A book of my selected poems is being published in Hebrew by  Keshev press, in the next few months, and I thought you’d like to see the ‘”afterward interview” so i translated it to English:

---

1. You have lived in Israel most of your life—certainly most of your adult life—yet you write and work in an English-speaking environment, and your mame-loshn (to which you have recently returned) is Yiddish. Who are you? What are you?

First of all, the most amazing thing about Yiddish is that it has no country. It is always the language of the stranger, the outsider. Especially for me, since I speak it only at public events; since the death of the poet Rivka Basman Ben-Haim, I have no one with whom to speak Yiddish in daily life. I use it for a satirical perspective on society.

As for language, generations of Jews before us spoke multiple languages because they were forced to interact with people from different lands. My parents spoke more languages than I could count, and I learned various languages from them. I am convinced that multilingualism creates—or enables—a multiplicity of perspectives on the world and more possibilities for solving problems and writing poetry. In the past I studied French poetry, and I am certain I was greatly influenced by it. But for many years my great love was actually Chaucer, because he seemed not to take poetry writing too seriously. I learned so much from him about the freedom to speak in different voices through different characters, and I very much enjoy writing in multiple voices. The Bible offers me endless possibilities because the women there do not say much; usually they are not told what is happening, and their actions are not considered.

Who am I? I am an old woman with many different personalities and different ages within me. Sometimes I am good and sometimes bad, at times wise and at times foolish, sometimes brave and sometimes afraid.

What am I? I am very passive, as the Romantic poets used to think of themselves—a harp in the wind. What passes through me finds its way into a poem—if I have time and something to write about, and if someone encourages me. If I have no audience, I do not write. Or I write but do not show the poems to anyone.

---

2. You immigrated to Israel shortly before the Yom Kippur War, and you are working on this book during the “Iron Swords” war. Hussein Fawzi once told Haim Gouri that Israel should have listened to Egyptian poets rather than generals, and then we would not have fallen into the trap in 1973. What is your vision for the conflict? What do poets have to contribute?

The most important thing poets can do is remind people of their humanity, of their responsibility as human beings. We must tell the truth. In the current situation, I find it important to explain to the American media what everyday life in Israel is like. Here is an example published in a newspaper a few months ago:

I am not a professional poet
I am not a news reporter today
I see what I see
and before I finish telling it
something else already happens to me.

Today, for example, I stood in line
and prayed that the line would lead me
to the gentle pharmacist I know
who will give me the right advice
for finding the proper pill.

Instead I got the manager,
a tired blond who insisted it was out of stock,
and I knew the Arab pharmacist
would manage to bypass the rules on the way to filling
the prescription.

The third thing every poet must do is write within a tradition. Even if a new poem has no connection to tradition, one must know and understand the history and meanings of the language in which the poem is written. That is why I do not try to write much in Hebrew—I do not know the literature and history of each word well enough. In Hebrew it is especially important to know the language deeply in order to continue enriching the evolving culture, alongside changes in language and vocabulary.

---

3. You often return in your poems to your place of origin, to the family you had to grow up in. What role did the Holocaust play in your life?

As one of the only survivors of a large family, it is my responsibility to tell what I know.

---

4. Another family you did not have, and over which you mourn in your poems, is that of the children you did not bear. Like many poets of your generation, you write without mercy about your deepest regrets and “what-ifs.” Now, as the United States slides back toward medieval attitudes regarding women’s rights over their bodies, and it seems the wheel is turning against us and undoing many of the achievements of the twentieth-century women’s movement—where do you think we are headed?

The day after the right to abortion was overturned in the United States, the ten-year-old daughter of a friend of mine was stopped on her way to school by a group of boys who shouted at her, “your body, our choice.” The issue of abortion is fundamental to every aspect of women’s rights. Women still have the right to vote: they must ensure that those who will not fight for women’s rights are not elected to public office. We must also enter politics ourselves and make changes at the highest levels.

Women also need to write more about this. We feel that editors probably will not want to publish strong poems on women’s issues, but I have a feeling we are wrong.

---

5. Many of your poems are dramatic monologues of biblical or historical figures, most of them women. Where does your attraction to this genre come from? And why these figures?

I do not write enough in this genre. I like to write about people as individuals, not as historical figures or statistics. I am very interested in people as unique characters. Of course we are all influenced by society and history, but we are all different, and it is important to look through the eyes and ways of thinking of others.

---

6. You take confessional poetry to the extreme when you document breast reconstruction or colonoscopies in your poems. Where will you not go?

I write about things I wish I had known more about in advance, before experiencing them. Only now are we beginning to talk about menopause, for example. I want people to have some preparation for events that may happen to them—caring for someone ill, becoming ill, falling in love—truly—with all the uncertainties involved. So I wrote a book about Ezi’s lymphoma (fortunately it does not bother him), I wrote about the shock of encountering creatures that were my complete opposite—from iguanas to mummies—and discovered we have quite a lot in common.

I will not write about children or grandchildren or people whose privacy would be violated if I wrote about them. I have written a great deal about my parents recently because I am beginning to understand the complexity of their lives. But I do not think I have the right to pry into others’ lives.

What else will I not write about? I have no idea—I am not finished writing yet.

---

7. You are here, and your audience is mostly in the English-speaking world. For whom do you write?

For many years I was not aware at all of the idea of an audience. I wrote for myself and assumed none of my family or friends would be interested. In the United States I had friends who enjoyed what I wrote, and as a new immigrant I had no one to speak with in Israel or share my poems. The few English-writing poets I knew at the beginning of my life here were not available or accessible to share my poems in particular. When I sent a poem to a journal in the United States it was accepted, but the letter arrived in Hebrew and the editor asked to see the poem in its original language. The editor was Menachem Katz, uncle of David Broza, and once he understood I was writing in English he continued to publish my poems. Other editors were less encouraging, assuming English was not my mother tongue.

I continued writing, but with the sense that there was no real audience for my poems. They simply had to be written. When they began to be published in Hebrew translation, I saw for the first time the possibility of dialogue with the literary community. Then I went to the United States for three years at Columbia University and discovered I was a star. I was invited to read at the UN, the Library of Congress, and countless universities and museums, mainly because I was an exotic Israeli. I wrote about Israeli society and found that I served as a kind of bridge between the two cultures.

When I returned to Israel, my subjects changed—I did not write for an audience at all. I was not invited so often to literary events, and since I was then engaged in rebuilding the Israel Association of Writers in English (IAWE), I was not as available to care for my own writing. But I understood how poetry is my most intimate companion, through which I can think about everything happening around me. Even today I do not think much about who will read the poem while writing—I think about creating a perfect work that reflects my thoughts at that moment. I change my mind often and do not think my poetry reflects any fixed worldview or political position, but it does reflect the inclusiveness that, I believe, characterizes me as a person and as a poet. I can write about anything, and if even one reader loves the poem, I am happy. And if not, as the Beatles sang, “What do you see when you turn out the light?  I can’t tell you but I know it’s mine.”