By Sharon Finegold, Special to JTNews
Asia: my maiden name. There it was, March 2001, on a sidewalk sign adjacent to my hotel in Jerusalem. Asia: usually found as a prefix to “laundry,” bean sprouts, or “imports.” But here in Jerusalem it invited me into “Asia Gallery: the Private Collection of Modern Design/Ancient Material.” Inside the glass-fronted shop sat a woman with gray, green and blue eyes, reddish blonde hair, a round face with sketched-on eyebrows and a smile of welcome so soft it almost touched your face to receive you. This was Asia (pronounced Ah-siya) — metal chemist, jeweler, incorporator of antiquities, artist. She invented herself, every thing, every moment she encountered, whether ancient or modern.
Asia had just spent time in Jerusalem with Dale Chihuly when he’d installed his exhibit at the David Citadel Museum. She was very much interested in his work in glass and in the Pilchuck center. She had studied architecture and art in Italy, but she had felt pulled back to Israel by a magnetic tug too strong to deny.
The second intifada had just begun when she opened her new little gallery. Business was at a standstill. She sat poised exquisitely — like a gem in a fine setting — in her full and quiet shop, occasionally visited by an Israeli coming to make a purchase. No tourists came. There simply weren’t any.
All around her in this tiny shop were her creations, from fragments of glass blown at the time of the Roman Empire, crystals found on hikes, gold and silver from antique Israeli jewelry. The shapes were modern and classic, some followed the shapes of their history — such as the full bottom of an ancient perfume bottle — some were pomegranates, some moonstones with Moroccan gold chains, some were modern silver and gold abstract. She explained everything and sought my ideas and reactions, partly to try to sell it to me and partly to open to me the landscape of her imagination, which she explores in her silent studio in Gilo in the earliest morning or late evening hours of solitude.
Not being one for jewelry, I didn’t buy anything that time. I’d mostly wanted to see who had my name on a sign on a Jerusalem sidewalk. So mostly we just talked, this American tourist lady and this Israeli artist.
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Gilo. What’s it like trying to create art in a studio under direct fire from the Palestinian Authority, a block away from the apartments where bullets come through the windows, doors and walls? The rumbling of tanks underneath your bedroom and studio, helicopters hovering above, over and between you and the view across the valley of the monastery where you used to buy olive oil from hospitable gentle monks?
Asia has been busy there, working with the traumatized children of Gilo in her special way — an art workshop where they create expressions of their dreams of safety and peace. Asia, with no income to speak of, had taken what art supplies she could gather in her studio and was working with the children of Gilo as a volunteer. These children had experienced bullets flying across their bedrooms, had moved about the floors of their apartments on their bellies, had struggled to do homework using flashlights while tanks and helicopters defended their neighborhood. These were children whose parents were too shattered from terror or injury to deal with their children’s psychic injuries successfully. They would come to Asia’s workshop to draw and make collages and talk out their fears — fears they couldn’t share with their parents. Asia felt she was at least doing something to help these children.
I visited Asia in 2002, then again in 2003. This time, I allowed myself to fall in love with some of her jewelry. I bought a few pieces. Every time I wear them, I receive interested and admiring comments. I have ordered duplicate pieces for friends in Seattle and California who were drawn to Asia’s work as if by a trans-Atlantic spell of magic. This time, Asia told me of the terror the children have experienced when buses have exploded on the streets of Gilo.
“Like a caravan of dromedaries in the dawn,” Asia said, the Gilo teenagers who travel to other Jerusalem neighborhoods to their specialized high schools were afraid to go by bus. They walked with their packs on their backs, trudging many miles to school in the cold early light. “You know how hard it is for teenagers to wake up early in winter,” she said.
After about a month, however, the caravans decreased and then ceased as the youngsters absorbed the trauma and dread, and got back on the bus. Asia described seeing all of this while making the jewelry to display in the quiet shop near the empty hotels.
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It was July 2003, and my husband and I had traveled to Israel on a Lawyers’ Mission to learn about the infrastructure of terror, and how lawyers can sue on behalf of victims of terror. Asia’s shop had been closed more often than usual. We’d feared maybe she couldn’t pay her rent. But we called her and arranged a time to meet at the shop. She had started to sew her own creative dresses in marvelous colors and textures, all within the bounds of modesty she observes as a modern religious woman.
She invited us to visit Gilo with her in her little car, which is clean as a whistle because she’s trying to sell it. She showed us where she lives and works. Then, around the bend of the block, appeared the vacant ghost of the once-beautiful and prosperous Arab-Christian village of Gilo, now occupied by the P.A. forces, its inhabitants having been forced to flee by the P.A’s occupying forces. With a clear feeling of failure, she drove us along the cement barrier wall, erected to shield the apartment homes from attack. Its length was painted by different artists with the’ picture’ of the view that was obstructed — all with the message in pictures or words “No walls, no war, no hate” staring back at the citizens of Gilo as their mantra and prayer.
Asia and her young “artists” painted a part of the wall: colorful, prayerful, adamant that the wall should soon be removed and they would live in friendship and peace with Arab children from Beit Jalla.
Asia’s “kids” had moved back into their newly bullet-proofed apartments that week. New safety materials had replaced the mattresses and sandbags that had covered the windows, doors and walls. Asia organized her kids in brigades of painters to decorate over the bullet holes in each other’s bedroom walls, to allow them to let go of the memories of bullets inside their homes and family’s lives.
Project completed, Asia returned her shop. She exuded the same wonder and beauty and mystery, and the same excitement to see us. She was open for business all day and promised to complete a few pieces for my friends in Seattle before we left for the airport in two days.
Thank you, Asia, for sharing a name I now use so infrequently, and for making it newly alive to me with the jewelry you create and the beauty of healing you bring to so many lives. May we all have the peace and security to build the future together, here and there, and to do it with the kind of authenticity, love and integrity you have brought to your life’s work.