20/7/97

California living ... in Ashdod

    There's a banyan tree in Ashdod that seems to have been there since biblical days. Or at least since before 1956, when this cement-white welcome mat off the Mediterranean arose out of the desert. 
    If Zionism were a tree, it would be the banyan, maybe even this particular banyan outside the Cafe Eden (tostim, salatim, omeletim and the like). It's a grand old soul that dispatches shoots from its branches to root into secondary trunks. Like the way this country was settled in the good old days, you should pardon the lyrical patriotism.  
    Say "Ashdod" and one of every three Israelis will think you mean Ashkelon. The other two will shrug. 
    The Ashdodis like it that way. "Don't write about us," one local pleaded jokingly. "This city's the best-kept secret in Israel."    
    Anita Raymond, a New Jersey native who volunteered to show me Ashdod's hotspots -- you laugh? -- pointed out that whatever else this city has to boast about, a tourist industry is not among them. It seems they don't want a tourist industry. 
    If they did, you'd already see a Hilton, Moriah and Sheraton looming over the old Byzantine ruin, from which you could hang a board and dive right into the Med. Well, almost. 
    Hotels? Anita laughed, and I understood why when she showed me one of the city's two: it is quite unique, with its distinctive crack all the way down its exterior. 
    Anita, 50, elegant and urbane yet as unaffected as her workmanlike town -- she'd look right in a stretch limo, but in fact she gets around on a bicycle -- lives in an upscale neighborhood that could snobbishly call itself the artist's colony. Van Gogh Street. Beethoven Street. Brahms, Chopin, Rembrandt, Victor Hugo Streets. She lives on "M. Angelo," next to the ostentatious Gruzini mansion with the three gold lions on the gate. "I assume it's meant to be 'Michaelangelo Street,' she said, "but for all I know the M could stand for Moti or Mendel." (When she gave me directions, she added: "if you find yourself on rabbi streets, you'll know you're lost.") 
    The villas came later, you understand. Modern Ashdod first broke ground as a ma'abara; before that it was an Arab village, and before that, one of the chief Philistine cities when there were still Philistines around. 
    The ma'abarot -- not the original tents, but the enhanced plaster hovels -- are still standing, still in use. "The Californim," Anita called them.
    "The what?!
    She grinned. "The new immigrants in the '50s thought that's what homes in California must look like." An Oakland beggar's toolshed, maybe. 
    (On the way to the Californim, we were stopped by a fat guy in a little car. "Allo, where's Miami?," he hollered at us. Anita told him, then without waiting for the obvious question, explained to her ignorant journalist companion that it's also the name of a beach in Ashdod. I didn't have to ask which was named for which.)
    Lucky I came on a Wednesday, because that's Shuk Day in Ashdod. It's a weekly Israeli mirage, up from nothing in the middle of the desert: your garden-variety fruits-and-veg vendors, shmattehs and shmontzes, alte zachen and Ashdod's consumerist claim to fame, the Russian Corner, where you can buy a leather jacket naturally softened by the fierce midday sun. Put it on and shvitz.
    You want architecture? It's worth a special trip to see a building called the Mimounia.  Anita described it pretty well: "An ungepatchket Garden of Allah." (Neither my computer spell-check nor thesaurus recognize "ungepatchket"; if you don't know Yiddish, just let your imagination run wild.) It's an unabashedly chintzy Moroccan entertainment hall, a cross between a Mecca mosque and a prize-winning sand castle. That's the best I can do.
    A bit less weird is the giant teapot and teacup in the middle of a grassy traffic circle near da Vinci Street. Asked what on earth this Wonderlandish monument might symbolize, Anita suggested a fond salute to the British Mandate. 
    And why not? Ashdod has what must be the country's only memorial to the enemy: a towering obelisk with the inscription "In memory of the fallen in the battle of Ashdod, May 1948." That doesn't seem remarkable -- but it's in memory of the fallen Egyptians.  
    Who'd have thought there'd be so much to say about Ashdod? 
    There's more.
    Bet you didn't know the Holy Ark was brought here by them thieving Philistines; or that here at Jonah Hill a man was upchucked by a whale (honest, it's in the Bible); or that the Israelites were believed to have entered the Promised Land at the exact spot where now exists an Ashdod pecan grove. That's according to Anita, and I don't think she was making any of it up.

THERE'S A defiance of human nature to this city, an apparent lack of tension between population groups that shouldn't get along so well, a naive camaraderie instead of antagonism: hell, this is a city that has doubled its size to 130,000 citizens in a couple of decades, with nary a grunt of growing pains. 
    Maybe it's because, to a large extent, the earlier Moroccan arrivals live in their own neighborhood, the swarms of Russian newcomers in theirs, the haredim in theirs.
    (Or maybe it's because there aren't a lot of provocateur journalists snooping around Ashdod looking for ethnic trouble.)    
    It's wrong, I know, but people here get along.
    If the haredi neighborhood is a hotspot on Anita's itinerary, it's because what's boiling is the temperature, not tempers. Although this is the third largest concentration of haredim in the country, there's a tranquility, a civil spaciousness conspicuously missing in roiling Mea Shearim and Bnei Brak. 
    That's Ashdod. Nothing brash about it, not some place you'd want to visit, but a place to live, quietly. Wide avenues, neat public squares, a blue ribbon of surf, on the perimeters a vast and proud industrial sprawl, and decent folk goin' to work, comin' home and gettin' dolled up for an Ashdod evening out -- a couple of hours folk dancing and then a beer and boureka under the banyan.