Budrus: A Small Israeli Film with an Enormous Message

Last night I went to a Manhattan screening of an Israeli/Palestinian film called Budrus. I dragged my husband along with me even though he usually finds such ‘smoleneem’ films one-sided. But he is open-minded and, in the interest of placating his more left-wing wife, came with me. Budrus, produced and released by JustVision in 2010, has been celebrated internationally (Panorama Audience Award, Second Prize, at the Berlin International Film Festival, 2010, Special Jury Mention, Tribeca Film Festival, 2010, and others), but is only now reaching a few US screens. Go see it.



The film itself was remarkable for reasons I’ll talk about below, but the screening itself was also well done. Before and after, there were small receptions of wine and cheese, and two of the three producers, Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha, discussed the making of the film and took questions from the 100 or so spectators. In between, a three-person ensemble including a vocalist (Palestinian), keyboard player (Israeli), and trumpet player (American) serenaded the audience.

Budrus, to be brief, is a documentary film about a Palestinian community organizer, Ayed Morrar, who unites local Fatah and Hamas members along with Israeli supporters in an unarmed movement to save his village of Budrus from destruction by Israel’s Separation Barrier. Budrus, for those of you not familiar with Israeli geography, lies in the northern West Bank just east of the green line. Budrus’s 1500 villagers support themselves through agriculture, largely the cultivation of olive trees.

Israel’s separation fence has long been a point of controversy. I’ll go on record as saying I find its existence largely positive. Since its erection, suicide bombs in Israel have largely stopped (though there are dozens of attempts caught at the border every year). As a stepmother of four with lots of friends and family in Israel, I relish the protection. With that said, Israel has no business putting the fence one millimeter beyond the 1967 green line. Unfortunately, the fence often veers into what is by all international and moral reckoning Palestinian territory.

In the case of Budrus, the planned separation fence was going to uproot acres of Palestinian olive groves, divide the village cemetery, and would have passed meters from their only school. You understand the villagers’ anger and anxiety.

To protest the fence, Budrus’ residents, led by Morrar, unite in nonviolent protest. Over months of protest, residents together with international witnesses and participants put themselves between bulldozers, Israeli border police, and what they consider their blood, their olive trees. While the two sides exchanged tear gas, rubber bullets, a rain of rocks, remarkably no one was killed though apparently tens were seriously injured. In the end, and I am skipping past all that is interesting about the film, Israel relocated the fence closer to the green line and away from Budrus.

What was significant was the Budrus protests marked an embrace of nonviolence as a means to change facts on the ground. Of course, Palesinians consider the First Intifada nonviolent (highlighting the difficulty defining nonviolence), but why digress? Since Budrus, similar strategies are being employed in other West Bank villages.

Also significant was the importance of women to the Budrus campaign. The film spends a lot of time with Morrar’s daughter, who is now studying medicine in Bosnia, and she talks of how village women forced the men to allow them at the front of the protest marches. Not only did this hinder Israel’s ability to respond, but also, I hope, underscored the importance of female voices in the Arab world (a world that largely oppresses women). In addition, the Budrus protests required cooperation between Fatah and Hamas, the two ideologically opposed factions of Palestinian Arabs. Morrar, who is a member of Fatah and who spent intermittent years in Israeli jails (though the reason for his incarceration is never explained), stated that he disagreed philosophically with Hamas but pragmatism required cooperation. For this, the two sides came together. Moreover, both camps welcomed and embraced the Israeli activists who also joined their fight.

Which brings me to a third remarkable aspect of the film--the importance of the Israeli activist movement. Tens of Israeli activists spent months supporting and protesting alongside the Budrus residents, even when arrested and in the face of real violence by the Israeli border police. Many of the Budrus residents went on record stating their surprise and gratification that there were Israelis who not only rhetorically opposed the occupation but who were wiling to demonstrate their commitment with their presence. I can’t imagine a better means of building trust and belief between the two sides.

While the film downplayed the injuries some of the residents received and didn’t explore the background and mindset of the Palestinian leaders, it was an evenhanded, even uplifting film. Budrus demonstrated that nonviolence as a consistent means of protest can have effect.

I applaud JustVision for producing the film.

But there is more work to be done and the film raises another question. My husband, who is a native Israeli and who found the film overall positive put it best. His question at the end, “Yes, it’s hopeful to demonstrate that cooperation is possible and that not all Israelis are bad. But for peace, we also need Arab Israelis and Palestinians protesting and standing alongside Jews when Hamas, Fatah, when people representing them shoot rockets, suicide bomb Israeli civilians. When that happens, there might be a chance for real peace.”

The Opposite of Home

I have lived in Israel now for over six years. Six years. I’ve never lived in one place for six years. I’ve never lived in any other place more than two. Granted, I spent one year of the six in New York. I spent another two years moving back and forth between Vermont and Israel, studying. When my mother was ill, I spent nine months back and forth between Atlanta and Israel. We moved twice within Israel. Last year, I bought the condo in New York and have been spending 50% of my time in the US. Still, I have called Israel home for six years. Home?

I am always dreaming of new places to live. I don’t mean JUST daydreaming about more square footage, a more extensive view, a different neighborhood, though like many people I often find myself imagining how it would be to live in a different house, a different city. I mean literally dreaming, at night, about the next place. Sometimes the dreams wake me up they are so dramatic and thrilling. They are often the ones I remember in the morning or when I wake up in the middle of the night. Of course this doesn’t mean they are my only dreams, but they are often the most vivid and I suppose the last ones I have before waking. Last night, there was a long rambling house on a hillside. From the window and through the trees, I could see the ocean throwing itself against a rocky shore. I knew, in the dream, I’d lived in the building before, in a smaller apartment, with a man I used to love. This time though I was looking at it for myself, only myself. The building was old and rooms had been added over time. Rooms opened to larger rooms, to balconies, to terraces. Some rooms had regular shapes, rectangular. Other rooms were round or had oddly shaped corners. There were places to hide. I knew there would always be a surprise in this house.

Like most dream houses, I never move into this house, even in the dream.

But I recognize the impulse that Kay Ryan describes in the short poem below to be free of encumbrances, to never settle, to test what it is that is most necessary. I don’t think I’m alone.

That Will to Divest

Action creates
a taste
for itself.
Meaning: once
you've swept
the shelves
of spoons
and plates
you kept
for guests,
it gets harder
not to also
simplify the larder,
not to dismiss
rooms, not to
divest yourself
of all the chairs
but one, not
to test what
singleness can bear,
once you've begun.

Barbarians and Writers

Today, a ten-person boat attempted to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. On board, were Jews from Germany, the US, the UK, Israel who wanted to say, Israel’s policies are not ours. They carried books and school supplies for the Gazan children. Even though the Gazan leader would, if he could, murder every one of Israel’s fathers, every one of its mothers. Because of course the blockade does nothing but reinforce that hatred. Israel towed the small boat into Ashdod, one of its ports, without violence.

The barbarians are all of us.

I am reading Adina Hoffman’s biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali called “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness.” Hoffman is a Jew living in Jerusalem. Taha Muhammad Ali still lives in Israel. The book is successful in that it recounts one particular man's experiences, his tragedies, and his victories. It speaks of the restorative power of words and of poetry. While I think Hoffman's retelling of the poet's life is seen through a particular lens, the book is beautifully and compassionately written and speaks also, I think, to the possibility of healing. Both of them wish each other well.

If the barbarians are us, so perhaps are the saviors.

Here is a lovely poem by Taha Muhammad Ali.

       NEITHER MUSIC,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.
My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.

My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.

And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.

After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and on all that we’ve longed for,
on all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first thing
to putrefy
within us.

One Year of Sin

Just a little meditation on Yom Kippur with line breaks...

At dusk, the streets go silent of cars and buses, television
programming blinks out, lawnmowers and leaf blowers
are stowed as the highways empty out, only to slowly fill
with children on bicycles, skaters and skateboarders, their dogs
running alongside, while the parents sit on benches
and chat about the last vacation to Puket or Berlin.
No one is supposed to die on Yom Kippur.

A day earlier, walking our small brown and white dog
through Park Se-adya Shoshani, my husband and I watched
a religious Jew dressed in his black coat and hat wave
what looked from a distance a feathered boa
over the head of a small boy who could not have been more

than three. Closer, I realized the scarf was in fact
a live white chicken. The chicken absorbs the past year’s
bad deeds, my husband said, looking a bit embarrassed. Even
that of a three year old child. The white chickens
are then slaughtered, so that the year’s evil dies with them.

This morning, I sent photos of Ayalon Highway empty
except for pedestrians and bicyclists to a friend, who
can’t believe that no one, I mean no one, drives
the whole day of Yom Kippur. For one day, in Israel,
there is nowhere to drive. In a few hours, the Israelis will
get back in their cars, but right now, I think I hear
the Mediterranean, the sins of the past year cast off.

More on Telling Ourselves Stories

Speaking of history and how our stories change over time, I don't know why but this from Stephen Elliott's almost daily email resounded after yesterday's bout with Israeli confirmation bias...(FYI, unless you subscribe to his email via therumpus.net, you can't see Elliott's email; it's worth the time to subscribe; it's worth the time to hang out on the site (of which Elliott is the editor)):

In our round table yesterday I tried not to say things I've said before, but I failed. It's so easy to fall back on stories you've already told. I remember seeing Lawrence Wechsler and someone asked him about Ryzsard Kapuscinski and whether you were allowed to lie when writing history. Lawrence began to tell this story about Kapuscinski, how when he was writing about Iran he was actually writing about Poland, and Josh whispered to me that it was the same story Lawrence told years ago when Josh took his class at Columbia. And I thought, just answer the fucking question. And now I think you build up the stories, little connections. Occasionally you add a new one, like "I feel like I'm married to someone else's pornographic fantasy" or "honesty is bordered by self-knowledge." The new one goes on top of the pile and when you're asked a question you go to the bin and retrieve the best story you told last time. You tell yourself these stories too and occasionally something big happens, like you fall out of love, or a friend dies, and a whole bunch of these stories, which are really fragile as twigs, snap in half, and you have a lot more room, and you fill the space with more stories, more connections, start again.

I don't want to stretch this metaphor, this bin and these sticks, but I do think the point at which you can just reach into your past and give an answer you've already given no matter what the question is the point at which you've truly grown old.

I.e., no more 'something big,' no more new stories, perhaps just another way of going senile. The same story over and over.

Fiction vs Confirmation Bias

Oh, how we humans cling to our narratives, refusing to acknowledge that our stories about ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves, might be biased, even untrue. Psychologists call it confirmation bias. We ignore, deliberately and subconsciously, information that contradicts our hypotheses or preconceptions of the world.

Last night this was once again brought home to me in regards to the place I call home, Israel.

Where was I? An English language book club I belong too here in Tel Aviv comprised of women from the US, Canada, Australia, as well as native born Israelis and women from other countries who meet to read and discuss books in English. Last night we met to discuss Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani. In attendance were about 25 people, primarily women, all of them Jewish with the exception of myself, as well as the author himself.

Translated into English from Hebrew, The House of Rajani tells a late nineteenth century tale of the relationship between a Russian-Jewish immigrant to Israel and a mentally disturbed Arab boy. Hilu uses fictitious diary entries written by both as a means to describe their relationship and provide insight into the two characters. The book has been wildly controversial in Israel because the Jewish man (married) begins an affair with the boy’s lonely mother (also married), and, as irreverent as the affair in that day and age and between a Jew and an Arab, more so is his single minded obsession to purchase/steal the Arab family’s land through fair means or foul. Thus ensues the suspicious death of the boy’s father, the decline into madness of the mother, the assumption of the land by the Jew, his eviction of the land’s long-time Arab tenant farmers. Coloring the goings on are the boy’s prophetic visions, which describe a future war between Jews and Arabs, fiery modern warfare, death to thousands, and the loss of the land including his own to the colonizing Jews.

Interestingly, Hilu attempts to mimic the early Hebrew and Arabic of the time (he reportedly spent a year reading newspapers from the late 1800s), and the translation attempts to replicate the slightly archaic feel of the language. Conversational and contemporary the book is not. But Hilu does capture, at least in my opinion, the smell and color of that turbulent time, and his primary characters are fully fleshed even if there is little to admire in any of them.

The House of Rajani is essentially telling one story of pre-Israel Palestine through the eyes of the ‘other.’ Hilu was vilified in one of Israel’s newspapers and stripped of a prize he had won (The Sapir Prize, which is one of Israel’s largest). Hilu believes the stripping of its prize, and its eventual return, was completely political. Hilu was called anti-Zionist, a self hating Jew, in the press and in the blogosphere. Several journalists, politicians, even academics criticized him publicly.

What is remarkable is not only the public drubbing an author received (in a democracy for God’s sake!) for writing a book of fiction, but the selective memory it represents on the part of Israel. There are innumerable books written, even by Israelis, documenting the thousands displaced by Israel’s War of Independence (the Palestinians call it Naqba, which means catastrophe in Arabic), that the displacement was at times voluntary, at others not, Israel’s destruction of Arab homes and confiscation of lands. There were atrocities, large and small, on both sides and Israel can certainly claim that they did not instigate the war. Moreover, as in all wars, to the victors go the spoils, but that Israel continues to deny its own participation seems, at least to me, at times ludicrous, at times immoral. Instead, the story of Israel, at least for the Jews, is that the Jews arrived to a land virtually empty and, in their hands, it flowered. Like many colonizers, the ‘natives’ were invisible, or rather they became invisible in history’s retelling.

I will say that the book club was civil if at times rancorous. Before Hilu arrived quite a few of the attendees admitted they were not political and in fact had little historical knowledge of what actually transpired. But even these women exhibited a willingness to listen to Hilu, even if they allowed it only as an imaginative work of fiction.

I suppose I draw more comfort that the book has sold 50K copies in Israel (amazing for a country of 7mm, not all of them reading Hebrew) and been translated into seven languages. People are reading it. In my opinion, acknowledging reality is the only way Israel can address the present. Perhaps literature will prove one way that the blindness associated with the country’s confirmation bias can be healed.

Ronny Someck and the Pleasure of Hebrew

One of the pleasures of learning another language is being able to gather another layer of meaning to the poetry written in that language. A poet I am currently struggling with, both in translation and metaphorically, is Ronny Someck. Someck has published nine (or perhaps ten) books of poetry in Hebrew and hosted a popular radio program in Israel for years. Decades earlier, he was part of a circle called the “Tel Aviv Poets," which included Mier Wieseltier, Yona Wallach, and others, who often wrote about contemporary Israeli street life, incorporating slang, images from television and popular culture into their poems. Their poetry was often fleshy and sexy. Someck's poetry still often is.

Anyway, the reason I bring him up today is that I’m reading some of his work in Hebrew and struggling with the translation. BUT one interesting aspect of Hebrew is that much of the language is built around what they call “binyamin” or buildings so that word groups arise from the same root. For example, “dahm” means blood. From that, we get “Ah-dom” or red, and “Ah-damn” which means man, and from that we get “Ah-dah-ma” meaning earth. Red begets Blood begets Man begets Earth and vice versa.

Here is a poem by Someck titled “Red Catalogue of the Word Sunset:”

A French poet sees a red sunset
and squeezes burgundy from the cloud grapes.
An English poet likens the sunset to a rose
and a Hebrew, to blood.
Oh my country, a land fastening cannibal lips
to the setting sun’s virginal throat,
my arms are oars of fear
and I, in the ark of my life, row
like Noah to Ararat.

It is a unsettling poem comparing Israel to a cannibal that ‘eats its own,' different from more civilized lands where sunsets lead to wine and roses. But what is lost in the translation is the play of the language through the poem. The red of the sunset becomes blood becomes land becomes man. Underlining Someck’s unsaid importance of this resonance to the poem is that these relationships are "seen" by a “Hebrew” poet not an Israeli poet whose language might be Arabic, or given the waves of immigration, English, German, Russian, etc. The Hebrew language becomes part of what makes this land the cannibal that it is (in Someck’s poem). Or as Mier Wieseltier, another Jewish Israeli poet wrote in the poem “A March for Long Distance Poets,” “The believer in what words can do / believes in what they did to him.”

Her Circle Ezine - Kind Enough to Include Me!

Her Circle Ezine is, in their words, an online portal of women's creative arts and activism from around the globe. By celebrating artists and writers whose work addresses the social issues of our time, we strive to bring these issues to the fore, whilst reaffirming connections between art, politics, and life. I've become an enormous fan for the poetry and prose, interviews, and essays, all created by an amazing array of talented writers.

They were lovely enough to ask me to submit a posting to their Writer's Life blog as a Guest Blogger! Take a look. Beyond my brief thoughts, there is a lot to draw you into their site.

A New Kafka Story Coming Soon!

I know Franz Kafka, writer of "The Trial" and "The Metamorphosis," wanted his papers destroyed after he died. He directed Max Brod (to whom Kafka left his papers) in his last will to do so, leave nothing intact. Brod, of course, ignored this plea. We can argue what was right or wrong, but if Kafka's will had been executed according to his instructions, his major novels - "The Trial", "The Castle" and "Amerika" - and most of his short stories would have been lost to the world. Brod, who died in 1968, left the remaining papers to Esther Hoffe, his close friend, assistant, and perhaps lover, with the direction to deposit them in an appropriate archive so that they could be saved for posterity and available for study. Well, Esther didn't follow instructions well either, but hid them away. Her daughter similarly kept them hidden although reportedly did sell a few in secret auctions.

Anyway, you can read a bit more on this on a previous blog.

There is, however, some good news. After years of wrangling, courts finally managed to get the boxes opened and contents reviewed. There was a gag order regarding what was inside, but a Tel Aviv judge rejected the order. The Haaretz newspaper reported that a huge amount of documents found in the safe deposit boxes are letters and manuscripts belonging to Kafka and Brod. Also in the box is a HANDWRITTEN SHORT STORY (!) by Kafka that has never before been seen. Perhaps Kafka would still want whatever remains destroyed rather published. I suppose his wishes are important, but at this point, after so much has already been published, I think it would be a greater loss to destroy them.

Of course, the lesson for great writers (or writers who believe they might be great) is to destroy what you want destroyed before you die. If you leave to someone else, a friend, even a close friend, chances are you'll be reading your unpublished letters and documents from the other side (assuming any of us get there!). If Kafka's case isn't enough, just remember Dmitri Nabokov and Elizabeth Bishop.

The Vanity of Buying a Book

In Israel, book sales are up, though not all book sellers see it as a reflection of increased reading:

The CEO of Sifri bookstores, Aryeh Almog, said rising literacy led to increased reading, but stressed that "buying books today is a symptom of the newly rich, who buy books so they will not be suspected of a lack of comprehension." Or as Ziva Alfasi, one of the owners of the Lyric bookstores, said: "Books are a kind of fad. A few years ago, people would bring a vase or a useful kitchen accessory as a gift; today, when you go to a birthday party, dinner or even a wedding, people bring a book."

Ah, vanity. But if more books are in people's houses, for whatever reason, perhaps a few more will be read.

Amos Oz Says, "Against Ideas, Israel's Force is Impotent"

Since Monday when Israel boarded the Gaza-bound aid flotilla and the resulting terrible tragedy of nine lost lives, I’ve been ill. Yes, the mission was not without venal objectives. As The Gaza Freedom March stated efore Monday’s confrontation: “A violent response form Israel will breathe new Life into the Palestine solidarity movement, drawing attention to the blockade.” But Israel couldn’t have handed them a more desired response. Throughout the Arab world, the nine killed are called “martyrs.”

Here is an op-ed written by Amos Oz, one of Israel’s most revered writers and a peace activist, which appeared The New York Times and UK’s Guardian, among other places I've reprinted it in full below. I haven't been able to write about it yet, and Oz's words are clear enough.

Against ideas, Israel's force is impotent

Since the six-day war Israel has been fixated on military force. But Hamas is an idea, and no idea has been defeated by force

For 2,000 years the Jews knew the force of force only in the form of lashes to their own backs. For several decades now we have been able to wield force ourselves. Yet this power has, again and again, intoxicated us. Again and again we imagine that we can solve every problem we encounter with force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.

In the period before the state was founded a large portion of the Jewish population in Palestine did not understand the limits of force and thought that it could be used achieve any goal. Luckily, during Israel's early years leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful not to go beyond those boundaries. But since the six-day war in 1967 Israel has been fixated on military force. The mantra is: what can't be done by force can be done with even greater force.

Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip is one of the rank products of this view. It originates in the mistaken assumption that Hamas can be defeated by force of arms; or, in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.

But Hamas is not just a terror organisation. Hamas is an idea. A desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force – not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads, and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one. The only way for Israel to edge out Hamas is for it to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

Israel has to sign a peace agreement with Mahmoud Abbas and his government and thus reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip. That latter conflict can be resolved, in the end, only by negotiating with Hamas or, more reasonably, by the integration of Abbas's Fatah movement with Hamas. Even if Israel seizes a hundred more ships on their way to Gaza, even if Israel sends in troops to occupy the Gaza Strip a hundred more times, no matter how many times Israel deploys its military, police, and covert forces, it cannot solve the problem.

The problem is that we are not alone in this land, and the Palestinians are not alone in this land. We are not alone in Jerusalem and the Palestinians are not alone in Jerusalem. Until we, Israelis and Palestinians, recognise the logical consequences of this simple fact, we will all live in a permanent state of siege – Gaza under an Israeli siege, Israel under an international and Arab siege.

I do not discount the importance of force. Military force is vital to Israel. Without it we would not be able to survive a single day. Woe to the country that discounts the efficacy of force. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget for even a moment that force is effective only as a preventative – to prevent the destruction and conquest of Israel, to protect our lives and freedom. Every attempt to use force not as a preventative, not in self-defence, but instead as a means of smashing problems and squashing ideas, will lead to more disasters – just like the one we brought on ourselves in international waters, on the high seas, opposite Gaza's shores.

Another Independence Day

Today marks Israel's 62nd year as an independent country. There has never been peace. There will likely never be peace. At least not in any timeframe that feels worth talking about.

Of course, last night Israel celebrated the anniversary with ceremony, speeches, fireworks. In Israel, there are more festivities the night between Memorial Day and Independence Day than on both New Year's Eves combined (the Jewish and the calendar). Our neighborhood erected a stage in its center surrounded by rides for the children, acrobats, booths selling every kind of cake, cookie, drink, candy imaginable. For two hours, officials including Tel Aviv's mayor (who lives in our neighborhood) delivered speeches extolling their as much as Israel's accomplishments, followed by dance and singing performances put on by local children's groups includng the Scouts (Tsofeem), dance groups, school groups. Behind them all, video and pictures of army personnel, local heroes, interspersed with images from the dancing and crowds played on two giant screens. Fifteen minutes of fireworks followed. And all this just for our neighborhood! Afterward, my husband and I went to a nearby party for drinks, more food, dancing that went on well into the early hours of morning.

I love the entire two days for its earnestness. There is no irony in all this exhibition. I also am sad, because nothing changes. After sixty two years, nothing has changed, it seems to me. Israel exists but always on a precipice.

I included a brief poem written by poet Aryeh Sivan. Sivan has written 14 (14!) books of poetry and a novel. Today he was awarded Israel's highest literary honor, The Israel Prize. Very few of his poems have been translated into English. Sivan wrote the poem below more than 25 years ago. It could have been written today.

TO LIVE IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL
                To the memory of Zvi Hurvitz:
                 Pioneer, commander, and bereaved father.

To be cocked like a rifle, the hand
clutching a pistol, to walk
in a closed, harsh line, even after
the cheeks are filled with dust,
and the seared flesh is fallen away, and the eyes can no longer
focus on a target.

There is a saying: a loaded gun is bound to fire.
Not true.
In the Land of Israel, anything can happen:
a broken pin, a spring rusted through,

or, the sudden cancellation of your orders, without explanation,
as it once happened to Abraham on Mount Moriah.

Translation by M. Salomon

Where Dadaism Settled in Israel

Yesterday, I spent the day in Ein Hod, a small Israeli village about an hour north of Tel Aviv. What makes Ein Hod so interesting is that supposedly all of its inhabitants are artists. Granted there are less than 600 of them, but it still makes for dense creativity. Ein Hod became an artists' colony in 1953. The driving spirit behind the project was Marcel Janco, who convinced the Israeli government to let him build the colony rather than destroy the village. Until few years before his arrival, the village had been home to 500-700 Arabs, who fled or escaped or were pushed out (depending on who you ask) after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Janco and its later residents renovated many of the pre-War buildings including the local mosque, which became of all things a bar.

Anyway, the place is rife with artist studios, many of them open and selling to the public. There is also a museum, which features the work of Janco and tells his and Ein Hod’s story. Janco was actually a fascinating character. He was a Romanian Jew, who spent much time in Zurich and Paris, and was one of the key characters in the Dadaist movement of the early 1900s. Janco’s paintings and illustrations from that period often depict the café and city life enjoyed by him and his compatriots. In addition, Janco illustrated poetic works by the likes of Tristan Tzava and Andre Breton, two leading Dada lights.

When Janco immigrated to Palestine in 1941, Dada didn’t come with him. Janco’s work took on a more figurative and narrative feel though later work tended toward the abstract. His subjects also tended to be of the local—immigrant camps, Arab and Jewish scenes, abstract Israeli landscapes.

As a historical note, most of the 700-900 Arab villagers of Ein Hod resettled in the West Bank. A group of 35 original inhabitants took shelter in a nearby wadi forming a new village called Ein Houd. It wasn’t until 2005 that Israel recognized the village and connected it to its electric grid. As in so many places in Israel, the conflict between the possibility of what is versus the loss of what was remains a constant presence.

If you do visit Ein Hod, there is a fabulous bookstore hidden down one of its small streets. The store is assembled of what looks like sheet metal, stone and wood remnants from demolished buildings, and a few nails. The floor is nothing but dirt and rock. The proprietor, who surrounds himself with at least four dogs and makes and sells some really terrible pottery, plays old Israeli and American LPs and might, if you look longingly enough at his coffee pot, offer you a cup. I found an out of print collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin as well as an ancient (and a bit water marked) edition of Octavio Paz.

Book Review: Hamutal Bar-Yosef and Israel: Grief and Poetry

Grief never ends, at least for some people, perhaps for more people than any of us acknowledge. Moreover, grief is often complicated and sometimes seems outside individual control. In Israel, where the burned out trucks from Israel’s War of Independence still line the way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, where every year the nation’s children travel to the European sites of the Holocaust, where the entire nation shuts down for Memorial Day (Yom Ha-Zikaron) and Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom Ha-Shoah), memory and the grief attached to memory are impossible to escape. For an American now living in Israel like myself, for someone who is not a Jew, Israel’s national obsession with grief often feels impenetrable. How does a people, how does an individual look forward, when it is of the past that one must constantly be reminded?

The Israeli poet Hamutal Bar-Yosef writes in an essay: Israeli culture demonstrates an unhealthy, even dangerous fixation on grief. Perhaps more troubling, Israeli culture has come to perceive mourning as a permanent state. Regrettably, this cultural approach to bereavement disregards, and even impedes, individual efforts to resume a normal life. Yet it is this same Israeli poet who memorializes her own grief in book after book, whose nine volumes of poetry reflect an almost singular fixation with loss. As Bar-Yosef asks in the poem “What is Impure:” 

What is impure
in touching the dead?
A black magnet
soft
and so seductive
like the hole in a woman’s body—

Bar-Yosef provides no answer in the poem except to say later in the same poem that “you want never to return.”

I suppose it is not surprising that grief remains a central theme in Bar-Yosef’s poetry. It has been so most of her life. She was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1940 on a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee. During Israel’s War of Independence, she lost her only brother. By the age of eight, she was reportedly writing poetry expressing the trauma of bereavement and the resilience of life. Later, she lost the youngest of her four children to suicide when he was but a teenager.

Hamutal Bar-Yosef is one of Israel’s most prestigious poets and, has received almost every national award. In addition to her nine books of poetry, she has written six books of literary research, short stories, a children’s book, and translated two collections of poetry from Russian into Hebrew. While some of her individual poems have been translated into English, it is only with the 2009 release of a bilingual selection of her poetry called Night, Morning, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back and published by The Sheep Meadow Press, that her work begins to reach a broader English-speaking audience.

Bar-Yosef says in an interview contained at the end of Night, Morning that she enjoys writing sonnets, odes, elegies, that she considers herself a conservative, both politically and poetically. However, the poems in Night, Morning in both their Hebrew and English translations appear entirely in free verse. The omission apparently is deliberate. Bar-Yosef says in the same interview that she and the book’s translator decided to avoid poems whose forms were sophisticated, allusive, or, strangely enough, musical.

What did carry over into the translations was the rich symbolism and metaphor Bar-Yosef often employs, especially in early poems, to tell her story. At times, the symbolism appears, at least to this reader, too easy and provides little added value to the overall collection. For instance, in one early and very short poem “Another Dream,” she writes

I was lying on a pile of diapers under corkscrew
apple peelings while large and small crawling
things climbed all over me and I was
soft and serene.

A dream of apprehension perhaps but nothing in the symbolism to suggest why the reader should care. The short poem that immediately follows called “I Forgot How to Scream,” continues in the same tone:

I lay on my back and whistled
the same empty song
on various flutes,
with glazed eyes studying
how the sheep nibble
each other’s ears.

However, more often, Bar-Yosef’s symbolic richness offers new ways of talking about experience and loss as when she writes in the poem “On the Fence,”

I jumped not into hell, but rather
into the kettle of boiling iron,
I became a bell.
Amicably I answer telephones
keep in shape and clear-minded
enjoy music and food.

This self-description suggests an outward acceptance of grief, the ability to surmount enormous loss and continue with life. Of course, perhaps speaking to God, she then reveals the hidden turmoil:

On the cold irons of will
beyond all true stories
hold me tenderly
and don’t mind the tears.

As earlier suggested, Bar-Yosef believes Israel’s permanent state of grief potentially hinders individual recovery. She echoes these sentiments in a poem titled “The Jackal:”

when outside we hear the waiting
of our wild-haired neighbor, the crazy one

then the howling jackals of our childhood return
to prowl with poisonous fever outside the thin
shutters of the old hut, engulfing us
with the wilderness of their rage and ruin.

It seems to me that in both cases, Israel’s and Bar-Yosef’s, grief can be a form of remembering, a way to make sure that the dead are forever with us. So grief itself provides a form of consolation, but, in Bar-Yosef’s poetry, it can also be the only form of revenge against enormous loss. In a poem called “Tel-Aviv,” Bar-Yosef reacts with violent rage when her grief is temporarily forgotten:

How and when did you strip me of my grief—
Rapist city of balmy winds, whore?

That is not to say that Bar-Yosef doesn’t attempt to find solace, even if any respite from memory proves only temporary. For her, solace is found, not in the people around her, but rather in daily life, in nature and in its returning cycles. In the poem “Hibiscus” she writes:

Lovely Hibiscus!
You have stunned my spirits
with your amazing dimensions
the shining, threatening, laughing purple
of your lips.

….

O Hibiscus,
you have filled me with burning.
What is yours? What is mine?
And who is the kindling
for the fire?

And two poems later, in “The Sea of Galilee’s Water Level Has Risen,” Bar-Yosef writes:

For years the Kinneret was dying before our eyes,
like an adolescent daughter
refusing to live because of us,
her absent parents

But now, this year,
her face is filling out.
Today the ancient lashes
of our eyes
are moist with joy.

It is the blossoming hibiscus that claims an exclamation point, the rising waters of the Kinneret (the Hebrew name for The Sea of Galilee) after years of drought that draw tears. Perhaps saying that what seems dead through winter can still bloom, what has been emptied by loss can be filled. But only if one allows them to be.

Keren Cytter--Video of Language

If you’re not doing anything Thursday night, Feb 4, I have a suggestion. That night, the Israeli artist Keren Cytter, will be the featured artist at Artist’s Talk on Artists. The weekly events take place at SOHO 20 Chelsea, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 301. It’s typically an interesting program with a back and forth between ATOA’s Director of Programming and Cytter to be followed by questions and answer session with audience.

Cytter is a force. Her films consist of multiple layers of images- conversation, monologue, and narration systematically composed to undermine linguistic conventions and traditional interpretation schemata. Recalling amateur home movies and video diaries, these montages of impressions, memories, and imaginings are poetic and self-referential in composition. Here’s an excerpt form her 2005 “Continuity.”

Of course, Cytter doesn’t cover necessarily new ground--she participates in the type of self-conscious postmodern investigation of form and process, calls into question the blurry line between perception and so-called reality. But the really interesting aspect of Cytter’s work, for me, is how she uses language, both the confusing exchanges between the ‘actors’ as well as language itself. The actors in Cytter’s video often speak languages that she herself does not understand. This from a recent interview, “Language has a lot of impact. People end up determining what the movie is about based on the language. I did a movie about my childhood in Ariel in Dutch, and people thought of it as a Dutch movie. They ignored the fact that there are soldiers and barricades! I was surprised; it was clear to me that this movie is about a different place and culture, but once people heard Dutch they stuck to it.” Fascinating!

Here’s some more from her bio: 2009 was a very busy year for Keren Cytter, who participated in exhibitions at Manifesta, the Venice Biennale, the New Museum and X-Initiative, and premiered in performances at the Tate Modern and Performa. Cytter won the Vodka Absolute Artist Prize, was featured on the cover of Art Review, and listed second in Flash Art’s “2009 Top 100 Emerging Artists”. It seems that the artist is everywhere.

Cytter, 32, who was born in Israel and is now based in Berlin, never stops working. She has made over 50 video art works, a full-length feature film, and many drawings. She began an MFA at the Avni Art School in Tel Aviv, but quit after two years to pursue her own projects, such as painting tree trunks green in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (“I think it’s funny that 10 years later they are still green…the trees must be suffering.” Cytter said.) The artist has also published three novels, a book of crossword puzzles, and six editions of Alexia, an art and sex magazine, before moving to Amsterdam with a scholarship from De Ateliers.

The People Spoke

I watched “People Speak” on The History Channel last night. I loved it. Some won’t agree. Howard Zinn, is, to say the least, a controversial figure, even an instigator. Many call him Marxist, socialist, anarchist, even liar. As one blogger put it today:

“Zinn has spent a lifetime teaching college students about the evils of capitalism, the promise of Marxism, and his version of American history – a history that has, in his view, been kept from students. His controversial 1980-book The People’s History of the United States paints traditional American history as a façade – one that has grotesquely immortalized flawed leaders and is based on principles that victimize the common man. In 2004, Zinn wrote a companion book entitled Voices Of A People’s History Of The United States, which includes speeches and writings from many of the people featured in The People’s History.

How could you put this forward as HISTORY? It's political commentary without attribution.”

History is written by the victors. I’m not sure who wrote that but it’s true and in America’s case, ‘victors’ include those in political and financial control, those who fund, publish, market the books we study in grade school.

With that in mind, I found Zinn’s program interesting, entertaining, even inspiring. I’ve read Zinn’s “The People’s History,” and yes, as the blogger writes, Zinn suggests that the history told in school, in books, is not the whole truth, but I think what Zinn is actually asking us to do is to view all accepted history with skepticism. There is no one history and for each group, perhaps for each person, it will be different. America’s history is certainly not always heroic. For many peoples, it was filled with tragedy and horror. But part of America’s greatness, I think, is that we are able to still hear voices telling those histories and recognize them. Zinn’s is one of the voices, and he puts forward the case for an alternate history, or at least versions of alternate histories, which I believe are no less true than those I read in my sixth grade history book.

In People Speak, various actors and celebrities recite the words of historical figures such as Susan B. Anthony, Langston Hughes, Cesar Chavez. Yes, Zinn sometimes seems a little heavy handed in his dismissal of the ‘accepted’ history but the words, poems, songs, speeches he evinces should be heard. Here is one I particularly loved, a speech given by the African American abolitionist and woman's rights activist Sojourner Truth in 1851 at The Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. It’s not the version on Zinn’s program, but equally spellbinding:

As a citizen of Israel, I’ll add that Israel is similarly experiencing the painful recognition of alternate histories. There is valid Palestinian anger to the Israel Palestinian conflict—towns were razed, people killed, intent sometimes verged on evil. Israel is beginning the painful recognition that their truth is not the Palestinians. Revisionist historians who write about Israeli transgressions such as Benny Morris have gained widespread recognition, films such as Beaufort and Waltz With Bashir, which present the moral ambiguity of Israel’s history, were wildly popular and won many awards. Anyway, in both cases, that of the US and Israel, history moves, as it must.

Re-considering My Retreat

It’s been three weeks since I took ownership of this condo in New York and it still feels like a hotel. The sheets creased from their boxes, the towels sloughing off the small pills of newness, indecision regarding where to hang a picture, place a lamp, even the perfection of the wood floors and newly painted walls feel strange. Like a new car, it won’t be until I make that first ugly scratch in the wood or the first long black scuff along the base of the walls (and not immediately spend hours trying to erase it) that I’ll feel it’s mine. I also need neighbors! Only myself and five others in the nine stories. I know I’ll miss the absolute quiet of the mornings but I want to hear a few footsteps, doors slam, an argument at an unseemly hour of the night.

I go back to Israel in January (for anyone wondering, I’ll split my time between NY and Tel Aviv). I haven’t studied a word of Hebrew, opened up an Israeli newspaper, answered an e-mail from an Israeli friend in three weeks. Yes, I know. I claim that my deliberate ignorance is a form of hermetic retreat. I needed a few weeks away from the always-terrible news to regroup. Don’t we all sometimes need to block out what bothers us most? If not to give our emotions a rest, than to strengthen our ability to evaluate, understand, fight, whatever… its onslaught.

But I am re-entering the world of poetry (and this blog). Tonight Marie Howe, Mark Doty (two of my favorites) along with Dale Peck and Kate Walbert read at an event sponsored by The Writer’s Studio. Tomorrow, perhaps, perhaps I won't turn off the news and let news of Israel trickle in.

One Writer for Every Nation?

I was a bit dumbstruck when an acquaintance of mine, who lives in New York, said she ‘knew’ Israeli literature well—she’d read at least two books of poems by Yehuda Amichai and the autobiography by Amos Oz. As though Israeli literature stopped and started with two male Ashkenazi writers, both of them Jerusalemites, and both of them born before Israel was even a recognized country. I gently reminded her that there were hordes, hordes of men and women writing in Hebrew, Arabic, English that are also “Israeli” writers. I’ve read quite a few of them (and the bookstore shelves still overflow), most in translation, and wouldn’t begin to assume any deep knowledge. Appreciation is more the word.

But then the cultural elite (who are they?) always searches for the voice that represents a particular region, nation, even continent. In South America, it was Borges (who's Argentinian) and Garcia Marquez (who's Columbian), at least until Chilean writer Roberto Bolano assumed the crown. Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE Bolano, having consumed Savage Detectives, 2666 (although the fourth of the fifth sections was a bit of a gory slog), and most recently The Skating Rink (even if one reviewer calls it ‘Bolana for beginners'). Like his predecessors, Bolano, especially after his 2003 death from liver failure, has become more myth than man. In this article his good friend, Horacio Castellanos Moya, said he believes, "Bolano would have found it amusing to know they (the cultural elite) would call him the James Dean, the Jim Morrison, or the Jack Kerouac of Latin American literature". (I love this picture of Bolano smoking that cigarette--such a bad boy!) In a similar vein, the award-winning Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has spoken out about his dislike at being labeled "the father of modern African literature". “I don't want to be singled out as the one behind it because there were many of us – many, many of us," he said when asked about the title.

I suppose though, for those of us presented with the 1000s of books published each year with only enough time to read a fraction of those, that we manage to crack the binding of even a few works by those from other cultures is something to be applauded. So, while I might chastise my friend for suggesting that Amichai and Oz represent the whole of Israeli literature, their works are amazing, and that she has found time to read them, love them, well, that is more that can be said for most. Isn’t it?

The Amazing Dahlia Ravikovitch

I want to celebrate a recently released translation of Israeli poet Dahlia Ravikovitch, translated by the duo of Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, called Hovering at Low Altitude, The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch. Both have been translating Hebrew poetry into English for decades (check out their wonderful translations of Yehuda Amichai). Ravikovitch is considered in Israel to be one of the leading women poets of the past one hundred years, actually one of the leading Hebrew language poets period. I’ve read Ravikovitch’s work in translation before (The Window, published in 1989, and also translated by Chana Bloch is a shorter book but contains many of her best poems), but this latest release is much more comprehensive.

Dahlia Ravikovitch, similar to many poets writing in Hebrew in the 60s and 70s, adopted colloquial speech in her poems and wrote entirely in open verse. However, unlike some of her contemporaries (e.g., Natan Zach, Yehuda Amichai), who often wrote of the crisis of Israel, Ravikovitch's early writing was personal, dealing with depression, self-loathing, womanhood, motherhood, love and the lack of it. She was perhaps the first female poet that spoke of 'the body' and its objectification, albeit usually in cloaked terms (e.g., the poem "Clockwork Doll"). With that said, she was not a confessional poet, and many of her poems are personae, written in second or third voice, or directed at situations outside her own. She also wrote movingly about Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, often from the perspective of a woman. In reviews and analyses, Ravikovitch is often discussed as being a political poet, but it wasn’t until after Israel’s 1982 invasion into Lebanon, the last fourth of her life, that that the Palestinian and Middle East conflict became a central themes of her work. After the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila, carried out by the Christian Lebanese phalanges unleashed in the camps by the Israeli army, she wrote:

Over the sewage ponds of Sabra and Shatila
there you passed a considerable number of people on
from the land of the living to the land of the dead
night after night
first shots
then hangings
and then slaughter with knives
. . . and our sweet soldiers
they have asked nothing for themselves
they wanted so badly
to go home in peace.

This poem, whose title translates as 'You Can't Kill a Baby Twice' appears in her 1995 collection Col Ha-Shirim Ad Co ('All the Poems So Far'). As this excerpt illustrates, Ravikovitch’s work conveyed not only her compassion for the plight of the ‘other’ but her understanding of how the conflict affected Israel and Israelis. Her work in all cases, political or not, rode close to the vein. Her friends referred to her as 'a woman with no skin and bare nerves.' She died in 2005, reportedly of suicide.

I love her work and, for those searching for another Israeli voice (yes, we all know Amichai) Ravikovitch is a place to start.

Living is No Laughing Matter

Two days ago, International PEN Congress Issues Eleven Resolutions on Free Expression. Unlike writers in countries such as China, Cuba, Iran, Turkey, many countries in South America and Asia, we read and write with few restrictions put on our pen. Something we should all remember.

Here’s poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet called On Living. Hikmet was a Turkish poet, essayist, novelist repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. This poem speaks to his lyrical genius and poetic optimism. It is one of my favorites. I've only committed the last amazing stanza to memory, but am working on the rest.

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people-
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees-
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front-
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind-
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet-
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
-you have to feel this sorrow now-
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say ``I lived'' ...

February, 1948
Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu