I can’t imagine what it is like living on the border of Lebanon. A friend of mine skipped across yesterday for lunch in Ragar, while I ate lunch today at my friends in Metula cooked by a Druze Lebanese woman. We look over the border and see all the Hizballah constructions, factories, and establishments with the naked eye. How strange and how weird.
The Border – Sept 10, 2022 Read Post »
The importance of further developing the revived language makes poetry important in this land. And I learned a lot about Hebrew in the taste of the poetry festival in Metula. Some of the critics – like Ariel Hirschfeld and Dan Miron – help to actually create literature. But I really think the literature institutions have become more and more insular and need more dialogues with the world. Ronny Somekh gave me an issue of a Polish journal today that has a poem of his translated into Polish from my English translation, and I flipped through it, wishing we could understand the poems and wondering what they could learn from Hebrew. It is only chance that Ronny was translated by me, and chance that he has connections in Polish – but there is so much to learn from each other. Unfortunately, poetry, like everything else, is determined by politics and the people I know who are in charge of the literary world, who determine publication and funding, can’t handle it.
hebrew – sept 10, 2022 Read Post »
Avot Yeshurun – I remember him as an old man with facial nerve paralysis who was always alone. I had forgotten his poetry. But when I heard Israel Bright sing a poem of his, I was transformed back to when I heard him read. His speech was unclear, but I got the gist of it because there was something about how when he came to Jaffa as a refugee he was carried ashore by an Arab and fed eggplants. What I never knew about the poet is that he changed his name in 1948 to Avot (Ancestors) Yeshurun (are watching) after the division he was in destroyed an Arab village. Dan Miron spoke about him this evening and pointed out that menschlichkeit (being a human being) is the only characteristic that gives us a right to be here.
Poetry-Politics-Sept 9, 2022 Read Post »
Somehow Ezi’s SIM card got knocked out as we were riding along the Lebanese border yesterday, so our efforts went more into getting a new card before the Shabbat and poetry got demoted on the urgency scale. It was done, and all is now well, but my losing contact with him for a long time yesterday and the business of getting a new one took up more of my attention than I’d like to admit. Still, we’ve been hearing a lot of lectures and some are really interesting. The multitudes are what surprised me, and the complete lack of politics in the entire conference. There is no place for foreign languages, no Arabic, no English – poetry is really big here and it’s all about Hebrew. This is not what I’d experienced long ago when I first came to these festivals. There were fewer people and a bit of multiculturalism.
poetry on the border – sept 9, 2022 Read Post »
“The queen is dead and you’re listening to POETRY?” my friend from Metula writes as I text her to explain why I’m late to call her. She really hit a nerve. I was watching a few narcissists go way over their time slots and feeling that life is happening while these people are explaining their connection to Shlonsky. And all that time, the queen who meant so much to me as a child, had passed. One of the first books I read when I finally learned to read was a biography of Elizabeth as a child. How I admired her! I always admired her.
But Shlonsky, himself, was great. And Erez Biton showed his greatness by quoting long pieces of his work by heart. Here’s a poem by him.
ABRAHAM SHLONSKY
THE VOW
By the eyes that witnessed bereavement
and burdened my bowed heart with cries,
By the compassion that taught me forgiveness
until days came that prohibited pardon,
I contracted the vow to remember all,
to remember — and forget nothing.
poetry in metula- sept 8, 2022 Read Post »
Israel bombed Aleppo airport again today, and we both were reminded of a little related discovery in my library. Last year we were looking at how certain passages in the bible were translated into English and I went to look them up in the King James translation that Bandi, my father-in-law, gave me forty years ago. Ezi, who always examines everything, noted that the book was stamped with the insignia of a shop in Aleppo and the frontispiece was stuck together with another page, and he went to work separating the pages. What emerged was a dedication by his grandfather to his grandmother, who was studying English. Arpad Gut sent his love to his wife and explained he was busy repairing the runways after a b0mbing, 1942. He was working then for the British in WWII.
aleppo airport – sept 7, 2022 Read Post »
In the summer, there was a lot of talk condemning violence against women. One Example:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/pm-violence-against-women-is-stain-on-the-country-that-cannot-continue/
But it continues, and we women don’t know how to defend against it. Women are not only killed by their jealous ex-spouses and honor-preserving brothers but, being more vulnerable, by people who can’t get to their husbands or fathers or brothers. I don’t know if it’s connected to the virus or what, but it scares me.
And I wish I lived in a society that protects endangered women. When I first moved into an apartment in Israel, in 1972, my mother-in-law then assured me that I could not survive without a cleaner, and my Iraqi neighbor found me a Tunisian woman who had lived near her before. She was, my neighbor affirmed, known to have killed her husband by spraying his food with DDT for a long time. She told me she had been married at 14 and had her first of five children before she was 15. And she never had a good day (or night) with her husband. Why was she never convicted of murder? Because the neighbors who knew about it didn’t think the law could understand the situation and wasn’t fit to judge. This was the case in the play “trifles” and the story “jury of her peers” that I wrote about in a few articles a few years later. The fact that women cannot be given protection under the law when their situation cannot be understood.
Here, now, women are provided with shelters that don’t offer them normal lives or are ignored when their husbands break injunctions preventing them from coming close to their exes… It’s as if there should be a separate legal system protecting women.
She worked for me for at least 4 years, maybe 6, and we spoke of many things, but not this.
And yes, this entry was triggered by the murders of a woman and her daughter to punish the husband who was out of the country. Here’s one take on the story
violence against women – sept 6, 2022 Read Post »
So after the cop came to the door this morning looking for our neighbor who’s disappeared, I went looking and finally got to the grocery which is the center of all information. There I learned that she’s been hospitalized again and her daughter was just there.
She’s very dear to me and I hope she’s all right, but another thought from a completely different direction occurred to me. The housing crisis in Tel Aviv.
This means that Tel Aviv is encouraging residents of older buildings to tear down their houses and build safer and bigger units. The plans for our buildings are grand and lots of money to be earned by the contractor and the middlemen. For us, it would mean finding a place to live for 2 years and then moving back to a renewed apartment with an addition of a safe room. 66% of the residents have to agree on this. At the moment there is a margin that don’t agree, because they are too old and can’t really benefit from this deal. But they are old and are slowly dying out, so the balance will soon tip.
