Supermarket in Little Baghdad

Buildings have lives of their own. I was called to inspect an large supermarket in Ramat Gan peopled by Iraqi refugees of the fifties (known as Little Baghdad) with chronic unsolvable plumbing problems - odors and humidity. It is a non-kosher grocery store full of tempting Russian vodkas and heyzer sousages, but manfully I took the treifl assignment. It is a sixty years old building, in a very bad condition. The asbest cement and cast iron pipes have been repaired and modified - it is a dark humid jungle inside, with hanging fungi and slimy reptiles. After walking up and down the fourteen floors and opening all false roofs with the building manager (pic, an athlete in his seventies), looking down from the 14th floor I saw a small hidden patio at third floor. It has been raining and it appeared flooded: somehow, through the unseen kishkes of the building the water emerged in the supermarket. The man said that the office floor is owned by a crime family and he will not approach the place. Courageously I passed alone through successive security doors and cameras, and met a tiny old Iraqi Jew with transparent pergament skin and a ridiculous coal-black hairpiece, with a miniature X legged mummified wife. The man was extremely polite, took the keys and led me to the hidden patio, aknowledged the problem and promised to waterproof it. No threat to my life was aired. One of the questions in Murray's new class quiz asks if one ever worked a day and arrived home dog-tired with an aching body. I did. But being a prole has its rewards: I sent a bill for 400 dollars.