Julia > Recent Status Updates

I saw something at that moment that I’d never been aware of before. You couldn’t imagine a more feminine woman than Helen nor a more virile man than Achilles, and yet in every way that mattered, they were alike. It was always about them.

Obviously, the past had been wiped clean. Helen was Greek again, no longer Helen of Troy – that was over, finished. She’d gone back to being Helen of Argos. Queen of Argos. So many thousands … I cut the thought off.

Кутаиси, Кутайс или Котис, столица нынешней Имеретии или некогда всей Колхиды, существует — нечего и говорить об этом — с самых древнейших времен. Д'Анвиль уверяет, что это древняя Эа — родина Медеи.

я думал о волшебной памяти народов, как эстафету передавшей нам факт, историю или басню, которая восходит за тридцать пять лет до Троянской войны.

Совершенно иное бывает с черкесскими женщинами, которые, находясь в жалком состоянии у себя дома, считают за великое счастье быть проданными.

The stone edge did not end because the world ran out of stones

Сын Шамиля, вернувшийся из «плена» в Петербурге и умерший от тоски на Родине

Orna. Him meeting her (and her daughter) years later

Amos leaving for a kibitz after a fight with his father. Father’s making amends by explaining the origin of the name K, seeing Amos off, waiving goodbye to a wrong bus

How the aunts fed him tons of raw vegetables, cod liver oil, etc, washed all his clothes and made him sit outside in the sun “as if I just got out of the ghetto” when he was visiting after his mom’s death

By their hard work, common sense and pioneering enthusiasm, the group manages to survive and to build up from scratch with their bare hands a prosperous homestead on the desert island. This delighted me. Imbued as I was with the pioneering ethos of Zionism that I received from my father - secular, enlightened, rationalistic, idealistic, militantly optimistic and progressive.

Nov 30, 1947

Bullies may well bother you on the street or at school some day. The may do it precisely because you a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment he have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so’s and so’s, not that, never again. From tonight, that’s finished here, forever

In those days I was not so much a child as a bundle of self-righteous arguments, a little chauvinist dressed up as a peace lover, a sanctimonious honey-tongued nationalist, a 9yo Zionist propagandist. We were the goodies, we were in the right, we were innocent victims, we were David against Goliath… whereas they (the B, the A, the w) … the evil hypocritical world that was always thirsting for our blood

Лермонтов, персидские бани

Your mother.. started pouring scorn on a.. painting that hang in our dining room all these years. She ridiculed it for sweetening reality, for lying

“And now look how my memory is making an idiot out of me”

When we were conquered by the poles and then by the red army and then by the nazis… and then there was Stalin again, with NKVD. Rovno was thrown from hand to hand like a puppy being teased by Russia, Poland, Russia, Germany, Russia. And now it doesn’t belong to Poland or to Russia but to Ukraine. Or is it Belarus?.. what there was doesn’t exist anymore and what there is now will also turn to nothing

It behind this faith in the diploma there is smth else, and that is that the girls those days.. even the girls who went to universities are entitled to the education and the place outside the home but only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time from when you leave your parents home until your first pregnancy. From that moment.. we had to begin to live our lives only for the children

The diploma is the Jews religion. Not money, not gold - the diploma

Soc.status and hereditary traits = cards that were dealt, no free will. How to play with these = freedom. How you play though depends on your traits (= no freedom). The last resort: to laugh at our condition or to lament it, to play the game or go through our hand. … In a nutshell: to go through life awake or in stupor.

Me: effort = freedom

What a woman should look for in her man: decency and kindness. I [the mom] rate decency higher than kindness. Decency is the bread, kindness is the butter - or the honey.

He believed in two things: compassion and justice. But he was of the opinion that you always had to make a connection between them. J without C isn’t J, it’s an abattoir. On the other hand, C without J lay be alright for Jesus but not for simple mortals who have eaten the apple of evil. That was his view. A little less organising, a little more pity

Scholars “spending a week on a single footnote and who bothers to read us? If we are lucky, 2 or 3 prisoners of our own discipline read our books before they tear us to shreds, sometimes not even that”

Dinner with borscht, grandma’s critic (“really very nice and almost tasty, but that god preserve her from giving advice but it was well known, every little girl knew…”, poles sweetening everything “without rhyme or reason and if you didn’t watch them they would drown salt herring in sugar…”), mom’s reaction (tnx fir sharing her expertise, promised to serve only bitter and sour food.. to suit her)

If you steal from one book, you are condemned as a plagiarist. But if you steal from 10 books, you are considered a scholar. And if you steal from 30 or 40 books, a distinguished scholar.