There were so many people at Mishkenot Shaananim and thee

other sites of the festival, I couldn’t count them – and I’m good at counting audiences.  There were so many people – PAYING ATTENTION – and on the panels I was in, there was a lot to pay attention to.    At first, for example, I couldn’t understand why suddenly a prose writer, pen name Ka.Tzetnik, would be of interest to a poetry festival, and then discovered – after listening to the work of Nili Cohen and Dina Porat who both wrote books about him and/or the legal implications of the trial of Eichmann – that much of what I had known about the porno of Nazism was all wrong.  My father had a stroke while watching ‘Night Porter’ – a film whose drama was based on the then popular Nazi porno, so I too had a lot to say. 

The next 2 days were also exciting.  I got to talk a little about sex,  and Ilan Scheinfeld wowed me for the second time in a poem that was the most erotic interracial, homosexual poem I’ve even heard.  

Notice though that all I’m describing has little to do with the fact that there are over 700 soldiers dead and still counting, that there hundreds of rockets falling on the area where the festival was supposed to be held.  Even though we did have some discussion and poetry about the war, we couldn’t get around that subject.

For me, the most important thing was the fact that literature and culture has to continue.