After Judy Garland received the nasty bump on the head that led her to the ‘Land of Oz’ whilst trying to get back home during a dustbowl tornado in 1939, she encountered a world of oh so familiar people in very different guises. Eventually, as we all know, after many adventures in the company of the Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, she came to her senses and woke up declaring ‘There’s no place like home’.

I’ve been back in England for the last two weeks and to Leeds, the place I called home for the first forty years of my life. But now Leeds is no longer my home; Zichron Yaakov in Israel is very much the place where I lay my hat, (as Paul Young so famously declared in the 1980’s song), and strangely, revisiting the place of my birth, adolescence and subsequent adulthood seems more like returning to an alien environment than to the northern city to which I am inextricably linked due to family ties and close friendships.

I left Israel during a spring heatwave with the temperature sizzling at around 35 degrees. Six hours later I emerged into the Manchester night to the shock of the cold that is 2 degrees above freezing – and this is the middle of May! For the first three or four days in Leeds I felt terribly cold and old friends and family thought I was exaggerating when I insisted that I really was feeling miserable in the winter-like chill. It was only when I pointed out that the drop to even a mid-day high of 14 degrees was like them suddenly descending to minus 5 in the space of a few hours that they accepted that maybe I was feeling a bit on the nippy side.

Of course, what for me is a spring break in leafy England is for everyone else just another week of work and family commitments. It is unreasonable for me to expect everyone to suddenly cancel their business meetings or decide not to take the kids swimming or to dance classes just so they can sit around drinking coffee with me and reminisce about old times. Life goes on as normal, just as it does when visitors come to Israel, and it’s a case of trying to fit in with the routine and find a few hours here and there for some ‘quality time’.

I headed into Leeds for a bit of shopping. With the pound now incredibly weak due to the economic hardships being experienced in England, (and sure to get much worse over the next few years), buying clothes and gifts here is pleasantly affordable. The shekel goes a long way these days and I looked forward to spending up. Leeds is a fairly cosmopolitan and prosperous city, or at least it had been until the last few years where signs of recession are visible on every street with empty shops, all-year-long sales and discount stores occupying main high street positions where once stood elegant classy department stores and quality retail outlets.

‘Times is ‘ard’, as they say in these parts. People are worried about their jobs. Genuine fears of redundancy or enforced pay cuts loom for an alarming number of my friends and there is no doubt that people are cutting back and preparing for the major tax rises that are certain to come in next month’s emergency budget of the new Liberal/Conservative coalition government.

Maybe it was the weather, but people look as grey as the leaden skies, there is an astounding rise in obesity among the general population, and I strongly felt an atmosphere of gloom hanging over the place. Israel has its problems, many and complicated, but at least we are able to face them against a background of sunshine, beaches and a comparatively thriving economy. All of a sudden, the challenges faced back home seem that much more bearable – well, at least from afar!.

Just a minute – where is home? Is home the place I grew up, where my parents, childhood friends and many former colleagues are, or is home where I now live with my wife and children, my new friends and new colleagues? In Israel, I am still often referred to as ‘the English guy’ whilst in England I am thought of as ‘Israeli Paul’.

As well as missing Paz and my daughters Tami and Maya, I’m missing the Israeli food. Trying to get a decent salad over here is only marginally less of a challenge than Indiana Jones found when looking for the ‘Lost Ark’. Being gluten free these days rules out 9/10ths of the British diet – no pies, pasties, sandwiches, pizza, pasta, fish and chips, Indian food, you name it. I did find a Tesco sushi one lunchtime and that kept me going, and had some excellent, succulent Yorkshire roast lamb one evening, but overall, despite a definite improvement in the last decade, eating out in Britain falls a long way short of the standards I’ve become used to in Israel.

Driving in Britain though is an absolute delight. I’d almost forgotten what it is like for people to keep their distance, not use their horn, signal where they are going, and to top it all, stop and give way to let you into the traffic – with a smile and a cheery wave. Wonderful!

After a week of leaden skies and temperatures well below seasonal norm, the weather has taken a significant turn for the better. As I write to you, Britain is ‘sweltering’ in temperatures around 28 degrees – ‘Phew! What a scorcher’, The Sun newspaper is no doubt reporting. And when the sun does eventually shine, Britain is stunningly beautiful. The Yorkshire countryside close by is truly breathtaking when the skies are blue, the sheep and cattle graze in immaculately tended fields, and country villages filled with old stone cottages and a dazzling array of flower baskets look like images on top of those quaint old toffee tins you find at Betty’s Tea House in elegant, majestic Harrogate.

It won’t last though. Tomorrow I fly home and am taking the warm weather with me. It’s forecast to fall back to 15 degrees maximum temperatures and the greyness will return. The great unwashed, (I know that’s the case having endured a fortnight travelling on local buses, especially during the mini-heatwave), will repopulate the streets, the shops will be shuttered at 5pm to save them from being smashed up from drunken yobos during the night, and very soon Prime Minister Cameron will deal a financial blow to the populous that will make life even tougher here.

Last night I visited friends who were watching the final of a talent show chaired by Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber in which the winning contestant will play Dorothy in his new stage version of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. As I mentioned earlier, Judy Garland’s last line of the movie has become a Hollywood classic. Tomorrow morning, courtesy of the Jet2 budget airlines service from Manchester to Tel Aviv, I’m flying back over the rainbow to be with my merry band of friends and loved ones. There really is ‘no place like home’.

 
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The Israel Trail 05/04/2010
 
On Thursday last week my father-in-law, Dan Eyal, went to work for the final time. At the age of 67 he has received his 'gold watch' and all the family now look forward to him enjoying a long and happy retirement and to him being free to do all those little jobs around his house (and mine), that have needed attention for some time.

Dan has experienced quite a journey through his 67 years, a journey that in so many ways typifies the struggles and joys that the State of Israel has survived since 1948.

He was born Daniel Krakowski, in, (of all places), Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Why was this Jewish baby born in that Central Asian Muslim state back in 1943? Well, because his mother and father, natives of Zakopane and Warsaw respectively, in Poland, fled east away from the advancing Nazi forces, and kept running until his mother could run no more. They had reached Samarkand, and that is where Dan was born. 

At the end of the Second World War, unlike the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews, Dan's parents chose to return and settle in Warsaw. They stayed there until 1956 when resurgent anti-Semitism caused them to flee again, this time to the fledging Jewish nation of Israel. Like so many European immigrants to Israel, Dan (on his wedding day) chose to change his name and left behind Daniel Krakowski to become Dan Eyal.

Growing up on Kibbutz Hatzor, near Ashdod, Dan served in the Israeli Army and was amongst the Nahal fighters under the watchful eye (singular) of Moshe Dayan, who won back Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967. He went on to fight a few days later against the Syrians in the Golan, and was called up and back in action again in 1973 down on the Egyptian border during the Yom KippurWar, after which he chose to stay in the air force parachute regiment where he held the rank of major until retiring in 1985.

From then until last Thursday, Dan worked for the Israeli aircraft industry as an electronic engineer. An honourable career I would say, by any standards.

There is a group of hardcore Israelis who love the Israeli countryside, the mountains, deserts, fruit groves and beaches, who set themselves the task of walking every step of the 'Shvil Yisrael', the Israel Trail. Dan decided that upon retirement he wanted to do a section of the nearly 1000km trail every few weeks, a walking path that begins at Metula on the Lebanese border in the north, and ends in Eilat on the shores of the Red Sea.

Last week he mentioned he was going to do the first section, and in a moment of weakness I offered to walk with him on the trail from Shefiyya to Jisr Az Zarqa. And so it was that this very morning we were dropped off at the Shefiyya junction and headed off with map in hand, a couple of bananas and five litres of water between us on the first leg of what would surely be a journey of epic proportions.

Dan might be 67, but he's in very good nick, swims four or five times a week, cycles regularly and walks every evening. I'm nearly 43, do none of the above, but have been known to be fairly useful at snooker and can knock out a passible version of 'Misty' when in the mood to tickle the ivories. Regular followers of this blog will know that I'm not averse to a little wager now and then, and I would have made Dan 4/6 favourite to complete the 20km hike and me no better than 5/4 against!

Once away from the main Route 70 road from Fareidis to Yoqneam, we crossed into the first of many beautiful fruit groves. Apricots were beginning to appear on the branches of these very attractive trees and huge bulrushes ran around the perimeter of the grove where a small stream flowed. Birds were singing, the skies were blue and my legs soon felt like a spinster's pincushion as we walked through thistle-laden paths, having made the mistake of wearing shorts and not hiking trousers. 

Up the first (of many) hills and through the vine groves belonging to the Carmel winery, beginning to blow a bit as we walked the steep path that leads up to the tourist haven of Zichron Yaakov. The path, marked every 100 metres by blue, orange and white lined symbols took us through woods that offered blessed relief from the rising temperatures and after the first hour we stopped in what had been an ancient quarry. It's not easy to find a silent place in Israel, but that was the prize for arriving at this spot. Silence, apart from the twittering of the birds, the whirring of a few grasshoppery-type creatures, and the hissing of a snake. The hissing of a snake! 

Yes, but 10 feet away a black or dark brown slithery, disgusting reptile stopped momentarily to take a good 'butchers' at us. I have to confess to being afraid of few if any animals, with the exception of snakes. I am terrified just looking at them. My spine started shivering and my feeble hushed calls to Dan literally fell on deaf ears, as he had not brought his deaf aid with him for fear of it falling out in the undergrowth. Happily, it slithered under a rock some way away and I packed up my bananas, blanched almonds and bottled water and headed away - poste haste, with Dan trotting after me asking "what's the hurry?" 

Through orange, fig, and pomegranate groves, passing beautiful wild flowers in shades of pink, purple and yellow and on to a descent where fly-tippers had taken the outrageous liberty of dumping building material, doubtless from a major housing project under construction a couple of miles away. In Israel, the police rarely if ever prosecute anyone for destroying beauty spots. It's a crying shame. Crossing the main Binyamina road and uphill (again) through the rugged Ramat Hanadiv Nature Reserve, across landed given by Baron Edmond de Rothschild to the people of Israel. 

In amongst a stunning pine forest where the scent reminded me of an after shave my dad used to wear back in the 1970's - it wasn't Brut – but something like it – it might have been Old Spice – and on to Ein Tzur a beautifully preserved natural water spring that became a spa and baths for the Romans, built around 100BC. Through the rough pastureland past a herd of unflappable Jersey type cows and eventually to Hirbet Aqav, the remains of a Roman Villa that was later home to Byzantine farmers before being lost for nearly a thousand years until, according to a plaque on the site, it was discovered again by Kitchener in 1873. He must have been on a day trip from Khartoum! Quite a find, and with a view from the top of the rocky headland across to the Mediterranean that was simply breathtaking.

Being an amateur Israel Trailer walker, it was only then that it dawned on me that we would have to find a way down the extremely high mountainous rock on which we were standing, and the thought made me wonder why I'd volunteered for the 'stroll'. We'd now covered about 13 kilometres. The path directed us onto a particularly taxing descent over massive uneven boulders and through a Canaanite burial site that dates back to 2500 years BC. Just a quick thought; how can anyone deny that this is the Jewish land when there are such sites documented and proven dating back through so many thousand years of Jewish life in the area?

A very difficult descent indeed, after which we found ourselves stymied by the main Haifa to Tel Aviv rail line and accompanying barbed wired fence which runs right across the path. As if by magic, four walkers came from the opposite direction (the first we'd seen in nearly four hours), and one of them, younger and clearly with less brains than us, took it upon himself to sprawl across the barbed wire to lower it to a height where we could all cross, whilst he groaned in discomfort in Tommy Cooperesque fashion.. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" That's from the New Testament (John 15:13), but who cares, we're in the right part of the world! Bless him, whichever A&E department he must now be residing in!

Through olive groves, banana plantations, through the waters of the Taninim River, past the edge of Binyamina, through Beit Hanania and finally to the Roman aqueduct that lead us, staggering slightly in the manner of Laurel and Hardy in their French Foreign Legion picture, to the Sudanese Arab town just north of Caesaria that is Jisr-Az-Zarqa. 

Well done Dan – a great performance for a newly retired 67 year old. And well done me too, (though I say it myself). A real sense of adventure and achievement, highly recommended to all who come to visit this extraordinary land. The Israel Trail. A long and winding road….. 

Check out the Israel Trail for yourself at www.israelnationaltrail.com

 

 
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