5/3/00

House for sale, as good as old

    Upstairs at 5 Ethiopia Street, you do not mention the word "renovations." Jacob Pins will give you a dirty look, march you to a back window to show you what a "barbarian" has done -- gutting a fine old Jerusalem building in the name of gentrification.
    He turns away from the window, harrumphs in contempt, and beholds his own living room, preserved exactly as it was 100 years ago -- from the handmade windows to the original door handles. Nothing, not even the color scheme, has ever been altered.
    I say "living room," but you really can't picture it as such. Everyone who walks in for the first time is bugeyed with awe: in cubic space, it's about as big as eight standard Israeli living rooms.
    And that's not mentioning the rest of the 250 square meter home.
    One day recently, Pins took a deep breath and made up his mind: Sell. He's getting on in years, he explains, he has no children, and he'd like to enjoy the time he has left.
    Impertinently curious, I instantly ask: how much?  
    Our mutual friend, his real-estate agent Werner Loval, laughs. Proper yekkes both, they cringe at such gauche insolence, but forgive my snoopiness as defensible journalism. (I live off that excuse.)
    "At least a million and a half," Loval says casually.
    The contents are worth triple that.
    The three of us are sitting in a corner of this vast realm, chatting about the three fascinating subjects in our midst: Jacob Pins, his home, and everything in it.
    "Let me give you some background: Ya'acov Pins is a yekke," Loval says with a demure smile. As it turns out, that is not irrelevant.
    Yipes, and I was 10 minutes late! They accept my apology good-humoredly. Apparently, the punctilious karma of Pins and his home has such an effect: when schoolchildren are brought to view the home, they behave.
    Mindful of yekke etiquette, Loval speaks about the host, and the host speaks about the rest.
    Pins, 83, is a venerable artist, collector, and author; for 30 years he was a Bezalel art teacher. His work was exhibited 17 times -- by the time I was born. By now, a partial listing numbers 127 exhibits.
    He immigrated from Germany in 1936, joined short-lived Kibbutz Shibolet, won the Jerusalem Prize in 1962, and the following year bought a home.
    "It cost me $30,000, which was a lot of money back then."
    His figurative oil paintings and startlingly expressive woodcuts share this space with his passion, Japanese art.
    Having already acknowledged myself a total ignoramus, I admire a large, obviously ancient statue right in the middle of the room. "Yes, it's lovely," Pins agrees, then chuckles: "It's a fake."
    I couldn't have guessed what was genuine and what wasn't, so Pins, ever so forgiving and without a trace of snobbery, gives me a guided tour of the displays. "Bring a sandwich," he jokes, as we begin the trek.
    Masks, busts and statues, pillar prints and paintings, ranging from very old to very old. Even the fakes are antiques. An exquisite obi reaches almost from floor to ceiling, which is saying something: the ceilings are at least five meters high.
    One must gaze upward here, because on the ceiling itself is a work of art, a colorful circular Arab adornment.
    That, like the Italian marble floors, is not fake, or imitation, or later embellishments. The broad door frames that were freshly painted green when the house was built, is still just as green. The quaintly mottled window panes, the woodwork and masonry, are unadulterated -- precisely as Nashashibi commissioned the home in 1895. 
     Nashashibi, scion of a prominent Jerusalem Arab family, commissioned the entire row of buildings on this side of angular, meandering Ethiopia Street, and the buildings behind them. The surroundings are steeped in picturesque Yerushalmi history -- as is No. 5 itself.
    Pins narrates the lineage of his home as if it were the Hope Diamond. Each resident has his story, and Pins knows them all. Good thing, too, because, grinning broadly, he recalls the time a Nashashibi ancestor -- "from a poor branch of the family" -- came to visit the home.
    "He told me his grandfather had lived here," as if to hint at some claim of heritage legitimacy, "but I knew this was not true. he built it to rent out; no Nashashibi ever lived here."
    Nashashibi lost the property when he ended up on the wrong side of the border in 1948.
    "The first tenant was the consul of the Austrian Empire, he stayed until 1902. After that, in came Prof. Dalman, representative of the German Protestant Church, until 1914, the outbreak of World War One. In came the Spanish consul, sent here by King Olphonse XIII in order to protect the Sephardic Jews from the Turks. In 1920 he went back to Spain and the first Jewish tenant moved in, Mrs. Tzeitling. She was a singer, but couldn't make a living from it, so she opened a boarding house here. The guests also had to suffer her singing, that's what Mrs. Feigenbaum (a neighbor) told me.
    "She stayed until 1928, when Rehavia was built, and she moved there.  The Davis family stayed here until '34, and then in came Dr. Lazarus, a physician from Nuremburg who passed away after two years, then in came his friend, Dr. Theodore Engel,