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Food / An epitaph for eateries
By Haim Baram
Tags: Food, Assaf Gavron 

Okhel Be'amida

(Eating Standing Up), by Assaf Gavron Uganda Press (Hebrew), 168 pages, NIS 51 (paperback)

Novelist Assaf Gavron concludes his collection of food columns, in which he unfolds hundreds of captivating stories about shops selling street food in the Jerusalem of the mid-1990s, with a critique of the pricey gourmet restaurant Arcadia, in the center of town, that made it clear the establishment had never stood a chance with him. I smiled to myself. A bit before or after Gavron first published that column in the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir, I published a review of Arcadia in that newspaper (which is owned by the same company that publishes Haaretz). The assignment was not a success for me. Instead of turning out a hedonistic description of the wonderfully pretentious food served at the restaurant, I wrote a Marxist essay condemning the rich people who eat there and leave behind enough money to support half the inhabitants of the destitute neighborhoods that surround the restaurant on all sides, which was clearly not what the editors had in mind.
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Apparently, they concluded that I was not especially cut out for writing restaurant reviews, and after a few more such meals on the paper's tab, they stopped sending me on such assignments. I was rather pleased to discover that my former colleague (whom to the best of my recollection I have never met) also felt like a fish out of water at Arcadia. In any event, neither the glory nor the pretensions of Arcadia - the antithesis of the dozens of food joints visited by Gavron as he carried out his fascinating job of reviewing street food - will live or die by that review.

Eventually, Gavron became a well-known author (his novel "Hydromania" was reviewed in the December 2008 issue of Haaretz Books), but his abundant talent was evident even in those early newspaper columns. Gavron writes in lean Hebrew, one could almost say on a low level, sprinkling his text with popular expressions and allusions to the life of the typical semi-secular, semi-religiously traditional Betar-fan Jerusalemite. They are full of descriptions that are literary, even lyrical, and clearly come from a Jerusalemite who loves his city, even though he tries to conceal his warm feelings under an amused cynicism. Gavron's writing won him admirers at Uganda Press, a tiny Israeli publishing house, and their memory of his column from the days when Kol Ha'ir still set the tone in the city led them to initiate the publication of his columns in book form.

In his foreword to the book, as well as in the columns themselves, Gavron writes excitedly about the reactions his columns elicited all around town, and as someone who has been writing two Kol Ha'ir columns (one about politics, the other about soccer) for 24 years now, I can understand him very well. Regular appearances in the paper brought the writer into nearly every home in the city, and the reactions are comparable to the reader comments that a provocative piece might elicit on the Internet nowadays.

Ben-Rimoz or Ohana

Gavron was a prominent figure in our city, and when he badmouthed Falafel Doron in the German Colony, he inflamed the insulted owners, "who had connections with a writer at the paper," as Gavron wrote. I am not that writer, but I too was insulted on behalf of the owners. I did, and still do, love their food, and beyond that, they are Hapoel fans - not only in basketball, but also in soccer. Nearly all Jerusalemites have their own standards, which they use to pinpoint their enemies and help their friends. You will not find two Jerusalemites with an identical opinion about any eatery, just as you will not find agreement as to existential questions like who was the greater soccer player - Eli Ben-Rimoz (Hapoel) or Eli Ohana (Betar).

Even the same person can sometimes harbor two contradictory views of the same restaurant. Gavron beats his breast a bit for the sin of his initial enthusiasm for McDonald's - which opened downtown in the mid-1990s, where the Orion Cinema had previously been located - but in my opinion, such a slip in taste only adds charm to the book.

The writer is a strange beast, saying he roots for Hapoel in basketball and Betar in soccer. A man like that, who could be compared to someone who lives in the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron and votes for Hadash, shouldn't even be allowed to get married. But Gavron certainly knows how to write, so his book succeeds in overcoming tremendous obstacles, some of which would have condemned any other writer to sharp criticism on the literary pages.

For instance, the book is outdated, with at least a third of the joints described with such wit in its pages having gone out of business due to the ravages of time. Jerusalem, and the country as a whole, has undergone quite a lot since Gavron began writing his columns; Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated and there have been a lot of terror attacks (which especially affected the center of town), as well as major changes in the economy and in the capital's transportation situation, with the streets being dug up for years while rails are laid for a light rail network. All this means that for all that "Eating Standing Up" is entertaining, it won't teach readers much about the current state of Jerusalem's fast food.

But the editors appear to have made a conscious decision to include places that have since closed down, and for those that remain open, to list the prices as they were when the columns were first published, with the goal of preserving the authenticity of the original columns. The book should be viewed less as a guide to fast food in Jerusalem and more as an epitaph for eateries that are by their very nature transient, as well as a way of recalling one of the most difficult periods in the city's history.

The juicy, wonderful descriptions of the food - including the side dishes, the salads and above all, the falafel - compensate for the many references to eateries long gone. The food, as Gavron sketches it, revels in its own colors, and even the worst meals are described with a sensuousness that only magnifies the sense of nausea, trickling not only into our brain cells but also into our nervous system: "The tomatoes and the pickles are tired and plucked-looking, like construction workers after a long day of work in the summer," "a glass cage in which the sausages rest like tired pensioners in a Swedish sauna."

There will be critics who think Gavron's description of Falafel Shlomo - it "has all the prerequisites for becoming a classic that has no competitors in the field of falafel," but turns out to be "nothing special," the "sort of food that has to be checked out for curiosity's sake but not to be revisited" - applies equally to the book as a whole. I don't agree.

Haim Baram is a journalist and commentator.
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