We got a puppy last week. He’s probably the cutest little thing ever, but then I’m biased. Monty, as we’ve named him, kind of fell into our laps (not hard when you’re talking about a Maltese, tiny even when it’s fully grown). We received an SMS from a friend on Wednesday morning telling us he was available and were we interested. By Wednesday night, he was ours.
Monty (it’s variation of Malt-y for Maltese, get it?) is his very own melting pot of Israeli society. His mother is Israeli, his father an Italian immigrant, he was born in the home of South African Jews living in Jerusalem and, before we received him, he stayed for a short time with an American family living in a settlement.
That’s not the only “political” part of our newfound puppydom. When we received Monty, his owner gave us a pile of newspapers to potty train him on. “Make sure you buy only Haaretz, he said, indicating his disapproval of Israel’s most left-wing newspaper. But he must have goofed because when we got home, the paper we’d received was Makor Rishon, one of Israel’s most right wing rags.
When Monty had gone through all the newspapers we’d taken home, we found a pile of papers next to our recycling bin with a mix of more mainstream tabloids – Yediot Achronot, Maariv and Israel HaYom. It seems that our puppy will be an equal opportunity offender after all.