Chris’s writing topics in 2 minutes each [by Mark]

Most memorable conversation with a “local”?

I posted about this on the “Demographic Battle”—the man my age who encouraged me to get home and start procreating like him; after all, with but one wife —he could have had 4— he had 17 kids.  That poor woman.  But who am I to judge.  Maybe she is privy  to graces and mysteries and gratitudes I could never begin to imagine.   So he and I were chatting as the females were getting dinner together. One of the best days in Palestine.  We were doing what we  were called to do—bear witness—and then in so doing, got to see the daily life.

Some interesting ways you’ve navigated a foreign place

One interesting way in Palestine, the last time I was out of the country, is to take long walks if possible. To be among people.  To see the town.  To notice the traffic.  To see what’s for sale. But then there was that long walk in Rafah with the NY Jewish activist/documentary film maker—I think she later published at Counterpunch and her name is certainly in one of the three notebooks I kept when I was in Gaza, but man! how the Palestinian males, from the kids to the teens to the men in their mid-twenties scowled and hissed at her, and she gave it right back to them.

Some meals you’ve had that you can’t recreate for the life of you

Tepesquintlay, that’s how it’s pronounced.  The year was 1986, late November  I'd studied the summer  before at the Maryknoll School, in NY, and had contacts.  PG and I were in Guatemala, and we met up with Father Mo Healy out in the far country. (He uttered these quotable words, “It’s not only good to say what you see, it’s good to see what you see.”)  Anyway the village welcomed us  and  killed the fatted calf, described to us as a supreme delicacy of a cross between a rat and a chicken.

On your list of “first thing(s) I do when I get home

Buy books… sit at cafe and wonder what had just happened… get my limbs happily entangled with Joan Marie’s … long talks with Andrew …make a list of all the things we have to do to speak about being there…Send emails to Murad … write a thank you to the Palestinian-American lawyer who helped me when I was detained by the IDF …

What’s a place that feels like home that you’ve yet to visit?

It’s not a particular street in Warsaw, nor is it a certain stetl in the old Russian Pale of Settlement which hasn’t existed in 100 years, so I could travel to these ghost zones and imagine with my paltry Yiddish (or I can daydream being super colloquially fluent in mame-loshn), walk around and say Nu? 50 times, or  Oy vey is mir!  or Me shlept zihh  or  A mekayhe! or Vu zennen di yidn?

from the book, H. Leivick: Poète Yiddish– Hommages et textes choisis