Joel Schalit

London Calling

On July 1st, I stepped down from my editorial position at Allvoices. With two months to pack up our home and move to the United Kingdom, I couldn’t have had a better reason to punch out. I’ll be spending the next eight weeks at home writing and editing a couple of terrific books while we get everything ready. To make the transition back to book editing, after being immersed in the world of blogs and online periodicals is interesting to note, (as a format exercise), given the direction that this kind of work now moves.

Leaving my office in San Francisco’s financial district (pictured above) for the very last time, I couldn’t resist capturing the signage of the cylinder shaped newsstand that sits at the building’s front entrance. Housing not only my ex-employer, but also a Reuters office, and the headquarters of the local Jewish weekly, The J, my former firm’s new abode hosts an above average number of news publishers for such a small, albeit significant, American city.

Just before I left, however, I received a call from the very first periodical I ever worked for, in between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, in 1982. Serving as a summer intern for the legendary Mother Jones (whose building, pictured above, is three blocks west of my former office) has earned me a semi-annual email or phone call from what sounds like another MoJo intern, keeping tabs on alumni. “You’re a writer, right?” asked the young man who called me. “Yes,” I told him. “And an editor, too.”

Local Levantine

1 of 4 photographs of our neighborhood, featured in a new photo essay of mine published today in Zeek. Focusing on the imbrication of the Middle Eastern in San Francisco life, the article is a brief portrait of an increasingly multicultural city, bisected by two regional conflicts, and immigrants living peacefully together, side by side.

It’s Getting Closer

Sometimes a well-placed sign says everything. A block east of Bayshore, at the foot of Bernal Heights. San Francisco, May 2008.

Carniceria Halal

The biggest surprise of living in San Francisco this past decade has been the number of excellent Arab restaurants that have opened in the area. Starting out with the first Truly Mediterranean falafel parlor on 16th and Valencia, to the Old Jerusalem on Mission and 26th, my greater neighborhood now boasts some of the best Middle Eastern food in the United States. As good as anything I’ve had in Brooklyn or LA.

So, it was with great pleasure that I discovered the other great local Arab restaurant: San Bruno’s Mideast Market, on El Camino Real. Run by a guy from Bethlehem, together with an exhaustively stocked store carrying everything from cans of Ahmad Ceylon tea and fresh pita, to Marcel Khalife CDs and Elite Turkish coffee, once a week, my entire office will head over at lunch and imbibe the best falafel I’ve ever had in the US.

Call it a sign of feeling old. Or perhaps surprise that, after feeling so dislocated for so many years, those aspects of Middle Eastern life that I miss the absolute most would somehow find me here, in the middle of a war. Speaking in Hebrew with the owner as I paid for my food, giggling, my coworkers stood outside the entrance, marveling at the fact that the awning above included the Spanish word for “butcher.”

Granted, if you want something like shakshouka, you still have to drive down to Los Angeles to get it. But, if what you want are the basics – falafel, hummus, shashlik, baklava and, as this establishment serves up, ezme (along with a few other curiously Turkish side dishes) – you can’t find any better than what local places like this make available. There’s so many surpluses to it all, in context, it feels positively utopian.

Tombstone Horizon

Now closed, San Bruno’s Golden Gate National Cemetery lives on 161 acres of land. Boasting 138, 352 interments, this enormous military graveyard sits at the northernmost end of Silicon Valley.

I pass by this spot every day on my way home from work. Yesterday, I got out of the car to take this picture. Looking north towards San Francisco, the city was invisible. All I could see were tombstones.

No Need For Translation

Our neighborhood Christian resource center. In Spanish, "Llamada Final" means "Final Call."

A block south, local proponents of secularism let their their feelings about religion be known.

Rootless Occidentalism

C’mon Fairuz, where was this album really recorded? The fine print on the upper right says Lebanon, but the LP’s title indicates that it might also have been made in the US. The ambiguity of the record’s ideal location, as somewhere in between America and the Middle East, suits this 1971 release extremely well. How contemporary, especially considering the fact that the record is nearly fourty years old.

Street Academy

Right across the street from the San Francisco supermarket where I confirmed the non-identity of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader stands a liquor store. Until recently, it’s owner was a Palestinian, and the clerks who worked there were either from southern Lebanon or the West Bank.

The last time I had talked to the Lebanese clerk was in July 2006, at the beginning of the war. He had told me that he was very concerned about his family, who still lived in the south, and had just had their electricity and water cut off during the first days of the fighting.

Two weeks ago, I found him standing in front of the store. He recognized me, and we shook hands. "Did your family make it through?" I asked. "Yes," he replied. "Barely. Your people bombed the hell out of their village," he added, as a young couple walked by us speaking to each other in Hebrew.

I told him about the turn I took last summer in Ghajar, and asked if he could help me identify the puzzling green flag of the militiamen I’d run into there." Oh, they were Amal," he said, referring to the Lebanese Shi’ite guerrilla organization that preceded Hezbollah.

Shit You Hear at Groceries

This is our local grocery store. We try not to shop there too often because it’s expensive, and offers a fairly unimaginative selection of coffees. But, being four blocks away, it still has it’s value. Such as when, fact-checking an article about the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade cell in Nablus last summer for a magazine, I ran into a friend who had just spent a month working with an NGO in the West Bank city.

"The author identifies the head of the local ‘Brigade crew," I told Rebecca when I saw her, dropping the name given to the commander. "You must have run into those people with some frequency when you were there. Does it ring a bell?" I asked. Laughing, she gently replied, "No, of course not. That’s definitely not the guy’s name, and besides, I couldn’t pin a pseudonym on him if I tried."

Choose Your Jerusalem

Sometimes, a ten minute walk from home can lead to more pleasant associations.