What is it about analyzing Generation Y that everyone loves so much (I’m talking to you, too, Gen Y bloggers) ?

Yet another article has been making the rounds, examining why we are all special and precious and therefore don’t have to work or take on any adult responsibilities.  As you can probably guess, these kinds of treatsies make the immigrant kid in me super-mad.

Another Maslow reference, another link to a study that conveniently proves what the author is trying to say and, viola! 20-somethings are lazy, precocious, and super-optimistic, which is why we have to handle them (us) with kid gloves as they go through emerging adulthood.

I hate this term, emerging adulthood.   To me, what it means is that you are rich and American and mommy and daddy are still paying bills for you, as the article points out:

While the complaints of these young people are heartfelt, they are also the complaints of the privileged. Julie, a 23-year-old New Yorker and contributor to “20 Something Manifesto,” is apparently aware of this. She was coddled her whole life, treated to French horn lessons and summer camp, told she could do anything. “It is a double-edged sword,” she writes, “because on the one hand I am so blessed with my experiences and endless options, but on the other hand, I still feel like a child. I feel like my job isn’t real because I am not where my parents were at my age. Walking home, in the shoes my father bought me, I still feel I have yet to grow up.”

God forbid a child is told she could do anything and have French horn lessons, too.  I hope she brings this up with her psychologist at her weekly sessions, paid for by Helicopter Mom and Dad.

Who doesn’t have angst, though, about that “transitional period in their lives”?  People who don’t have time to think about why French horn lessons are ruining their soul:

EVEN ARNETT ADMITS that not every young person goes through a period of “emerging adulthood.” It’s rare in the developing world, he says, where people have to grow up fast, and it’s often skipped in the industrialized world by the people who marry early, by teenage mothers forced to grow up, by young men or women who go straight from high school to whatever job is available without a chance to dabble until they find the perfect fit. Indeed, the majority of humankind would seem to not go through it at all. The fact that emerging adulthood is not universal is one of the strongest arguments against Arnett’s claim that it is a new developmental stage. If emerging adulthood is so important, why is it even possible to skip it?

Is it really a new developmental stage?  Or is it just the fact that EVERY human being goes through doubt and feelings of regressing to childhood when they are faced with big life changes but that people who are real adults deal with them with grace and humor and not by majoring in Photography and then living at home for the next ten years.

I honestly cannot stand any more of these articles that massage our collective generation’s ego.

And then. And THEN.  There is a photo gallery of what it’s like to be 20-something in the 2010s.  Let me give you the Cliffnotes if you don’t feel like looking at 20 self-indulgent pictures of hipsters in Brooklyn:

“I am SO angsty about my future that I will now go to a coffeehouse and write about it on my MacBook.
Why, oh, why God, did I have to be born  middle-class and college-educated in America?
This is, like, the worst thing you could have done to me!”

Almost every day that I walk to the Metro, I see this guy:

And he always is in such a hurry to get to work, like he is power walking instead of just walking to the Metro at 8:00 am.   And I can never figure out if he’s genuinely that enthusiastic about his work, or if he’s rushing because he’s caught up in the frenetic worry of his job.

On the one hand, I think it’s exciting to love your job so much.  On the other, if he is of the latter variety, it’s really sad.  I hope that when I’m his age, I’m more excited about my family than my job.  While my career is definitely a priority for me and something that is important to my sanity and well-being, it will never be something for which I sacrifice my leisure and family time.

For example, while I enjoy working hard and being challenged,  I would never want a job that had me traveling 100% of the time, or one where I had to work overtime 50 weeks of the year, because by the time I’m his age and look back at my life, I don’t want a world of Mondays, e-mails, and conference meetings to be what I take out of it.  I want it to be these and these and these and these and these things.

Is there a balance, especially for women?  Yes, but it is almost as much work as the work itself.

This is Horace. He’s the household’s money manager.

“I can’t believe you bought that,” Mr. B said in dismay, fresh on his new minimalist attitude after our last move.

“Oh, he will save us lots of change that’s otherwise laying around the house” , I said.

“You just bought him because he’s cute,” Mr. B snarked.

Yes. “No,” I demurred.

But now he sits on Mr. B’s desk as his “coding buddy”.

So, ha.

(Full disclaimer: Thank you to Other Press for sending me a copy of the book.)

I  always judge books by their covers.  I have no remorse over this, and it’s lead me to great selections.  Based on simply cover alone, I surmised that The Debba is a spy thriller, much like The Moscow Rules, which would result in someone lying facedown in an unmarked sewer in Cairo.

So, for the next release, I recommend  a cover change that will appeal more to the author’s intended demographic:

Now there is something that draws my eye immediately.

Fortunately,   the book turned out to be a real page turner and an incredible philosophical exercise in understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  I loved it, and I think it’s an important read for anyone interested in engaging on debate about hamatzav.

First things first:  If you have a set stance on Israel/Palestine that you will never change your mind on, you will hate this book.  It will drive you crazy because it refuses to take sides and offer simple black-white messages and consists of multiple twists and turns.  In general, I think there’s a lot to take away and to discuss long after you finish reading it.

The book starts,in 1977, with a phone call to David Starkman, ex-Israeli living with his Polish girlfriend in Canada, having renounced his Israeli citizenship,  while having nightmares dating back to his army service.  His father, who he has not talked to in seven years,  has been murdered in Tel Aviv.  Despite his extreme discomfort with going back to Israel, he books a ticket on the next flight and is soon in the country he hasn’t been to in almost a decade to figure out what happened to his father.

Tel Aviv Purim Parade, 1940s.

The descriptions of Israel are spot-on without being cloying and obvious and, I think, meant to make the reader homesick.  When David first gets off the plane late at night, he describes, “In a flash, the nocturnal smells converged on me like starved furies.  Orange blossoms; the salty smell of the sea; the dust; the hot tarmac.  I steeled myself and walked on. The hot wind ruffled my hair.”

When he lands, he stays with his army friend, Ehud and his girlfriend, Ruti, with whom David shares a past history (the prehistory, as the book often describes).  “An ancient Mercedes cab, its four doors dented, took me to Ibn Gvirol Street. The driver, a muscular man with a close-cropped head, assiduously avoidd looking at me.  I paid him…and got off at the corner of Eliyahu Street. Darkness enveloped everything, thick and fragrant like breath. The green glow of the streetlamps seeped through the tzaftzafa trees; white bedsheets, flapping slowly like ghosts, hung on clotheslines. A gray cat slunk into a yard. Nothing seemed to have changed since I left.”

It’s obvious that David loves the country of Israel while at the same time hating the army top-secret missions he was implicated in that caused him to leave.  Tel Aviv is described perfectly: Mediterranean, worn, dusty, hot, and, yet, completely loveable. The city is as much a character in the book as any of the others Mandelman creates- Amzaleg, the Sephardic police detective who helps David, David’s uncle Mordechai, and the ever-growing gangs of Shin Bet, internal security services.

As David begins to try to understand who killed his father, the police become less friendly and tell him not to get involved, to go back to Canada.  This makes him want to press further, and he discovers that his father’s death is possibly related to a play he co-wrote with Rubin Paltiel, called The Debba, which sparked Israeli-Arab riots the first and only time it was staged in the 1940s in Haifa due to its controversial content regarding Israeli-Arab relations.  His father’s will stipulates that the play must be put on again in order for David to receive the money, and somehow, everyone around him discourages it.  The story revolves around the mystery of the play and David’s role in it, as well as his father’s role in the 1948 War for Independence and in killing an Arab terrorist, Abu Jalood,  and unravels quite satisfactorily at the end.

Tel Aviv, 1948

I loved this book for many reasons, even though I hate mystery novels, stuff with murder in it, and books that try to wrap up Israel in a couple hundred pages.   First is that the ending is a complete surprise and really left me thinking about the book for several days afterwards. Second is that it gives an inside look at Israel in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the days of the Israeli War of Independence, and it really leads you to believe that nothing is solid in history.

When I first learned Israeli history, I learned that all of the first pioneers to Israel were brave and strong, building the Jewish homeland, and there was no room for reinterpretation.  This is certainly not the case: the pioneers were not automatons and had human emotions,  some of which led to hard decisions, and this kind of behavior is shown clearly in the book.

I also loved this book because it really made me feel like I was in Israel during that time period.  The author’s clever use of inserting Hebrew and Arabic phrases throughout the text to get just enough effect and not oversaturate with stereotype, as well as the descriptions of the fresh cucumbers and sitting at Cafe Kassit really opened up Israel of the 1970s for me.

It’s true that, without at least a bit of knowledge about Israeli history, you could get lost in some of the terminology and references.  But discovering is always half the fun.

You can buy it here.

This year, as last year and at least three years before that, I’m fasting for Tisha B’Av because I consider it more of a national Jewish holiday than a religious fast like Yom Kipur, and I think it’s a shame that more secular Jews don’t participate in a day completely devoted to feeling depressed about the state of our people.  (When I tried guilting Mr. B into fasting this year, he said he would “try to eat less.”)

IThe more I go along, the more I realize just how orthoprax I am: believing in the necessity of Jewish rituals to build community, without necessarily believing in the existence of a God that would enjoy my brain aneurism.

As usual, I’m skipping all the religious traditions that go with Tisha B’Av and traditional Jewish mourning rituals, such as listening to Eicha, sitting on low stools, and abstaining from work, but I am fasting (or at least trying to until I pass out head-first in a bowl of shrimp primavera,) which leads me to this list I made last year of foods I was craving at 11 am that day:

• Auntie Anne’s pretzels covered with chocolate soft serve
• Penne with tomato vodka sauce and bacon salt (why did I write this? I don’t even like bacon)
• Mango-strawberry smoothie with Oreos
• Cedar-plank salmon with a side of chocolate chips
• Falafel with a filling of olives and French fries
• Grilled cheese panini with kale chips
• Chicken shashlik the way my dad makes it

I’m off to eat all of those things before I fast. Tzom kal! And beteavon to me.