Mallory's Camera

Shtisel is The Sopranos except the background milieu is not America’s Mafia but Jerusalem’s ultra-ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Meaning that it’s a long story arc that unspools over many episodes although each episode is also a standalone piece with its own nuances, motifs and symbolic vocabulary. If you watch closely, the end of each episode is the beginning of the episode transformed! My favorite kind of narrative! Inevitable latency, one might call it.

The overall story arc is neither sensational nor heroic, being merely an account of the ups and downs in the lives of one particular family. Their world is very tightly observed: every drink of water downed with a blessing; every trip into an interior marked by a kiss to the mezuzah. In such an abundance of observance, spiritual life actually becomes quite mundane—in both the literal and pejorative senses of that word.

The acting is superb.

The patriarch of the family, Shulem, is a completely dysfunctional father, husband, teacher and human being, and yet the actor who plays him is so likeable—in something of the same way that James Gandolfino was likeable—that the viewer is seduced into complicity.

The other main protagonist is Shulem’s son, Akiva—played by the almost supernaturally good-looking Israeli actor Michael Aloni—who alone out of the Shtisel family seems to be blessed or cursed with the ability to feel emotion outside the rigid structure imposed by ultra-Orthodox proscriptions. Akiva’s freer—not free!—spirit provides much of the conflict that’s essential to all good narrative: He’s an artist constantly pressured to stop painting and to stop falling in love with inappropriate women.

The little actress who played the lead in Unorthodox makes an appearance, too, as Ruchami, Shulem’s rebellious teenaged granddaughter. Rucham reads forbidden books! One of my favorite scenes is Rucham reading Hannah Karenina to her younger brothers, bowdlerizing ad lib as she gets to the smutty parts where Vronsky kisses Anna’s hand.

Anyway, I could ramble on for pages and pages and pages about how very brilliant this show is, and then all 4.3 of my readers would grow very bored.

Suffice it to say, I highly recommend it, and it’s on Netflix in Hebrew with English subtitles.

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Other than that? It was very, very hot yesterday: In the four hours between the start and finish of tromping and gardening chores, the thermometer rose from the mid 70s to 95°, and I honestly thought I might pass out by the time I got home.

As I was climbing the hill to the old rose garden, this vast flock of geese and half-grown goslings espied me and began rushing me.

What the hell? I thought. Do they want to attack me?

I was very curious about this behavior, so I stood my ground.

They got up close but they did not attack! Instead, they stopped about five feet away and began this bizarre kind of… dance:



I kinda love that weird up-and-down thing geese do with their necks! I like to imagine Brachiosauruses doing the exact same thing 160 million years ago.