Another day of rain, cheered with a pancake breakfast. When it slackened off for a while, we went for a walk around the park, and I checked the crab apple trees and picked a pocketful to take back for testing. The hundred grams or so I collected cooked into a puree with quite an interesting flavour, not quite ripe enough yet to harvest for optimum flavour.
Later in the day we watched the first three episodes of a DVD box set of an Israeli family comedy TV series called 'The Shtisels'. It's about the lives and loves of a Haredi family living in modern Jerusalem, a delightful portrayal of members of a family with a strong commitment to living a devout religious life. It's funny, and not because it mocks its subjects. In fact it's a sensitive and sympathetic portrayal of people and relationships with all their quirks, strengths and weaknesses. I can't imagine how it would be received by a person with no knowledge of Jewish spirituality and culture. It's certainly an advantage that I had to study Jewish religion and practice when I trained to teach RE forty years ago. We had Orthodox Jewish friends in those days as well. Understanding the context, was a source of extra viewing pleasure.
Cousin Dianne accidentally bought the set with French subtitles, and had to re-order the English version as she was evaluating the series as a candidate for a TV award, and didn't trust her French reading ability sufficiently to do justice to the work, so rather than send the set back, she gave it to us. Having watched the first three episodes in one sitting, I can understand her difficulty, as the pace of the Yiddish and/or Israeli Hebrew dialogue renders in French sub-titles at a lively pace for on screen reading. I don't think I missed much. In fact, I was surprised at how easy I found it.
The French text is clear, and I think my comprehension has benefited from having done a complete French revision course on Duo Lingo a couple of years ago. I keep up my daily Spanish practice on Duo Lingo, and that seems to have benefited my French comprehension, due to the similarity of some vocabulary and turns of phrase. When you learn more than one language in the same language group, knowledge of one benefits the other, it seems, despite the challenge of keeping them separate in use. Clare doesn't find it so easy to read subtitles with her eyesight deteriorating, but found herself listening to the Yiddish instead, as many of its words are derived from the German.
As it's a domestic comedy, it's mostly set indoors, but the occasional simple street scene is very evocative of the city I remember from twenty years ago, when I had a two month sabbatical in Jerusalem before we moved to Monaco. It awakened in me a longing to return there if the pandemic passes, if my health doesn't deteriorate. I'd like to return again as an independent traveller, rather than as a packaged tourist. I never got around to visiting Nazareth, Galilee, Haifa and the coast, or Gaza, or Jericho. Will it be ever possible?
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