is fighting for a life of peace and paying for it with the finest of its sons, Remember only this I loved you more than life itself, each of you separately and all of you together in all the world. I have no treasure, nor have I ever had one more wonderful or precious than you. Hold fast and keep me in your memory. Tani, be strong and raise our children. And mother Leah Babala and all the family look after Tanya and the children. End quote. Luva Eliev lived to be 89 years old, and when he died, even after more than 20 bruising years in the Knesset, tacking between the left and the farther left, he was still loved and admired by most everyone, a mensch. And when he died, it seemed like everyone had something to say about how beautiful a thing it was, the marriage he and Tanya had, the family they made. But walk with Lucy the dog up different streets and you hear altogether different sorts of stories. Walk past Yonah Hanavi, 16, near where Ben Yehuda meets Allenby, where Chavatzelet Chavshosh lived and wrote, and you will hear a letter that wonderful poet wrote when she was almost 20 to Pinchas Sade, by then a famous novel and poet himself, just now separated from his second wife, Yehudit. I am going to Jerusalem today and I wanted to say goodbye before I leave so you will not wonder why I am not calling you at night, begging you to let me, to let me come again and again. I want to tell you that last night after I hung up the telephone, I Went back to my room along the dark corridor. I was afraid that the dead would catch me. But they did not. And I reached my bed safely. I lay down and suddenly I burst into tears and said, take me at once. You came to me. You entered my room as in my prayers. And I prayed that you would be there with me in my room, like my brother. You came to me and you gave me flowers. I was very still and white, and I smiled. You went back to the doorway. You stood there and stayed with me. It was so beautiful, Pinchas, so dreamlike, that I began to speak to you from within myself, as if I were white in water. You have many faces, but this was you, the true one, the pure one. The purest and most beautiful, loving, tender. My pure brother. Son of God. And it seemed to me there was no longer any need for us to meet. We already are together. I am glad too, that we are not married. In your sweet and funny language. That we never need part and that we met so beautifully. My teacher once spoke with several people, my painting teacher, I mean. And the only thing I heard him say was that he could not grieve that Leonardo da Vinci was dead, because he was glad that he had once lived. And for me it is hard to grieve that I did not see you today and hold you in my arms, my love, in the richness that has come to me, in the happiness I feel that I am with you, in the beauty that is with you and in love. Because I am glad that we met. And sometimes I feel that I profane all of this, even with a letter, even by still being here, with new troubles, every new morning. Things that make it harder to see and more. My father, my beloved, my dear. Just as you are my father. You are yourself a child. And I am like your mother and also like your sister. I dreamed. It makes me hot to speak this way, that we were doing things we had not yet done. It was heavy. It was very much to the point of animality, to where one could drown. You come to me in dreams. At night. You come when I dream. Then I want to dream and sleep and dream and know nothing of what is happening outside. Though it be horror, even madness. No, I do not think anything bad will happen. I do not think so. There are things no power can hinder or change. Once I dreamed that I was already old, very old. And I came to you carrying something I had brought with me. I do not know what it was. Milk, I think. And you were old too, both of us. Very, very old. And trembling. And you were writing in marvelous handwriting the marvelous poems you had written before I was born. And we laughed, we both laughed at our tremendous age, because we knew that within us we were still two little children, babies with lips like the lips of flowers, with smooth, sweet light. And limbs of babies, of little ones. Perhaps when very, very old people die, it is a sign that they are being born somewhere else. God, I pray to be born in beauty. I was born in beauty at a beautiful hour, at two in the morning, in spring. My mother wanted to call me Rachel, after our matriarch Rachel, whom she loves. But my father thought that I was like a flower and beautiful and full of Shabbat. It must have been because of the dawn. And I was white. And on Friday nights in the synagogue, as the Shabbat draws near, he recites, I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. And so in the end, or in the beginning, they named me yours, without end and without limit. Chavatzelet. End quote. Chavatzelet meaning lily. Maybe it will not surprise you that in 1984 Chavatzelet Havshush jumped off the roof of Yonah Hanavi, 16, near where Allenby meets Ben Yehuda and where Chavatzelet Havshush lived and where she wrote that letter to Pinchasadeh. And consider this 1972 letter from the great Hebrew poet Avram Shlonsky, who had just lost his wife. A letter, he wrote in Yiddish, he worried, was halting and not good enough to the great Yiddish poet Dora Teitelboim, herself very much married to Herschel Teitelboim, a respected cardiologist in Tel Aviv. My dear. My dear one. Your letter has only just reached me. A first letter, a warm letter, a love letter. Only kisses can be so warm and fresh, so wholly faced to inwardness, so singular each time they are repeated. And I thought perhaps I should put off my answer until tomorrow. For if I answer at once, I will shout, I will cry aloud. And you know, you already know, my Khualu, that shouting is not in my nature, and that when I speak loud, I am smaller, more foolish than when I speak in a voice of thin silence, in a quiet, silent voice. I must be drunk from hearing from you, seeing you, feeling you through the letters of your letter, through the warm touch of your handwriting and your words. Yet I am never so truly drunk, so lucidly. Drunk. That when the one strong wine in my cellar is the once only wonder of true love, which is a miracle, A miracle that has happened to both of us. I tell myself, avray, take hold of yourself as you did when the poet overcame the hunter, and be silent, wise, sad and trusting. You know how fully and to what depth I have told you everything without speaking. To speak is often to deafen the ears. It is a substitute for feeling. That is why we write poems and not words, melodies, images, musical disguises for our bashful desires. For everything beautiful and true is bashful. Never have I felt so Hamlet like to be silent and to speak. To speak. To speak. I mean speak in the sense of say. To say it down to the abyss. My beloved precious Chualu Hebrew has an expression all my bones will say. It is not only the mouth that speaks for the blood and the heart in a moment of cleaving, all the senses, all the limbs, all the bones speak. There is another Hebrew expression, Incidentally, with all 248, meaning the 248 Ramakh limbs of the body, because the sages of the Talmud counted them and found in their fashion that this was their exact number. It means completeness. And that, after all, is true love, with every bone and every limb in complete wholeness. Are these not the dialogues of Avri and Chualut? Experienced drinkers know that the most perilous drinking is on an empty heart. In an instance it makes you as drunk as lot. Plainly, I am famished for you. Your letter intoxicated me into a state of lat ness. In good shalom aleichemish Yiddish, one could probably say of me, just look how he howls. And yet I might have said it all quite briefly and simply. My Chualu, my dear one, my only one, I miss you fiercely, very fiercely and more fiercely from day to day. I love you fiercely, very fiercely and more fiercely from day to day. And how will it end? My dear, My dearest, I kiss you always. More fiercely. Write right often and at length. Even now it is hard after a whole week to rise early and know that the telephone will not ring, that our book room will remain desolate, that all the benches on Nordau Boulevard are orphaned for an entire day. And so tomorrow, and many tomorrows after that, I flee to you through poems. And do you know one poem about jealousy? Another returns to the poet and the hunter, but differently in its form and its symbols and its plot. Another is about a bad dream. Another is an erotic poem, a song of songs poem Very clear and very veiled at once. And there are more. I write and I erase. I write and I hone. And I think they will be strong poems. Poems about always only about her, only about you, About Avri. I can already see them being read at 50 Gordon Street. Yes, another poem. At night I search alone along Noordau Boulevard, whose name I have changed to Avenue of the Does. My dear, I was wrong not to tear up this letter which is coming to kiss you fiercely, fiercely. You're avary one of the two mad children in love. My dear, forgive my halting ungrammatical Yiddish and above all, my scribbled handwriting, especially toward the end of the letter. Is that anything new? For an entire hour I have been speaking and speaking and speaking Yiddish. I could of course, make a clean copy, but I do not want to let it reach you, authentic as I am avary. End quote. Even Nathan Alterman, with whom Lucy and I started just up the block. Even Nathan Alterman writing to his wife Rachel Marcus, about their daughter Tirzah Tar in a companionable conspiracy of concern of the sort that every parent couple will immediately recognize that what about the children bond that parents share? Even Nathan Alterman got In the late 1940s, an undated letter delivered to Cafe Cassit, the cafe where he drank. He was already by then an alcoholic and where he laughed and quarreled with other writers and poets. A letter from Rehovra Anan, from Tzila Binder, a poet and illustrator, and that Lettermanceli mase kole emvele lot. I love you, my altarman. What am I to do? Through all the days and nights when you are far away, Fear grips me at the thought that something will happen and I will not see you, that something will happen and I will not be beside you. I do not have a moment's life without you. My accursed nature, this seeming outward lightness. You know I cannot be tragic. I seem like a miserable, angry child, but believe me, like a child who is truly miserable, with not the slightest possibility of play acting or posing. It is bad for me, very bad, that I am wholly in you, in every moment of yours, in every thread of your clothes. It is bad for me that you. No, I cannot. My altarman. I am crying. I want you beside me. I want you to love me. I want to touch you, to look at you, to feel you. I shall lose my mind. I want to be beside you. Help me. Have pity on me, Alterman. I am crying. Understand? I want nothing. I want nothing else in life. Life is you, you entirely. And I want you. You be kind to me and believe me. And do not forget for a moment that the moments when I see you are everything, everything utterly and forever. Have pity on me, my altarman. I beg you. Yours, Tzila. And that letter could go to Kasit, because everyone there already knew, as Rachel Marcus knew, as in time, Tir Ta Atar knew that Nathan Altiman, he loved Binder, and Sila Binder, in the fullness of time. She was the artist that Tirza Atthar hired to illustrate her books. And Nathan Alterman left to her Tezila Binder a quarter of his estate. And when he died in 1970 at Ichlov Hospital, all three women, Rachel Marcus, Zila Binder and Tirza Attar, they were all there at his bedside. In Tel Aviv these days, we are trying to plant trees. 10,000 new trees a year. It is a massive initiative. And you might think that this is easy to do, to plant 10,000 new trees a year, but it isn't. Because underneath the sidewalks and under the yards and even under the open spaces in the parks, there are all sorts of things. There is a network of pipes, and there is all the electricity, and then there are the gas conduits, and there is sewage, and there are phone cables, and there are the Internet cables, the fiber optics. And you realize that underneath the city there is a whole other thing, streams and flows of electrons and of water and of gas and light and waste. There is under the city an empire of things moving, moving, moving. And when you're out with Lucy the dog, and all at once the men talking, all serious on the news about Iran fade. And in their place you hear a letter about the kids, or about a survivor making a new life, or about poetry or bombs or war or sex or dreams, or the fires of being young or the fires of being old, or the country what will be with the country. You start to see how what's true under the ground is true too. Above it, how unseen. All around us is a great tangle of infrastructure, a great endless back and forth of love and passion, connection, need, hope and desire. Everyone who has ever visited this city inevitably says how full it is of life. Full to overflowing. It is also true that this city is full with ghosts. The two things are inseparable. The life here, the life itself, it is full with ghosts. And the ghosts here, they are full with life. I am haunted by Tel Aviv. Mahak.