I should have titled this “Love Poetry.”

I chanced to day upon a lecture about Israeli poetry by an amazing guy named Avi Alon

who woke me to a whole bunch of poems and poets I’ve known well.  It’s no trick to introduce poetry to an ignorant audience, but to captivate someone who knows most of the facts like me but never thought of the way it all fits together is pretty amazing.

I’ll give you one example – many of the songs that have become classic in Israel were poems written as poems in the ’30s when modern hebrew poetry was just emerging.  The theme of love – often unrequited – suddenly struck me because these were people who had left their homelands to come to Israel and had lost the ties and tradition that would have regulated their love life.   They felt that they had returned home, but the home they returned to had none of the original rules from the Bible, and none of the rules of the shtetl or the cities they knew.  My mother used to sing a song about her socialist sister Batya who was planning to move to a kibbutz (she went to Auschwitz instead).  Anyway, it’s one of those mother/daughter duets, where the mother asks her daughter questions about what happened at camp, and the daughter answered about how wonderful it is.  “And what did you eat, my dear daughter” “Burnt kasha, made by Masha, Oh mother it was wonderful.”  The final verse is about where did she sleep, and she says “In the loft in hay, with two halutzim, oh mother it was wonderful.”   

Of course the revolution in morality was all over the world after WWI, but I never noticed how it appeared in modern Hebrew love poetry. 

More soon