Ella Rothschild has been living in Tel Aviv for the past eleven years. Her first apartment was a studio, thirty square meters in Neve Tzedek, with parquet floors and large windows. In her excitement she bought a new refrigerator (1000 shekels), that she later sold, at a 30% discount to her landlord.

After two years in that small apartment, Ella moved to an apartment with two roommates at the corner of Yehuda Hayamit-Jerusalem Boulevard in Jaffa, a peculiar choice that didn’t become any clearer as years passed. Ella could hear every bus that passed under her window, and the occasional accidents in the intersection, but just below the house there was a great bakery that had the best chocolate pastry Ella had ever eaten.

Two years later she moved to a quieter apartment in Lilienblum Street which she shared with one of the roommates from Yehuda Hayamit. It was a beautiful apartment with a terrible wet kitchen wall and thin plaster dividing walls through which you can hear everything. After she found love and a dead cat at the entrance, Ella began searching for a new apartment.

After nine months of an exhaustive search she found a beautiful apartment in Neve Tzedek, where she lived happily for three whole years – until her landlords informed her that the apartment was sold for several million shekels. Ella was forced to look for a new apartment again.

From Neve Tzedek she moved to Sderot Yehudit, the east side of town. The transition was difficult and the new apartment was full of problems. The new landlord was needy and intense. It took Ella three years to make that apartment a lovely place to come back to after a day’s work, and after all the effort she put in this apartment she had to leave it because it, too, was sold at a disproportionate price.

Today Ella is subletting an apartment uptown. The price includes taxes, electricity and internet. There is no washing machine a serious downgrade in quality of life -, but she lives right next to the beach. Occasionally she goes for an early morning dip and gets bites all over her legs from the fish who make their home there.

In 12 postdated checks Ella works with 20 Maslool dancers’ and with her former roommate from Lilienblum and Yehuda Hayamit.