knitting. She is collected in the morning and arrives home early in the afternoon. But she generally prefers to be at home, and I don’t like it when she is away too long. I never really knew either of my two sets of grandparents, and even though she is little more than ten years older than me, Hajji, I think, has become a surrogate grandmother.
Hajji and her daughter-in-law Samira together form the backbone of what in the West would surely have become a small business. For downstairs, next to Hajji’s apartment, is a garden and covered area where they produce, manufacture and store the huge quantities of food the family needs. We are a restaurant, plant nursery, canning and pickling plant and bakery all in one. Every week there seems to be a different task, each one revolving around the particular growing season. It might be pickling cucumbers, cauliflowers and carrots for use during the rest of the year; or going to collect zatar (a herb akin to thyme and oregano) out in the wilds, then bringing it back to dry it, mix it with sesame seeds and grind it; or buying staples like rice, flour and bulgar wheat for storage in big containers. There are always piles of boxes, sacks and barrels waiting to be labelled and stored away.
A special occasion in the year is the olive harvest in late October, when we all disappear off to the edge of town, to a small patch of ground where the family has an olive grove. There for three or four days we crowd among the trees, up ladders picking off handfuls of the green and black fruit and throwing them onto tarpaulins below. At the end of the day the tarpaulins are gathered up and the olives bagged into sacks. Some we later pickle in glass bottles, while the rest goes to the press in town. After the harvest, the family gave me the first bottle of oil as a gift.
Much of our diet, however, grows next to us in the small garden. That is the traditional way in Arab communities, although it is a way of life slowly dying because of both the arrival of out-of-town supermarkets and the extensive confiscation of Arab communities’ agricultural land by the Jewish state. Some Arab areas have lost all their farming lands, but at least Tamra has managed to hold onto some. The ever increasing territorial confinement of the town, however, means that few families can spare what little land they have left to grow subsistence crops for their own use. Instead they have tended to construct homes for other family members, building ever more tightly next to each other.
In my family’s garden a huge number of herbs, some I do not know by any English name, grow amid the more common vegetables such as cabbages, peppers, courgettes, cucumbers and beans. We have our own orange and lemon trees, figs, pomegranates and vines. The leaves of the vines, like other vegetables, are cooked after being stuffed with a mixture of rice and meat. But first they must be stripped of their stalks, an art that both Hajji and Samira mastered decades ago but which, despite many attempts, I cannot perform without tearing the leaves.
Many of the dishes we eat here are uncommon to Western eyes, even though they are just as delicious and healthy as the cuisines of Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Spain. We serve up a huge array of stuffed vegetables, not just the more familiar vine leaves and peppers, but also artichokes, cabbage leaves, courgettes, aubergines and small marrows known as kari’a. Other familiar traditional dishes are okra in a rich tomato sauce (bamiye) or with beans (lubia); a dry lentil and onion stew (majedera); a tasty paste of green leaves known as mloukiye; and a seasonal thorny weed called akoub that is found in Galilean fields and has to be carefully prepared before eating. These dishes are made in large pots at lunch-time, the main meal, and then kept hot with a thick blanket wrapped around them so that family and visitors can eat at any time during the rest of the day.
But given the size of Arab families and the need to have something on the stove ready for guests, Hajji and Samira also make lots of healthy snack food. There are always large quantities of freshly made hummous available, far better than anything you can buy in a shop; a creamy sesame paste called tahina mixed with parsley; a puree of broad beans, tahina and garlic known as fool; a mash of aubergine and tahina called mutabal; and a bitter home-made yoghurt known as labaneh. All of these are served up with the local pitta bread, which we bake ourselves in a special oven. The equivalent of pizza here is something known as manakiesh, a bread topped with melted salty cheese or zatar. Hajji sits squat on the floor, as Africans do when preparing food, to roll out the dough. For special occasions the family will also make finger food: pastry parcels (ftir) stuffed with cheese, spinach or zatar; or mini-pizzas topped with meat and pine nuts (sfiha). The most prized dish of all is tabouli, a salad of minutely chopped parsley, bulgar wheat, tomato and spring onion, soaked in olive oil and lemon.
My apartment in Tamra was never meant as a temporary base, nor as a social experiment. It is as much my home as was Tel Aviv when I first arrived in Israel six years ago, or as was London before that. This is where, aged fifty-six, I am choosing to root myself for the foreseeable future. I have filled my apartment with all the most precious things I have collected over a lifetime: the mementoes of my childhood in Britain, of my many travels to South Africa, where much of my family still lives, and of my more recent life in the Middle East. I have original paintings by South African and Palestinian artists, Bedouin carpets on the floor, stacks of CDs of music from around the world, and a wide range of books on subjects that especially interest me: from psychology and politics to biographies. My father instilled in me a deep appreciation of Jewish culture and ethics, and many of my favourite books reflect that. Like me, it is an eclectic mix.
From my balcony the main view is of Tamra, its grey homes pressing upon their neighbours, offering no privacy at all. Electricity and telephone cables are slung haphazardly across the streets, attached chaotically to metal pylons or wooden poles, many of which are planted in the centre of roads, creating a major traffic hazard. The roads themselves drop precipitously in a network of lanes that no one appears ever to have planned, their surfaces only half-made or scarred by potholes. Every street is lined with rubble or rubbish, and piles of dust swirl in the wind. Children with no parks or even gardens to play in squat in the streets making games with stones, discarded bottles or sticks, dodging the passing traffic. In the winter, which is when I arrived, showers instantly overwhelm the drains, bringing torrents of water washing down the streets, a miserable stain of brown and grey.
But the story inside people’s homes is very different. Amid all this public squalor, everyone maintains their private space in meticulous order. Homes are cleaned daily, with the surfaces so spotless that you could eat off them. Even the poorest families invest their energies in making their homes bright and attractive, bringing as much colour into their domestic lives as is possible within Tamra’s dour surroundings.
Despite the oppressive atmosphere there are many compensations to living in Tamra, including the warmth and friendliness of the people and the town’s location. Here in the Galilee the air is clean and the light pure. From my lofty position both on a hillside and on the building’s top floor I overlook my neighbours to see far to the north, to the high hills of the Upper Galilee and almost to Lebanon. The rocky slopes embracing Tamra change colour through the day, settling into wonderful hues of orange and purple at sunset. In the late afternoon the shadows of the tall cypress trees lengthen rapidly, like nature’s timepieces. I love to look out at the clear sky at night, as the stars slowly emerge into life and a luminous moon rises over the horizon. Out on the nearby hills are to be found an amazing variety of wildflowers in the spring, including breathtaking displays of baby cyclamen and anemones. In the summer the air is filled with the perfume of the blossoms of jasmine, hibiscus, orange and oleander, which somehow manage to root themselves in spite of all the concrete. There are fig and pomegranate trees everywhere, affording another of the great joys of living here: being able to pluck the heavy fruit directly from the trees as one walks in the street.
Moving into an Arab community in Israel, however, means changing one’s definition of privacy. There is no sense of the anonymity that is a major component of life in Tel Aviv, New York or London. Hajji’s door is never closed, unless she is out. And it would never occur to anyone in the family to knock before entering her home, or to ask before opening her fridge. That doesn’t just go for Hajji, it applies to everyone here. (Apart, I should add, from me. A special allowance is made in my case, and the family knocks before entering my apartment.) I find this lack of barriers both rewarding and a drawback. In my first few weeks I was invited to an art exhibition in Haifa by a well-known Palestinian artist, Salam Diab. We arrived back home late to find, unusually, the lights were still on. I went inside to say hello,