The conversation with Aliza Olmert - artist and playwright, social worker and wife of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - took place in the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem two days before Rosh Hashanah. The house was full of television crews, including cameramen, lighting and sound people and journalists, who had come to conduct their traditional holiday interview. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sat in his room with Channel 2 TV news anchors Miki Haimovitch and Yaakov Eilon. Behind him hung a large painting of cypress trees by his wife, undated and unsigned.

"Why didn't you sign the painting?" Haimovitch asked her. "I sign only when it leaves the house," replied Olmert. "And how do you sign them?" she was asked. "Sometimes 'Aliza O.,' sometimes 'A. Olmert,'" said the artist. "That's strange," remarked Haimovitch. "My son is already practicing a regular signature."

The works of art in the prime minister's residence were chosen by Aliza Olmert from the collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. That is the accepted practice. Until they moved in, the premises were adorned by works by veteran representatives of local art such as Reuven Rubin and Moshe Mokady. "The 1920s and 1930s - in magnificent frames, heavier, more bourgeois," Aliza Olmert describes the paintings. "Let's say it was meant to create some kind of royal splendor."

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A reminder of that same Eretz Israel nostalgia can be found at the entrance to Ehud Olmert's office. A magnificent cabinet contains a display of historical items that were made in the early 20th century at the Bezalel School of Art and Design - ceramics, engravings, bas-reliefs, Judaica and hand-woven carpets. These are remnants from the beginnings of local art, which was part of the Zionist enterprise. In the rest of the official parts of the house - the living room, the entrance hall, the dining room - there are works from the 1960s hanging on the walls. The orientalism and naivete of the early painters have given way to more sophisticated, almost contemporary art: portraits by Michael Gross, abstract paintings by Yehezkel Streichman and Lea Nikel, two large paintings of windows by Liliane Klapisch, and two works by Rafi Lavie, which are surprising to find in such an official place, identified as it is with the establishment.

"One of Rafi's works, from the Phoenix collection, had found its way into this house even before I came, but it wasn't hung up," says Aliza Olmert.

Near the entrance is a landscape by Ori Reismann, which was chosen "by default," as she puts it. "I really wanted a work by Reismann, but a more summery one, with warmer colors and more transparencies. I like this painting, which has something opaque and gloomy about it, less than his light-filled works. But that's what I had at my disposal from the museum collection and that's what I could get."

'Pieces of art'

Already during our telephone conversation before the interview, Aliza Olmert explained that the works in the house were chosen from what was available - from the Israel Museum - and do not necessary testify to her personal taste. But several artworks that do reflect her taste have nevertheless infiltrated that same official space. On the piano and in other places in the living room, for example, there are strange-looking bronze bowls.

"Those are fruit bowls made by Zelig Segal, an artist and a good friend of mine," she says. Some of them are fulfilling their purpose and serving as containers for various fruits - at present, pomegranates. Others are objets d'art or, as Olmert calls them, "pieces of art": "These are pieces on the borderline between the functional and the artistic. 'Object' is too broad a word," she explains.

Other works by Segal, silver Judaica items, are on display in the cabinet in the entry hall. There is a cube there containing various traditional candles: a Hanukkah lamp, a memorial candle, a candle used to search for hametz before Passover, Shabbat candlesticks, a havdalah set. These remind one of another impressive work by Segal, "To Touch the Light," for which he won the Adi Prize for Jewish Expression in Art and Design at the Israel Museum about three years ago. Segal wrote on it the words "Let there be light" in Braille.

Opposite the cabinet, on a chest of drawers holding a series of flower arrangements in honor of the holiday, hangs a large black-and-white print showing women working in a field. The photograph was taken by her friend, photographer Aliza Auerbach. Olmert has also exchanged her own works with those of Segal and Auerbach.

'Ego of Lego'

The entrance to her study, which she calls "the office," is also the entryway to less official Olmert territory. The room contains works that hung in the couple's previous home, and which express the artist's own personal choices. On the wall hangs a black-and-white photo by Dalia Amotz, from the "Fields of Light" series that she did in the 1980s. Olmert purchased it from Amotz when they were neighbors in Jerusalem's Talpiot neighborhood. On a shelf near the door leans a portrait of a girl that she bought from Leah Zarembo, an artist who immigrated from Russia. "That's the first work she sold after arriving in Israel," Olmert says. The canvas is bordered by strips of metal that lend the portrait a unique look, somewhat old-fashioned and not at all Israeli.

Next to the portrait is a work by Olmert herself, comprising three statues made of hammers, whose handles have been transformed into cypress trees. Cypresses appear often in her works. At home, in the studio, in a piece that is now on display in the Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem (where a cypress is painted on an ironing board). What attracts her to this image?

"One of the cultural 'stations' in my life is cypresses," Olmert replies. "I grew up in the interior valley region of the country, and I remember the rows of cypresses that remained after the orchards were uprooted. The so-called windbreakers that protected what was later no longer in need of protection, remained in place. A formation of soldiers who weren't told that the war was over. The term 'windbreakers' also has amazing significance for me. They are actually now protecting the broken spirit" (in Hebrew, ruah means both wind and spirit).

The parallel between the useless cypresses and the soldiers is manifested more concretely in another of her works, "Iwo Jima," which stands on shelves in the room. In it, dozens of plastic toy soldiers try unsuccessfully to make their way among the hairs of a paintbrush. Some are trying to advance, others have already fallen en route.

"It's a kind of attempt to make heroics absurd," she says.

"Why make them absurd?" she is asked.

"I think that heroics are tragic - I'm actually talking about wars as a human 'bug.'"

Olmert created the piece three years ago, and it has never been exhibited. Does her status as the wife of the prime minister prevent her from creating and exhibiting critical works of this type? "No," she says. "If there were an exhibition on such a topic, I wouldn't hesitate and I would exhibit the work."

"Did you show them the 'Ego of Lego'?" asks Ruti Kaplan, Olmert's personal assistant, who joins the conversation. She points to a colorful object made from Lego that lies on the chest of drawers, beneath the shuttered window. Olmert received the item in mid-September from Kaplan, for her 60th birthday. "Aliza keeps telling me: 'I have an ego made of Lego,' so I sat down my son and asked him to make an ego from Lego," laughs Kaplan.

There is a group of drawings and paintings in the room, some of them framed, for which a place has yet to be found: They include a drawing that Olmert bought from Yosef Hirsch, when she curated an exhibition for him at the International Convention Center a year before his death, and a drawing by Hedva Harekhavi, another friend. Another drawing she received from architect Santiago Calatrava, who planned the Calatrava Bridge at the entrance to the city. One of the drawings in the pile bears the inscription: "Aliza, shalom, Cafe Savion, 60."

"Artist Shalom Reiser used to drink tea regularly at the Savion restaurant where I worked as a waitress for three years," she says. "He was hospitalized in Talbieh and he used to limp over there in the evenings. He never had money - I used to pay for his tea and he would paint for me. I have a collection of his paintings on paper napkins."

What God arranged

The family's private space continues on the second floor and is marked by a small ceramic sign that hangs at the entrance to Olmert's studio. The sign, which used to hang at the entrance to their previous home, symbolizes the entry into this intimate space. Here the ceremonies end. And here - in a place that served previous prime ministers as an upstairs living room for entertaining people - is where the studio and the work begin.

"I peeled off the carpet and we replaced it with synthetic flooring that can be dirtied and replaced later," she notes.

The studio is full of raw materials, paintings and various objects, most of them made from eggshells. "There's a mixture here of two different periods of my work, the paintings of cypresses and the eggshell creations," says Olmert. The statuettes made of the shells were recently displayed at an exhibition at Hebrew Union College in New York. These are broken eggs that were reconstructed, tied up and attached to one another with barbed wire. Here, too, there is an entire company of soldiers that is trying to advance, again unsuccessfully - but this time, among broken eggs that have been glued onto an ironing board. The quantity of work testifies to daily and intensive use of the studio - but only in the evening, Olmert says.

When asked whether her public status undermines her status as an artist, she replies: "Let's say that my place has always been painted with the color of where I belong, and now it is stronger."

Are you at peace with that?

"No, it's not easy, but I don't want to get into that. You see what God has arranged for me?" she asks, pointing to the balcony of the studio. Behind the guardrail stands a group of cypress trees that surround the house, conducting a dialogue with the windbreaking vegetation that she paints. Those which, as she puts it, protect what no longer needs protection. A formation of soldiers who were not told that the war is over.