The Outlet: the Blog of Electric Literature

Limitations in Art

Motel in Tucson, AZ.

I’ve always been fond of setting limitations for myself, in a way. When I was in high school, my best friend and I started a “B&W” club and only wore black or white for almost a year (we stopped when we found another pair of girls doing the same thing). I like limitations in writing, too. For my college thesis, I wrote a collection: Each story was mainly about two people, and each was titled with their names. The “novel” I wrote last semester all took place in hotel rooms. The one I’m working on this semester takes place in a mall and an apartment. Sometimes I want it to be only in the mall, but I start to get dizzy thinking about expanding scenes in other stores or the food court. I go to the mall as much as I can, now, and it is one of my least favorite places. At the same time, I love it, because it stifles me.

A fashion designer, Ann Sofie Back once said in an interview, “I’m working with burgundy. I hate burgundy. I’m fairly excited about this.” Perhaps more now than I’ve ever noticed before, designers are creating lines that are a combination of attractive, sexy things and references to the laughable outside world. This is very much inspiring me in writing.

Back’s latest collection was inspired by a Second Life character. Other runway inspirations I’ve read of this season include The Matrix, the first season of Melrose Place, Jamaican dance hall drag queens, and Burning Man. These designers are using cheap, recognizable materials: crushed velvet, fraying denim, sweatpants fabric, faux fur, and t-shirts decorated with body-jewelry. I don’t believe they are making any anti-fashion statements, and most of what I’m listing is actually quite beautiful. Perhaps some shows are saying something about the economy (of course, everything is about that, right?), but mostly, designers, like any artists, need to challenge themselves to make something worthwhile.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this novel, but I’m into the idea that I can at least see all the walls it can bounce off of. Plus, a mall is like walls inside of walls. Even the food court is segmented, and it has railings around the dining area, and you’re not allowed to smoke in certain places outside, even. There are screaming children and slow-moving old people in front of you. It’s almost as confining as a being on a plane.

I’m also interested in the idea of successful storytelling within narratives (like in letters, or orations at parties), because those seem to me like huge limitations on writing. The author is setting himself up to have to tell a story that is more engaging than the one he was setting this one inside of, or else the reader gets anxious for the real action to begin again. And he has to fend off more interruptions, while this is going on, in order to create realism. People at the party ask questions, the character doing the speaking needs a drink, the reader wants to know what she looks like while she talks, and if she can be trusted.

I’d like to write a story about a group of people or a person I truly hate. I want to write from the perspective of a total misogynist, and have him write letters to women, maybe letters to the editor of a publication I hate, and maybe the real action will start within those pages, and I’ll have to limit each step forward to a tiny square of ranting that is despicable, but at the same time eloquent enough to be published in a magazine. Maybe I’ll just assign that exercise to my students, instead.

-Natasha Stagg is a writing teacher and student in Tucson, Arizona.

“Love For Being Itself”: Marina Abramović, Di Fara Pizza and Chatroulette

On the final day of Marina Abramović’s performance at MoMA, “The Artist Is Present,” somebody tossed a manuscript from an upper balcony. Its pages peeled apart in falling, fluttering to the floor like so much confetti. One Memorial Day attendee called the sight beautiful. Inspection of a fallen page revealed font too small for ready understanding. Maybe the pages didn’t want to be understood, the spectacle of their descent their raison d’etre. While gathering them up, a guard asked the crowd to please not read the words. Nothing to see here, folks, he might have added. It was The Artist we were meant to feast our eyes on: New York City to the exhibition’s gathered United States.

Sitting opposite the temporal stream of her fifteen hundred plus guests, Serbian-born Abramović appeared massive, her red, white, and blue robes (a color per month) augmenting the size of her body. Her breathing was plainly visible, a single braid lying across her left shoulder, her posture canting to the right. Like a Central Park mime or a guard at Buckingham Palace, she held her place with seeming Zen, blinking and blinking and blinking again, face waxy with moisturizing balm. And what could we, the gathered, possibly have had to show her; what energies might we have silently transmitted?

“I wonder what she’s thinking,” a viewer mused.

“She’s writing a book,” went the earnest reply.

However true, it spoke to something: as art, only books carry the kind of monumental silence and stillness that a woman (Artist) seated in the center of the room, day after day, for months on end, brings to bear. As the program notes relayed, Abramović’s quadrant was a space where “nothing, and possibly everything” happened.

Art, it could be said, is true to everyone and faithful to no one: two thousand years ago a statue of a Roman soldier signified to its viewer a set of meanings (an ideal of manhood, the thrill of weaponry, the power of the state) that today have been reconfigured for most onlookers (a model physique, a quaint notion of violence, the ruin of empire in time). Ozymandias, and all that.

To create art is one thing; to confuse yourself with art—as only a human being after all—another: confusion at its most turbulent. And that is exactly the sort of confusion “The Artist Is Present” tempted. In this age of the watching eye, Marina Abramović invited us to share the mantle of her artistry in the most open and transparent manner possible.

Was that, in the end, truly to share at all? What would repeat sitter, Paco Blancas, say? How about “the streaker” who pulled her dress over her head before being immediately escorted from the premises by security? What of that critic who rained his pages from the upper balcony? Gathered there, what did we expect to receive? Or was it just a beautiful sort of relinquishing that her presence solicited, willingly surrendered by those who sat?

I was standing on the perimeter. Notepad in hand, like many others with notepads in hand. Or sketchpads. Or cameras. Something was happening there, and I was determined to know it by its name. Over the course of my three brief visits, one in March, one in April, and once more, on the show’s last day (“The Artist Is Leaving” they might have called it), I wrestled with the question of what to write, and how I would relate it to my passion for fiction.

Would I include an “I” in my essay, or go for more straight reportage; set ink on the Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe side of the line? And if I did include an I, would that “I” be me, purely mine and mine alone? Or a quality of self I owe in part to Marina Abramović having been present before me?

***

Considering these questions, I caught a train out to Midwood, Brooklyn, home of Di Fara Pizza. People bring their cameras, and notepads, to Di Fara too. As has been well documented, the guys know pizza. Their works of culinary genius are born in the most open and transparent manner possible. In fact, as I approached, with maybe something like a twinkle of anticipation in my eye, owner Domenico DeMarco, in apron and striped, short-sleeved button-down glanced out the sliding window at the front of the store. As if I were about to sit with him.

Or stand, as it happens. With a number of other patrons. The worn brass bulk of the cash register sports a set of ‘I Like The Pope’ stickers and a statuette of the white-robed Virgin Mary in prayer. A guy in ball-cap and apron took orders at random, as a star athlete signs autographs (who do I make it out to?), the three-tiered double ovens emitting their formative heat off to his left.

The interior walls wear the character of years, making no effort to hide their age and grit. Alongside the many, many mounted newspaper clippings heralding Di Fara Pizza’s pitch-perfect textures and flavors, a sign advises: “A group of 10 to 30 in the store can result in a delay, even of an hour or two. Yes, it may be frustrating, but perhaps the anticipation can enhance your appetite.”

Watching your pizza take shape comes with the ticket price (or if you can stand not having a slice, you’re free to stand and watch without paying a cent). Father, daughter, and sons perform—with support from others—behind a counter allowing full view of their preparations. Red tins of Salerno tomatoes are stacked behind the wooden balustrade lining the upper wall. Canisters of Vantia Olive Oil sit side-by-side above the flat expanse where dough is kneaded and spun.

It’s more often than not Dom DeMarco himself who dribbles the oil from a thin copper watering can, cuts shoots of home-grown basil with quick, sure strokes, and sprinkles the shredded parmesan before a pie in its box is released. Spinning the cheese grater, working the dough, rotating pies from counter to oven, oven to counter, then sectioning a finished pie, too hot yet for a patron to taste, into eight slices: these same motions DeMarco, his children and employees, have been practicing for decades on end, a version of perfect stillness—their perpetual motion notwithstanding. All toward the end of that most mythic phenomenon: the cross-generational, family-owned business.

Greatness is this: one grown man (like me, say) looking into the eyes of another, eyes that anywhere else would be guarded with un-recognition, to find shared ground, openness, wonder, the fact of Di Fara Pizza and an awaiting meal. Community. We arrive in Midwood, streaming desire, faces in a continuum. Most walk away ready to describe the experience in tones of amazement: you, too, should have the good fortune of knowing what I have known.

***

If knowing Di Fara Pizza is generally chalked up to good fortune, knowing Chatroulette, and what it holds in store, is more fraught. The very fires of hell, a more strictly religious guy than me might say. Some kind of fun, the shameless and sporting. An outlet, the isolated and lonely. The truth our parents hide, the young and wondering. Criminal behavior, the bearers of civic standards. Life, the tech-savvy, before hitting ‘Next.’

It is difficult to offer any single experience as representative of the Chatroulette universe, and yet that is all that Chatroulette is made of: once-in-a-lifetime meetings—here, then gone. Existentialism for dummies. These virtual interactions, cued by a mysterious algorithm—the genius of a Russian youth—take place in the blink of an eye: snap-snap-snap. The Artist is you, the space you and your webcam inhabit the context, the parade of strangers your fellow sitters. Think Reality TV confessional, the uncensored version: instead of London or Boston or San Francisco, the destination locale is your head. The narrative is post-modern in the extreme. There is someone, a person or people, on the other side, strangers in strange lands: do we need fiction no longer to help us visualize the other?

Perhaps it is no surprise, given the tempo at which most interactions occur and the freedom of apparent anonymity (and apparent safety of being a virtual being, not an accountable one, not a known entity) that many choose to let their genitals do the talking. These are the early days of the site, so a lot will change: already there is a ‘report’ button, which holds out at least the possibility of some future of regulation and pursuant shaming.

At present, though, Chatroulette is the revolution in cross-section, the anti-Facebook, a subversion of social-networking tribes, an altar to the god of chance (who may, it turns out, be nothing but a masturbating dude… not that there aren’t women out there, too). The thumbs up, the raised middle finger, the two-pronged peace symbol serve as pidgin language for some emerging universal consciousness; while this may have been the case for years, it is only now that anybody with internet access and a webcam can see that it is so.

Nouveau Edward Hopper, in close up: no more or less obscene than consuming a solitary fast-food meal separated from a city street by only a pane of glass. These are the molten edges around the plates of community, always the stuff of artistic obsession, where any given interaction can be creepy or thrilling, vacuous or revelatory, brutish or sweet.

On Chatroulette, not only do you see a stranger, you also see yourself. I am an image, you might think, and that is all: what vanity drove me to gather these herring fish words in my net? What good are they? Why not cut loose my shame, slip out of everyday masks?

In contrast, for those who decide, however reluctantly, to keep their clothes on—how much more clothed clothed people look in contrast to the others—naming is all. Pleasure lies in finding words to describe the succession of images, of people, of signifiers.

***

Unlike Marina Abramović’s recent performance (the mantle of artist so nearly tangible!), the launching pad for these stray reflections on the sunny enterprise of Di Fara pizza pies and Chatroulette’s shadow world, literary fiction—that which aspires to Literature with a capital ‘L’—is prefaced on absence. That the author is not there with you, and yet is, is exactly the fact of authorship.

Writers create a bridge that, once crossed, reveals the far to be near, the other to be self. Say Hemingway, and it is as if he is there, sitting opposite you. An idea of him persists, rooted in the continued life of his fiction. Say Tolstoy. Say Woolf.

In Charles Baxter’s short story, “Reincarnation” from the collection Believers, a tenuous community takes hold between three couples in a rural backyard one summer evening. The couples trade stories, over drink, as their faces recede in darkness. This continues in leisure until one of those present rejects the bond the gathered have carved out.

Before that happens though, the topic of incarnation is discussed, a notion of unearned love: “Whitman’s poetry is about love you don’t have to earn. It’s about love that you have or that you don’t have or that you just get or you give but not the kind that you did something to earn… It’s love for being itself.”

Call it adoration. In the search, perhaps, of love for being itself, a belief that such a feeling should exist on earth—a person should receive love just for being!—we seek out The Artist and deliver to her that love as we conceive of it in ourselves. Everyone should be so fortunate.

- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor.

Photos courtesy of VividRadicalMemory and UntitledBlog.

I have two professions: I am a chef and a writer.

One of these professions is doing very well; wages are rising; young people—educated , bright, energetic young people who might otherwise go to law school or med school are clamoring to join it; it has caught the popular imagination; it has its own cable network; it is, as they say, blowing up. When I attended its most celebrated festival last year, I saw something I never thought I’d see: colleagues of mine with their own entourages, like movie stars or prizefighters.

As a well-regarded but hardly famous practitioner of this profession in what is considered a third-tier town I’ve not only been interviewed and reviewed and profiled and asked to speak on panels but even caricatured by local cartoonists and offered money to endorse products. And at a time when people in occupations once thought to be iron-clad guarantors of prosperity are downsizing their expectations and girding their loins for the worst, I, a natural pessimist, am sunny about the future of this profession.

The other profession—well, it’s not going so great. One of its practitioners, in a famous article in Salon announcing his retirement, bemoaned that he was being paid the same rate that he had received when he started out 30 years ago, the same rate—not adjusted for inflation—that he had received in 1978.

Many of its oldest and most venerated outlets are closing their doors. Hardly a week goes by without the announcement of massive layoffs in this industry; even the most established practitioners worry about their own obsolescence; shortly before his death, its most famous American practitioner woefully compared his craft to the trade of a coach maker at the dawn of the automobile age.
Even though I produce something for this profession every week, I earn little from it—less per hour, I can’t help but notice, than the cheerful acid casualty who cuts my grass.

Yet, if I were to ask myself where my heart is, where, as Auden would say, I put the money of my feelings, it would be on this other profession, this sinking profession.

There comes a time in the life of most writers when they realize the truth: they will never be famous; forget posterity: their works will be largely unknown even to the present day; the two or three stories or poems in the little magazines (whose readership consists of, let’s face it, not the appreciative common reader Virginia Woolf wrote for, but resentful fellow practitioners); the book that sold 1,500 copies and then sunk without a trace–that’s as good as it’s ever going to get.

(But what about the Internet, you say. Well, —to continue the culinary/ literary metaphor—don’t you feel , when you log on, then log off a short time later, like someone who has been slouched over a refrigerator door for ten minutes, who then ruefully closes it, telling himself he was never all that hungry anyway?)

It didn’t start out that way—this bleak outlook we writers have; from the moment when our third grade teacher read to the class our earnest, block-lettered essay about the death of our pet hamster and our faces burned with happy embarrassment, we’ve been hooked on—we’ve been conditioned to expect—ever-larger doses of recognition.

But there comes a time in the life of most writers when they realize the truth: the need to write runs deeper than the ego; deeper than the need for praise or fame or riches or even some obscure desire for revenge.

Why do we write—why do I write? I confess that every time I ask myself this question and come back with an honest answer it never fails to put a smile on my face: We write because we have to write.

Why do we have to write? It may be for a reason as eloquent as Richard Wilbur’s, who said: “It is by words and the defeat of words/down sudden vistas of the vain attempt/that for a flying moment one may see/by what cross purposes the world is dreamt.” Or it may be for a reason as homely as the matron’s in E.M. Forster’s essay who proclaims, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

But we embrace this truth out of desperate necessity because—

Because, haven’t you heard? It is the chefs who are now the artists, with their own school of explicators who analyze their creative birth pangs in works with fatuous titles like The Soul of a Chef. We even have our own avant-garde, complete with its own manifestos, space-age techniques, food that doesn’t even look like food, and forward-looking eagerness to elevate something as intrinsically pleasurable as eating to new levels of tedium. And perhaps somewhere, slouching towards San Sebastian waiting to be born is the chef ready to destroy the bourgeois illusion that food is supposed to taste good.

Perhaps, I think to myself in moments of grandiose self pity, now is the time for the writer in me to embrace the anonymity of the craftsman, with the painstaking vigor of the stonecutter, who carved in the obscure corners of cathedrals, the elaborate foliation of which he knew would be visible only to the eye of God.

But maybe you’ve had enough negative affirmations for one evening.

If not, here’s another, final one, from Ted Hughes:

To hatch a crow
a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
         over emptiness
But flying

-John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun,the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

REVIEW: Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marías

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

Javier Marías

Translated by Esther Allen

New Directions, 2010

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the art of the novella is very different from the art of the novel or the short story. The novel keeps you in the moment and develops a character, merging your psyche with that of another real-feeling person as she struggles through ups and downs. The short story unfolds into the future rhythmically, forever eliding psychology in favor of narrative. D&G sum it up this way: The story asks, “What’s going to happen next?” The novel shows you what is happening, as it happens.

The novella, perpendicular to both, tells you right away what already happened, then asks, “What happened?”—meaning how exactly did these events come to pass, what did they mean at the time, to whom, and what do we take from them now? If a novel is a life and a story a cinematic progression of moments, a novella is only a single moment, seen a la Rashōmon through many lenses.

This tends to make the novella blur into philosophy. A novella is, in some respects, a meditation, and—as much as it sucks us in and delivers a satisfying plot or examination of a theme—it leaves us dazed, our thoughts half-formed, our gushy parts only half-enlightened. We wonder if we’ve missed something. If we’re holding one of the great novellas, we dive right back in.

Javier Marías’s novella Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico is worth the second dive, and maybe many more. A 56-page work of alternating gravid humor and steak-thick terror, Bad Nature begins with a pages-long digression about what it means to be hunted down and killed, what it means to want to hunt someone down and kill him—propositions turned over carefully, almost religiously, as if we had specifically asked a good friend to explain to us why anyone would ever hunt another human, what the hunted would feel, and why.

[Being hunted down] isn’t knowing that you could be hunted down… it isn’t knowing with absolute certainty that someone would stamp on your hand if it were clutching the edge of a cliff (a thing we don’t usually risk, not in the presence of heartless people)…

The digression—preceding any plot beyond Elvis’s name in the subtitle—is not only tolerable but highly enjoyable, because it springs not from distracting cleverness or the need to delay, but from a typical and remarkable precision on the behalf of its cosmopolitan and prolific author, who is increasingly hailed as the greatest living Spanish novelist. (He’s “the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature,” The Boston Globe, and “probably the greatest living and widely known writer in the world,” n+1.)

Marías—slyly political, laconically forceful—wastes not a word in seamlessly transitioning from the abstract to the real, and the really funny. Five pages in, Elvis has left the building, has left the United States, in fact, and is in Acapulco with the narrator, Ruibérriz or “Roy Berry,” a Spanish-born translator hired to coach the King into sounding more refined than the Mexicans he’ll be presumably upstaging in his latest plotless sojourn into film.

Roy is always quick to defend the King, who is so earnest and powerful and happy that you barely notice him amid his admirers. When’s he’s around, he’s a city unto himself:

…he traveled—well, “travel” may be an exaggeration: he moved—with a legion at his back, a battalion of more or less indispensable parasites, each with his own function or without any very precise function at all, lawyers, managers, make-up artists, musicians, hairstylists, vocal accompanists…

Here comes the “What happened?” A holiday goes wrong. After a scuffle at a bar with some small-time gangsters, Roy translates what a cool-furious Elvis spits out. And yet Elvis is allowed to go home… Roy is not. And when Elvis is gone, he’s gone, and Roy is left to drunkenly fend off the creatures of the Mexico City night on his own.

So, what happened?

Is Elvis to blame for the violence that ensues? Is no one to blame—is the outcome expected? Preordained? Absurd? Everything in the well-paced back-fifth of the book hangs on what happened when Elvis was in the room, and so—though he’s never really real, never really present or deep or transparent—the King is also never really gone.

Elvis provides, it turns out, half of a frame. The other half—the hunt—returns in the novella’s sewn-tight final lines, thematically landing back on page 1. Without trickery, Marías accomplishes the nigh-impossible. He infuses a meditation with all the life of a story, and he yanks up from the story a fully engaging character.

But, by the end, we realize that the character isn’t Elvis or even Roy: It’s the narrator’s voice, the man behind the curtain, the producer and cameraman and especially the director—maybe Almodóvar meets the restrained–manic Kurosawa of High and Low. Who is this guy, so funny and so hounded? Masculine in tone and childlike in observation?

The guessing game is all part of the happy itch with which Marías and writers of his caliber curse us. And so we read again. Somewhere, it’s always the 60s in Mexico, and Elvis is always at the bar, ordering another finger of rotgut mescal just as the fat gangster snatches back from the newspaperman his crumpled lucky hat…

-Wythe Marschall can be found here.

From KIN by Dror Burstein, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu

And the head of the city is raised to the blue sky, and a great shadow falls on the whole city, on the continent, as in an eclipse, and they see, in the last minutes of their lives, the sight which is both terrible and beautiful, an alien visitor, not from another planet, for the planet itself is the visitor, a comet, or an asteroid, tearing the atmosphere, and boiling the seas dry, racing like a locomotive without a driver, millions look at it and millions more look at their television screens, and one thought is multiplied by a billion, a dream, it’s only a dream, and we will surely wake up from it. And it’s impossible to look anywhere but at the sky, where they can already see, at the outside edges, where they know, where they can see. And at night a kind of whistle seems to come from the clouds. Everyone has known, for months, that it’s going to happen, the calculations were flawless, they knew the exact hour, and where it would hit, the scientists gave the longitude, the latitude, artists built giant sculptures at the predicted points of collision and set up cameras, and high school students put the data into physical equations and prayed for a miracle, but all the calculations showed a single result, nobody was mistaken. They knew the name of the city, and the inhabitants of the city were supposed to leave, but they stayed. Some of them because they weren’t completely convinced by the scientific predictions – but most of them to see.

He put on the record with Beethoven’s cello sonatas. Played by Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim. The sonatas were recorded in Edinburgh in 1970, and Yoel and Leah were present at the concert.

‘They’re married, you know,’ he said and turned the record over.
‘So are we,’ she replied from the armchair to his back bending over the gramophone.

He turned to look at her, waiting for the sounds, her eyes closed, her head tilted back against the armchair. The whisper of the needle on the record came over the loudspeakers. And it seemed that the cello would never be heard, the piano would never be heard, only this whisper, like messages recorded by sensitive instruments from very remote cultures, broadcasting their histories over ancient radio waves.

They were at that concert. They didn’t even know that it was being recorded. Was Emile there? No. Emile was then in [ ]’s belly in Jaffa, and he didn’t hear those sounds. But in days to come he would hear the record.
The cough you could hear there in the first part of the sonata in G minor, after about five and a half minutes, was Yoel. It was a severe winter. He was sent to a conference on sunken roads in Scotland. And Leah didn’t want to stay home alone. And he caught the flu.

With every second of the progression of the music the knowledge of their failure as a couple was borne in on them. They would never have a child. Thirty three years old, and the spring was already stopped by a stone. And they wanted one very much. They even knew what they would call him: Gil. And the disappointment of their four parents. Somebody sneezed, others echoed his cough. There was a kind of flu epidemic in Scotland then, in 1970. But Jacqueline du Pre and Daniel Barenboim were absorbed in their playing, and apparently did not notice the noise. Only they were healthy in a hall full of sick people, thought Leah. And Yoel thought that it was precisely for these coughs that the music came. In order to heal them, to be there by their side, to nurse them, not to let the noise and the coughing prevail. It was a severe winter in Scotland, and the sick people got out of bed and came in spite of everything to hear the couple and Beethoven. And indeed, the music cured them completely.

- Dror Burstein was born in 1970 in Netanya, Israel, and lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and two children. He was qualified as a lawyer, but hasn’t practiced law. He started his study of literature and earned a Ph.D. in Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He published poetry and prose books, among them the documentary book Without a Single Case of Death (2007) which was translated into English. His most recent book, Kin (2009) is being translated into French and Italian.

- Dalya Bilu is a well-known translator of Hebrew literature – in fact she is one of Israel’s finest. The books she has translated are almost too many too enumerate – Zeruya Shalev, A.B.Yehoshua, Yaakov Shabtai, Aharon Appelfeld, David Vogel, Joshua Sobol, Yoram Kaniuk, Orly Castel-Bloom, Edna Mazya, Yehudit Hendel, Yehoshua Kenaz, Alona Kimhi, Judith Katzir, Batia Gur and more. She has been awarded a number of prizes, including The Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, the Times Literary Supplement Prize and the Jewish Book Council Award for Hebrew-English Translation. She lives in Jerusalem.