Monthly Archives: August 2020

Still No Circuses

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Almost exactly eight months ago, in a post that dealt with our preparations for our first shabbat in Penamacor, I wrote about baking challah, and added: ‘From challah, I have gradually moved (with subtle but effective nudging from various members of the family) to baking all of our bread. The full story of what that means will have to wait for another post’. To those of you who have been scanning each week’s post since then in eager anticipation, I apologise for keeping you waiting so long. Today, your patience is finally rewarded.

Some time after I took over from Bernice in baking challah every week, my children bought me (which in our family means Esther decided to buy me, told Micha’el, and he agreed that it was an excellent idea) a book of bread recipes from around the world. This was a dual-purpose birthday present. Although it was first published in English, they thought it would be more amusing to buy it in Hebrew, thereby ensuring that before I could confront the challenge of understanding the concepts and techniques of breadmaking, I had to wrestle with the mere language on the page. Of course, ultimately, this greatly enhanced the satisfaction of producing an edible loaf of bread, but there was a fair bit of ground to travel before reaching that ‘ultimately’.

The journey, nevertheless, was well worth it. Since we all started locking down, I know that many more people have discovered for themselves the pleasures of baking bread, so I imagine more than a few of you will already have experienced much of what I have to say about the mystical experience of breadmaking.

In many cultures, bread is regarded as the staple food. In Judaism, the inclusion of bread turns eating into a meal. The blessing we recite before eating bread is very puzzling: Blessed are you O Lord, our God, the King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the land. At first sight, this seems to make no sense. In what way is it possible to regard God as the one who produces bread from the ground? Bread doesn’t come out of the ground; it is, rather, a very refined and processed food. Even worse, it is not God who performs all of that refining and processing, but Man. It is as if Dr Franz Schoenfeld were to claim the credit for Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Dr Schoenfeld, having been awarded his Ph D in Heidelberg in 1849, went on to focus on science. Eventually, he joined his father’s art supplies shop, and began applying his knowledge to the production of oil paints. In the 1870s and 1880s, van Gogh obtained some of his colours from Dr Schoenfeld’s paint factory. This did not make Schoenfeld the creator of Starry Night.

So what is going on here? Let’s consider first the process of breadmaking. You sow grain seeds, reap the wheat, rye or whatever, thresh the stalks to separate the grain, winnow the grain to get rid of the chaff, grind the seeds to produce flour, mix the flour with water, feed it for a few days until you have an active sourdough starter, take more flour and water, add the starter to it, add some salt, mix well, knead it to activate the gluten so that the dough will expand and the bread will be aerated and light, leave it to rise, punch it down, shape it and leave it to rise again, then bake it in a hot oven, leave it to cool, slice and enjoy. Every time I make bread I marvel at how this process was ever developed. At every point of the process, each step seems counter-productive, or at best not constructive, unless you already know where the process is leading. Not only that: while most cooking involves mixing ingredients that basically retain their essential character, breadmaking is a kind of alchemy. Measure out your flour and water; look at them; taste them. Who would ever imagine that flour is something you would choose to eat? Flour and water are nothing like dough. But when you put them together in a bowl, and mix them, there is a magical moment at which they start to come together. Just when you are wondering whether the flour will ever be absorbed, the scale tips, an invisible line is crossed, and you have…dough. Taste it and you will wonder why you put so much effort into creating this still indigestible, characterless, lump.

Breadmaking is a tribute to the ingenuity, the curiosity, the taste for experimentation, the technological skill, the patience, the imagination, the wit of man. For a believing Jew, all of these are gifts from God. Bread is our staple because it expresses, perhaps better than any other basic food, the partnership between the Creator and his creation, in continuing to create the world. Judaism celebrates two types of creation. The first, the fundamental, is the creation of ‘there is’ from ‘there isn’t’, of something from nothing, which only God can perform, and which is recorded in the creation account at the beginning of Bereishit, Genesis. Once that has taken place, the creation of something from something becomes possible, an ability with which God endowed Man. God created grain, and then created Man, and endowed him with the wherewithal to create, from that grain, bread. We recite the blessing to remind ourselves that it is not through our own unaided efforts, but through the abilities given to us by God, that we have made this bread.When I make bread, I feel myself a privileged player in that partnership. At the deepest level, it is indeed God who brings forth bread from the land. To say that making bread is a religious experience sounds like a wild claim, and not one I would expect a rationalist like myself to make, but there you are. Sometimes the experience trumps the experiencer.

I briefly mentioned sourdough starter earlier; this deserves a post all to itself. A huge mystique has grown up around starters. The internet is full of instructive articles that make growing a starter sound slightly more nerve-wracking than tightrope-walking across Niagara Falls; they describe the feeder and tender’s role as being less like a zookeeper’s and more like an ICU nurse’s. My own experience is that sourdough starters are quicker to develop, and more tolerant of neglect, than usually described.

An active starter is one of those symbiotic miracles of nature. To make a sourdough starter, you mix flour and water together in a jar and leave it out, uncovered or loosely covered. Half a day later, you pour half of the mixture away and add flour and water to replace what you poured away. You carry on doing this until you find the mixture starting to bubble and expand. As this activity increases, it can be a little unnerving, particularly if you are a fan of cheap science fiction. What is actually happening is that the bacteria and yeasts that are all around us in the atmosphere are gathering to graze on the pasture you have prepared for them, and to multiply. The bubbles, as Michael Pollan explains in Cooked*, are simply the manifestation of these micro-organisms breaking wind after a good meal.

The starter, after it has been pre-digested by these organisms, is much more palatable and beneficial to us. The gluten has been broken down so that it is more easily digested; I have been told by mildly gluten-intolerant friends that they have no reaction from sourdough bread. Vitamin B has been added by the micro-organisms. Lactic and acetic acid have been produced; this not only adds depth to the flavour of the bread; it also keeps it fresh longer. My astute readership will have realised that, if the bubbles are wind produced by the organisms, then all of these other beneficial substances are their excretions. That we still can’t wait to eat sourdough bread even after we know how it is produced is testament to its astonishing qualities! For a clear and simple account of the science of sourdough starters, and a no-nonsense explanation of how to grow one, you can watch this 9-minute video.

Because I do not bake bread every day, or even every week, I keep my starter in the fridge. This basically causes the bacteria to hibernate. When I want to bake, I first have to wake the starter up by frequent feedings. While my starter is a bit more listless than I would like, it still delivers flavour and rise to the dough and spring to the bread I bake with it.

At the end of our first trip to Portugal, I decided to conduct an experiment. Not wanting to burden Micha’el and Tslil with having to remember to feed the starter, I took a small quantity, mixed more flour in to make a very dry mix, then froze half, and kept the other half in the fridge. When we returned 3 months later, I brought the refrigerated starter up to room temperature, fed it for a couple of days, and it was then ready to use again. (I think the other half is still in the freezer.) All of this suggests that the recently emergent starter ‘kennels’ or ‘hotels’ may be a scam: starter owners who are going on holiday can take their starter to be looked after in these establishments by skilled handlers. The owners can give specific instructions about storage temperature and feeding regimen.

The revival of artisan sourdough bread owes much to the community of breadmakers in San Francisco. There are stories of sourdough starters that were brought across to America by immigrants 150 years ago, and have been kept alive since. Because a starter attracts organism from the environment, starters in different areas are reputed to develop different aromas and flavours, and the San Francisco strain is very highly regarded. Unfortunately, I will never have a venerable starter to hand on to my children, because of Pesach. Let me explain. Observing Pesach requires us to surrender ownership of all leavened goods for the duration of the festival. Where destroying these goods, throwing them away, or giving them away to a non-Jew does not incur considerable financial loss, this is what is done. For those of us, on the other hand, who have the odd bottle of single malt, a typically subtle solution has been developed; we sell these goods to a non-Jew, and, at the end of the festival, we buy them back. This arrangement is organised in Israel at the national level. Individuals appoint a rabbi as their agent, and a hierarchy leads up to the Chief Rabbi, who sells the entire stock of leaven owned by Jews in Israel to a single non-Jew, payment to be made after Pesach. After Pesach, the non-Jew changes his mind and withdraws from the deal (or at least has done every year so far). However, since a sourdough starter has little monetary value, and since it is about the most leavened thing imaginable, it cannot be included in this arrangement, and must be disposed of. Every year after Pesach, I start again from scratch, and there is a hiatus of 3 or 4 days before I can bake again.

It is widely believed that it was the cultivation of grain that first turned our nomadic ancestors into farmers. To finish, here is our own nomadic hunter-gatherer at work. (Didn’t see the segue coming, did you?)

* A word about Cooked. If there is anyone out there who has not yet encountered this wonderful book (and slightly less wonderful 4-part series on Netflix), then I strongly urge you to read it. If you are at all interested in biochemistry, anthropology, sociology, prehistory, barbecue, pickling, alcohol, cheese, or, indeed, any food or drink, then you owe it to yourself to allow Michael Pollan to wrap you in his enthusiasm. I even found the chapter on roasting a whole pig, while of no practical value to me, absolutely fascinating.

What Is It about a Sonnet?

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Thank you! If you have not been immediately put off by that title, and you are still reading, then many thanks for staying with me.

If you were to wake me up in the middle of the night, shine a light in my face, and ask me: ‘What is your profession?’, I would say two things. First, I would say: ‘Excuse me, I really have to go to the toilet’, and then, when I got back, I would say: ‘English teacher’. And this is despite the fact that, in the last 34 years, I have spent what is the equivalent of less than one year teaching. For over 18 of those 36 years, I worked as a technical writer; I enjoyed the work, rose to its challenges, and developed professionally over that period, but ask me what my profession is, and the answer has to be teacher – in much the same way as, however long I live in Israel, I will always, sadly, be an Ilford boy, and however much pop music I listen to, I will still, thankfully, prefer Bach. (This last is, as I am sure you realise, purely hypothetical: Bernice and I celebrated our wedding anniversary last night at a Jerusalem restaurant – we believe in living on the edge! – and the accompanying soundtrack included Hotel California. Even Bernice, who has known me for 55 years and been sharing a home with me for 48, found it hard to believe that, to the best of my knowledge, that is the first time I have heard the song all the way through, and certainly the first time I have listened to it…and the last, since you ask.

So, I am going to crave your indulgence this week. I really miss teaching poetry, and I’d like to do a bit of that today. Nothing else is coming up, so, if poetry doesn’t push your buzzer or tick your boxes, please feel free to give me up as a bad job this week…but please do me one favour before you go. When I started this blog, last November, and decided that I would post every week (more precisely, every Tuesday morning), I didn’t really think it through. As I believe I have mentioned before, deprived of trips to Portugal, and with things developing steadily but slowly with the kids there, I don’t have a lot to say about life in Portugal. Every Sunday for the past few weeks I have stared at a blank screen and wondered what might be well-received this week. I can keep waffling on about the subjects that push my boxes and tick my buzzer, but I am never sure whether that’s what you want to hear about. So, if you can help make my Saturday-night sleep less sweat-drenched and nightmare-riddled, by suggesting topics you might like me to cover, I would be very grateful. You can email me directly, at davidbr6211@gmail.com. Of course, the management reserves the right to totally ignore every suggestion (thereby, in all probability, alienating my entire readership and saving me the trouble of having to write a post every week). It’s a win-win situation for me, really.

So, poetry. First, a confession: I’m a formalist. I firmly believe that all art has to have a shape, a pattern (indeed, I think that is what makes art art). Freeform art of any kind rarely moves me. What engages me intellectually, and also heightens and sharpens my emotional involvement with art, is the tension between form and content. This sounds very highbrow, but it is equally true for popular culture. When, aged 7, I settled down at ten to five every Saturday afternoon to watch The Lone Ranger, part of my mind knew that all conflicts would be resolved, and all wrongs righted, just before quarter past five, that Clayton Moore would end the episode by riding off in search of next week’s 25-minute conflict resolution, and that, just before the end, one of the characters (who clearly did not own a television) would ask: ‘Who was that masked man?’ And yet, at the same time, another part of my brain worried whether virtue would triumph and evil be vanquished this week, or whether something would go horribly wrong. A third part of my brain (I’m starting to feel rather like Sally Field juggling her multiple personalities in Sybil) was intrigued to know just how the impossible would be achieved in the seven-and-a-half minutes remaining.

If The Lone Ranger sits at one end of a spectrum, then, for me, the sonnets of Shakespeare and John Donne sit at the other. But they are undeniably on the same spectrum. While I was mulling over how I wanted to approach the topic of this week’s post, I had another serendipitous moment. (They have, incidentally, been coming thick and fast over the last couple of months), I came across the following very effective description in a book I am currently reading called First You Write a Sentence. Subtitled The Elements of Reading, Writing…and Life, the book is both a sort of guide to, and a celebration of, good writing, which the author Joe Moran firmly believes is rooted in the humble sentence. It’s a fascinating little book….if reading and writing are your thing. If they’re not, I’m wondering just how you got this far down the screen.

Anyway, last week, I came to the following paragraph:

Only bad poets think that rules cramp their style. The good ones know that rules are the road to invention, that a cramped little corner with just enough legroom may be the best spot to consider the universe. Rules force us to plumb our brain’s depths for the word that will fit the shape it needs to fit. They let us say things that are just beyond our imaginative reach and write over our own heads before we know quite what we are saying.

A disproportionately large number of my favourite poems are sonnets. I am convinced that the apparent constraints of the form focus the mind and drive poets to find the finest way to craft what they want to express in verse.

This is, to say the least, initially counter-intuitive. The sonnet, in all its various forms, is one of the most proscribed of poetic forms. Take, for example, one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, written around 1625.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The whole shape of the unfolding argument of the poem was dictated to Donne by his choosing the sonnet form. He had to work his meaning within the confines of the following rigid form:

* 14 lines, each of 10 syllables, in the pattern of unstressed-stressed (Ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum).

* A rhyme scheme in which: lines 1, 4, 5, 8 rhyme with each other; lines 2, 3, 6, 7 rhyme with each other; lines 9, 12 rhyme with each other; lines 10, 11 rhyme with each other; lines 13, 14 rhyme with each other. Using a different letter for each rhyme sound, the pattern is abba abba cddc ee. We can see how this divides the poem into four units, with a major break after line 12, a lesser break after line 8, and a minor break after line 4.

I have droned on at this length merely to illustrate that the rules for writing a sonnet sound remarkably like the instructions for assembling one of those Airfix model aircraft kits that I remember from my youth: all those fiddly little pieces that only fit together in one way. It seems ridiculous that something so restrictive should be so liberating, and yet…

Moving on from form, let’s look now at content. Donne’s argument (deeply rooted in his Christian faith) can be expressed, very crudely, as follows.

Lines 1-4: Death has no reason to be proud, because it has no power to kill me.

Lines 5-8: Death is just an intense sleep; since sleep is pleasurable, death must be more so.

Lines 9-12: Death is a slave to human killers; drugs can induce a death-like coma; death keeps very bad company. All this proves that there is no justification for death to be proud.

Lines 13-14: Death leads to an eternal afterlife, which completely obliterates death.

In the first 12 lines, Donne seems to be playing with an intellectual concept that is counter-intuitive: the powerlessness of death. His arguments in the first 12 lines are clever, rather than convincing. These arguments are, however, only ‘setting us up’ for the telling argument of the final two lines, which, for anyone who believes in an afterlife, is irrefutable proof of death’s ultimate powerlessness.

Now look at how this logical development, this thought process, is shaped by the rhyme-scheme of the poem. As I said above, the rhyme scheme divides the poem into four units, with a minor break after line 4, a lesser break after line 8, and a major break after line 12. Donne pours his argument into this shape, so that the position and relative strength of these breaks are matched exactly by the development of his argument. The form of the sonnet makes us pause and take stock after line 4, then more strongly after line 8, then even more strongly after line 12, intensifying the impact and conclusiveness of the final two lines.

I want to draw your attention to one more tension in the poem. There is no perfect match between the metre of the poem and the rhythm of the spoken text. The metre is, as I said, ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum (pause) ti-tum ti-tum…..and so on.

However, the rhythm is very different. Look at lines 1 and 2, for example. Donne’s rhythm goes against the metre in the following ways. ‘Death be’ and ‘Mighty’ are both tum-ti, going against the metre of ti-tum. In addition, the first line runs on into the second, with no pause at the end of the first line.

The effect of such conflicts is to draw more attention to the syllable, word or phrase that goes against the metre. Donne makes us notice, and stress more, ‘Mighty and dreadful’, which are very powerful in the line. When the line shifts from going against the metre to going with the metre, at the comma, this emphasizes the importance of the last five words in the line, which are Donne’s first statement of denial of death’s power: ‘for thou art not so’.

It is much easier to sense the tension between form and content when reading a poem, or hearing it read, aloud. (All poetry should be heard and not just read with the eye – and I mean that to sound as dogmatic as it does!) I invite you to listen to John Gielgud’s reading of this poem. Someone once remarked (and I’m afraid I can’t remember who) that he would willingly pay to hear Gielgud read the London telephone directory. In contrast to some other readers on YouTube, Gielgud does full justice to both the form and the content of this poem.

And, if we’re talking about poetry, here’s some in motion. (Is there any topic I can’t segue out of into a look at Tao?)

I Bloody Built That

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When Micha’el and Tslil first formulated their plan to live off the grid, they realized that it would be far better to build a community of like-minded people, for a number of reasons. Anyone who lives alone depends on a vast network of people outside supplying everything they can’t make themselves. In addition, it certainly makes practical sense to spread your risk: if you are a couple in isolation, and one of you is injured and unable to work for a period, survival becomes almost impossible, but if you are part of a community, the impact of the injury is obviously far less. It also enables members of the community to make a contribution in their various areas of expertise, so that the community is able to achieve excellence in many areas. An added benefit can be economies of scale: not just in terms of expenses, but also in terms of time, which may mean that community members have some free time to devote to interests that do not directly serve the community, and to practice skills that are not immediately productive. Finally, a community provides a richer social mix, for both children and adults. In the case of Micha’el and Tslil, their final goal is a community of 50 families, around 250 people.

As I wrote that last sentence, I was aware that some of you might find it ridiculous, seeing how far removed from their current reality it is. Sadly, the pandemic has slowed this side of their plans to almost a standstill (but not quite: there are some people expressing an interest). They clearly have a very, very long path ahead of them, but they are determined to travel that path, learning every step of the way.

Personally, I find their vision inspiring; it seems to me an act of faith in what they can achieve. Their project is, of course, in its infancy, but they possess what seems to me an essential ingredient to carry them through that infancy to maturity. I do not know whether they will ultimately succeed. However, I do know they have the one thing that above all increases their chance of succeeding: a vision.

President Kennedy, visiting NASA headquarters, is said to have approached a janitor mopping a floor and asked him what his job was. Now, you might have thought that a man intelligent enough to serve as President of the United States, faced with a man wearing dungarees and using a mop and bucket to clean a floor, might be able to work out what the man’s job was – at least, you might have thought so until 2016. But I don’t plan to spoil a really good story. When Kennedy asked him what his job was, the man’s (surely apocryphal) reply was: “I’m helping put a man on the moon”.

If that doesn’t bring a lump to your throat then you don’t get a seat on my sofa for the next screening of Forrest Gump.

One of our greatest gifts, it seems to me, is the ability to see and celebrate value and purpose in our life. Whether this means seeing your job as a calling, or dedicating your life to a higher ideal, this way of seeing is a vital part of our humanity.

I can’t really get my head around medieval cathedrals (metaphorically, you understood…or, indeed, literally, now I come to think of it). As I approach, say, Canterbury Cathedral, its sheer size generates in me a sense of awe. I can only imagine the impact that standing inside the nave and looking up to the ceiling 80 feet above must have had on 15th Century pilgrims who might never before have seen a building above two storeys high.

The sheer scale of the project of building a cathedral in the Middle Ages is hard to imagine. The construction of York Minster, for example, began in 1220, and was completed over 250 years later. That represents 10 generations of armies of labourers. I like to think that very few of them thought they were chipping at stone, or even carving a gargoyle. I really hope they all felt that they were building a cathedral.

John Ormond, a mid-20th Century Welsh poet, was the son of a village shoemaker; much of his poetry celebrates the value of skilled labour and artistic workmanship. His most famous poem, Cathedral Builders, explores the apparent contradiction between the soaring work of the artisans who built medieval cathedrals, and the coarseness of their domestic lives. His imagined builders may not have taken 250 years, but they were still part of something much, much greater than themselves.

They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
inhabited the sky with hammers,
defied gravity,
deified stone,
took up God’s house to meet him,
and came down to their suppers
and small beer,
every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
quarrelled and cuffed the children,
lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy,
and every day took to the ladders again,
impeded the rights of way of another summer’s swallows,
grew greyer, shakier,
became less inclined to fix a neighbour’s roof of a fine evening,
saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
somehow escaped the plague,
got rheumatism,
decided it was time to give it up,
to leave the spire to others,
stood in the crowd, well back from the vestments at the consecration,
envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
cocked a squint eye aloft,
and said, ‘I bloody did that.’

I have always loved that last line, for its earthiness, and for the way the poet recognizes the honest pride with which each builder appropriates to himself (quite appropriately, it seems to me), the glory of the work, while still sounding surprised by his achievement. Of course, it was ‘We’ who actually ‘bloody did that’, but that ‘We’ is made up of an army of ‘I’s, each of whom is entitled to claim credit. Without all of those ‘I’s, there is no ‘We’.

I fervently hope to witness the day when Micha’el and Tslil can step back and say: ‘We bloody did that’.

Until that day, I hope they – and you, gentle reader – can take inspiration from the wonders of purposeful teamwork – and, it has to be admitted, time-lapse photography – as demonstrated by the Amish. (It turns out that it takes a village to raise, not just a child, but even a barn.)

And finally, from a few months ago, this is what can happen if you try to undertake a major construction project alone.

Apologies! Audio is horribly out of sync

Playing the Long Game

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Last week, I promised to keep you posted on the missing documents saga. You may remember that Micha’el was told that their package of original documents returned by the authorities had been picked up from Castelo Branco Post Office, although they did not know by whom; all they knew was that, whoever it was, it was definitely not anybody who had any right to pick it up.

Then, a few days later, a neighbour stopped Tslil on the street, and said: ‘By the way, there’s a package for you at the petrol station.’ 10 months in Portugal have taught the kids that things that make no apparent sense may still have a logical explanation. Sure enough, when they went to the petrol station, there was a parcel waiting for them, containing the documents. Apparently, the clerk who had addressed the envelope had omitted from the address both the house number and the village (Penamacor). Instead of (as it were):

26, Something Street
Penamacor
Castelo Branco

the parcel had been addressed to:

Something Street
Castelo Branco

It had therefore been sent to Castelo Branco, where the postman had, of course, failed to find the street. Realising the mistake, the authorities redirected it to Penamacor, knowing that there is a street of that name in the village. However, since it was missing a house number, the postman could not deliver it, and so he handed it in at the petrol station, to be claimed from there. ‘Why the petrol station and not the post office?’ you ask. Good question! If I had to hazard a guess, I would say because very few people go to the post office regularly, whereas everyone uses the petrol station, and the proprietor, knowing where everyone in the village lives, can mention to the next resident of the street who stops by that, when they see the Orlevs, they should tell them that there is a parcel waiting for them.

‘Why, then, did the postal authorities tell Micha’el that the parcel had been collected?’ you ask. Full of good questions this week, aren’t you! Well, you see, in order to leave the parcel at the petrol station, the postman had to get the proprietor to sign for it.As far as the Post Office was concerned, this meant that the parcel had been delivered. There you are, you see: a logical explanation. It may not make any sense, but it’s logical!

Every confrontation the kids have with Portuguese bureaucracy confirms what I said when we first made aliyah. We started off at an absorption centre: this was a wonderful arrangement, since, whatever bureaucratic nonsense we experienced on any given day, we would always be able to find someone among our neighbours who had had the same experience a few days, or weeks, or months earlier, and who could reassure us that everything would work out in the end. Despite that, someone or other (usually, you may be interested to know, an American – I just report the facts as they are; I don’t comment on them) would regularly rant about the Israeli authorities and their Byzantine bureaucracy and incredible inefficiency. Incidentally, the bureaucracy was indeed Byzantine, since much of it was a remnant of the days when this neck of the woods was part of the Ottoman empire. Israel even adopted a little of the Ottoman bureaucratic vocabulary, notably the splendid Turkish word for rubber stamp – gushpanka.  

Whenever I heard such a rant, I would respond in the same way. ‘Have you ever tried to immigrate to the USA? Ask someone who has what the process is like!’ This was, of course, in one sense, an unfair comparison, since we all, as Jews, enjoyed the Right of Return to Israel, which isn’t the case for most would-be immigrants to the USA. However, it is fair to say that no native-born national ever really appreciates how daunting the immigrant experience is. You know none of things that ‘everyone knows’; you only find the right way of doing something by doing it wrongly first; and, of course, you can’t really understand anything anyone says in an office, much less on the phone. The best pieces of advice we were given were: ‘Always bring a small child’ and ‘When all else fails, cry’. We have, of course, passed this advice on to the kids.

What I don’t know is whether Portuguese bureaucracy follows the British or the Israeli model. In Britain (in my experience), if a clerk in a Government office tells you ‘Impossible!’, there is no point in arguing. Even if what you are requesting is, in fact, possible, you will never get the clerk to admit to being in error, and, if it is impossible, then you will never get the clerk to bend the rules.

In Israel, by contrast, ‘Impossible’ is nothing more than the clerk’s opening gambit in a protracted negotiation. We once knew an immigrant from Britain who applied for an Israeli heavy goods licence, even though his British driving licence only qualified him to drive a car. He arrived at the relevant licensing authority at eight o’clock one morning, and, on being told that he was not eligible for a heavy goods licence, argued for an hour and a half, and then announced that he was not moving from the office until he had his licence. Those of you who live here will not be surprised to hear that he left the office at the end of the day with a heavy goods licence (which, thankfully, he never used).

Sadly, official Portugal sounds, at this point, more like Britain than Israel. However, Micha’el’s people skills are so good, and Tao is so adorable, that my money is on them. (Be honest: could you say ‘No’ to this child?)

I’m sure the kids will eventually achieve what they need to do in order to move on to developing the land as they want and achieving permanent housing. Fortunately, Micha’el and Tslil are keen players of Go, and so they know all about playing the long game.