If I forget thee, Jerusalem

In the following two poems, Palestinian poet Mu’in Bseiso and Israel’s Yehuda Amichai both play on the words of Psalm 137 (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,/let my right hand forget...”)1 as a means to express their love for the land:

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

 Yehuda Amichai

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Then let my right be forgotten.
Let my right be forgotten, and my left remember.
Let my left remember, and your right close
And your mouth open near the gate.

I shall remember Jerusalem
And forget the forest -- my love will remember,
Will open her hair, will close my window,
will forget my right,
Will forget my left.

If the west wind does not come
I'll never forgive the walls,
Or the sea, or myself.
Should my right forget
My left shall forgive,
I shall forget all water,
I shall forget my mother.

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Let my blood be forgotten.
I shall touch your forehead,
Forget my own,
My voice change
For the second and last time
To the most terrible of voices --
Or silence.
 ***

The God of Urushalim2

Let my right hand forget me,
let my beloved’s eyes,
my brother and my only friend
all forget me.

If I remember not
that the God of Urushalim
lies heavily on [the chest of]
our land,
squeezing honey and milk
out of drops of our blood,
to live
and hatch out monsters. 

I thought that it will be interesting to start the part of the presentation about Palestinian poetry with these poems. In these poems, both poets express a deep, personal connection to Jerusalem, associating the city with their own blood, their bodies, and their closest family members. Both give a sense of danger and imminent pain at the possibility of losing or forgetting Jerusalem, and both imply that the act of “forgetting” or not fighting for Jerusalem would be a disgrace to their brothers and mothers.

Nevertheless, although the two poets use the same metaphor to address the same theme, each writes in the context of his own society, culture, and poetic tradition. Amichai, born in Germany and raised as an Orthodox Jew, has lived most of his life in Jerusalem. In his youth, he served in the British Army and in Israel’s Palmach force in the 1948 war. In “If I Forget Thee,” Amichai uses Psalm 137 as a lens through which to reflect on his own behavior and his personal relationship to Jerusalem, the land, and God. He takes the burden of forgetting on himself with the lines “Should my right forget.../I shall forget all water/I shall forget my mother.” He intimates that if he should ever forget his allegiance to Jerusalem, he will suffer personally and will lose any sense of himself, even his own voice.

Bseiso, on the other hand, uses the psalm to criticize Israeli oppression and to remind the Palestinian people of their obligation to fight for Jerusalem. Bseiso grew up in Gaza in the 1930s and 1940s, but because of his political activism, spent most of his life in exile in other Arab countries until his death in 1982. In his poem, Bseiso implores his people to remember that the “God of Urushalim lies heavily” on the land of Palestine, “squeezing honey and milk” out of Palestinian blood. His use of the term “God of Urushalim” to represent Israel is heavily ironic, suggesting that the Israelis use their religion to justify controlling the land and oppressing the Palestinian people. He plays on the biblical description of the Land of Canaan (now Israel) as the “land of milk and honey,” to accuse the Israelis of building their homeland on the suffering of Palestinians — “out of drops of our blood.” The poem also implies that any Palestinian who does not “remember” and fight against the “God of Urushalim” will lose his right hand, or his identity, and everyone that he loves.



Yehuda Amichai the poet and his poems

Amichai's poetry deals with issues of day-to-day life, and with philosophical issues of the meaning of life and death. His work is characterized by gentle irony and original, often surprising imagery. Like many secular Israeli poets, he struggles with religious faith. His poems are full of references to God and the religious experience. He was described as a philosopher-poet in search of a post-theological humanism. Amichai has been credited with a "rare ability for transforming the personal, even private, love situation, with all its joys and agonies, into everybody's experience, making his own time and place general."
 

God Full Of Mercy by Yehuda Amichai

God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead.
If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.
I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.
I, who was King of Salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.

I, who use only a small part
Of the words in the dictionary.

I, who must decipher riddles
I don't want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.

Concomitant with his non-traditional choice of subjects is Amichai's innovative use of the Hebrew language. Drawing from and interfacing various strata of language, from classical Hebrew to the post-modern colloquial, Amichai became known as the “poet who plays with words.” Influenced by the wit and irony of modern English poetry, Amichai, also a master of understatement, coined new idioms and slang expressions, and incorporated prose phrases in his work. As with his imagery and subject matter, his linguistic versatility reflects his sense that language, including poetic language, emerges out of the modern technological society rather than classical texts only. Hence the citation of the Israel Prize, awarded to Amichai in 1982, which heralded “the revolutionary change in poetry's language” that the poet had begun through his work.

Love Of Jerusalem

There is a street where they sell only red meat
And there is a street where they sell only clothes and perfumes. And there
is a day when I see only cripples and the blind
And those covered with leprosy, and spastics and those with twisted lips.

Here they build a house and there they destroy
Here they dig into the earth
And there they dig into the sky,
Here they sit and there they walk
Here they hate and there they love.

But he who loves Jerusalem
By the tourist book or the prayer book
is like one who loves a women
By a manual of sex positions.

Amichai's poetry spans a range of emotions, from laughter to sadness to self-mockery. His work emphasizes the individual who, although conscious and integrally part of the collective experience, ultimately views the world through his personal lens. This individual perspective evinces a candid, honest approach to the outside world.

An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the "Had Gadya" machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.

 In Amichai one almost always encounters a delight in figurative language; yet his poems are never pretentious or tedious, since they speak out of the everyday and towards concerns we encounter every day.  His great themes are love and loss: he celebrates life with vibrancy and energy and a relish for feeling, yet at the same time he is intensely aware of what is lost as history, both personal and social, shears away from each individual things he or she holds dear.

Seven Laments for the War-Dead

“…Is all of this sorrow?  I guess so.

“May ye find consolation in the building

of the homeland.” But how long

can you go on building the homeland

and not fall behind in the terrible

three-sided race

between consolation and building and death?”

“…Memorial Day for the war-dead: go tack on

the grief of all your losses –

including a woman who left you –

to the grief of losing them: go mix

one sorrow with another, like history,

that in its economical way

heaps pain and feast and sacrifice

onto a single day for easy reference.

Though he wrote about a wide array of subjects, idiosyncratic Jerusalem was the well to which he kept returning throughout his life. In perhaps his most-quoted paean to city life, Amichai explored the overlap of Jerusalem's ancient history with its contemporary vibrant population:

Jerusalem 1967
On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of
Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall
shop,
not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.
I told him in my heart that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.
When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates
prayer.
He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate
and I returned, with all the worshippers, home.

Amichai was not a political poet in the conventional sense but he continuously tried to understand the complicated world that we live in and reconcile between conflicting sides. He wrote in one of his peace poems "I, may I rest in peace -I, who am still living, say: may I have peace in the rest of my life... I don't want to fulfill my parents prophecy that life is war."

Tourists

Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.

They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.

Once I sat on the steps by agate at David's Tower,
I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists
was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see
that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch
from the Roman period. Just right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!"
I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them,
"You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it,
left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

*

Jerusalem

On a roof in the Old City
Laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight:
The white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
The towel of a man who is my enemy,
To wipe off the sweat of his brow.

In the sky of the Old City
A kite.
At the other end of the string,
A child
I can't see
Because of the wall.

We have put up many flags,
They have put up many flags.
To make us think that they're happy.
To make them think that we're happy.

This yearning for peace accompanied him from the very beginning and was most significantly reflected in his life and poetry: "Men wear their first love and not battle decorations" (from "We loved here").

Wildpeace

Not the peace of cease-fire,

Let alone the vision of the wolf and the lamb,

But rather

as in the heart after the excitement is over,

when you can talk only about a great weariness.

I know that I know how to kill,

that’s why I am an adult.

And my son plays with a toy gun that knows

how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.

A peace

without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,

without words, without

the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be

light, floating, like lazy white foam.

A little rest for the wounds –

Who speaks of healing?

(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation

To the next, as in a relay race:

The baton never falls.)

Let it be

Like wildflowers,

Suddenly, because the field

Must have it: a wildpeace.

I chose 8 poems to present here. Following the overall theme of my presentation, a dialogue, I looked for the ones that relate to political – social issues and of course the ones that throw in his love of Jerusalem into the mix.

.

Sites in which more information can be found.

http://www.uvm.edu/~sgutman/Amichai.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehuda_Amichai

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/yehuda-amichai

http://www.poemhunter.com/yehuda-amichai/

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/amichai.html

http://www.poetrysoup.com/poet/yehuda_amichai

http://www.gojerusalem.com/article/321/Yehuda-Amichai_-poet-laureate-of-Jerusalem/

http://jafi.org/JewishAgency/English/jewish%20education/Compelling%20Content/Eye%20on%20Israel/Gallery%20of%20People%20%28Biographies%29/Amichai%20Yehuda

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/09/poetry-gaza

http://www.boeliem.com/content/2001/649.html



First Impression

 

Bansky's art on the security wall

(Banksy is a pseudonymous English graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.)

My Father
By Yehuda Amichai
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original Hebrew

Four years my father fought that war of theirs,
And did not love or hate his enemies.
But I know he was forming me, even there,
Day by day, out of his tranquilities,

The precious few tranquilities he gleaned
Between the smoke and bombs for a child's sake
And put them in the knapsack tattered at the seams,
With leftovers of mother's hardening cake.

He gathered with his eyes the nameless dead.
The numerous dead he gathered so I'd know
And love them, seeing them as he saw, instead 

Of dying, as they died, in gore and terror.
He filled his eyes with them. He was in error.
Onward like them to all my wars I go.

*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBg3LfsiQGY

I don't know if history repeats itself

Presenting the poems - the visuals

 

 

 

In 2005 Israel built a security wall between sections of the West Bank and the Israeli towns and settlements. Over the years international and local artist decorated sections of it, on both sides, with drawings expressing their thoughts and aspirations. I thought that using pictures of sections of the wall, to accompany the poems I am about to present will be very fitting. I chose the ones that appeared less political and more expressive of the hope for peace and a dialogue. 

Explaining my choice

Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai (the last name means, my people are alive) is very much like me.

My family, like his, escaped tormented Europe and settled in Jerusalem.

Like him, I grew up in Jerusalem and got to see the city broken and united.

We share, in our history, an endless stream of wars, none of which brought a resolution, or peace.

Of course the similarity between us is shared by many in Israel, and his poems, are a reflection of life in a country that is still searching, still asking, still in many ways unsettled.

I chose to present him for few other reasons:

-          Most of his poems were translated into English. This made it easier to pick some for this presentation, and also made me believe that this is a sign that others, more widely read, thought his poems were worthy, and able to reach a wide crowd.

-          Many of his poems relate to issues of war and peace, but mostly in an apolitical way representing a point of view that is closer to my heart.

-          Many of his poems represent his love to Jerusalem, one of the biggest issues in the debate for peace, I can relate to that.

-          His Hebrew is a mixture of current and old. He is known as one of the first poets to use colloquial Hebrew in his poems, at the same time, as someone that grew up in a religious family the language of the bible, and prayer, as he himself kept repeating, is natural to him. I can relate to that, I grew in a religious family, in a religious neighborhood, and received a religious formal education.

-          Many of his poems were set in music, and I know them as songs that were played on the radio. His poems were, and still are often read in official holidays, and memorial days. I believe that his popularity made him more reachable but still genuine. 

And to finish with some factual information:

During his lifetime Amichai was recognized around the world with various awards and honorary doctorates. In 1957 he was awarded the Shlonsky Prize, in 1969 the Brenner Prize, the Israel Prize followed in 1982, and in 1996 he won the Norwegian Bjornson Award. He was poet in residence at NYU in 1987. The complete archive of his diaries, letters and unpublished works was sold to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. Yehuda Amichai visited the Poetry International Festival on numerous occasions, most recently in 1995.

Amichai has published eleven volumes of poetry in Hebrew, two novels, and a book of short stories. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. His collections of poetry available in English include Open Closed Open (Harcourt Brace, 2000); The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai: Newly Revised and Expanded Edition (1996); A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994 (1995); Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers (1989); Poems of Jerusalem (1988); The Great Tranquility: Questions and Answers (1983); Love Poems (1981); Time (1979); Amen (1977); Songs of Jerusalem and Myself (1973); and Poems (1969). In 1982, Amichai received the Israel Prize for Poetry and he became a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. He lived in Jerusalem until his death on September 25, 2000.

 Choosing the Israeli poets.

From the introduction to the book:

"Poets  have always been interpreters of dreams and harbingers of things to come."

"In Israel, the first rain - yoreh - falls at the end of a long, hot, arid summer. Then a transformation begins. The parched land is suddenly covered by green mantle of grasses and plants. And a great sense of rejuvenation is heralded by the brief, transparent autumn. Thr Hebrew New Year is at the gate. This is a season of soul searching, of reckoning and atonement, but also of expectation and promise."

The book, After the First Rain, is a collection of poems chosen from the writings of many , known Israeli poets and translated into English. For few days I read it trying to decide which poets and what poems to use for this presentation. At the end I decided to limit myself to one poet, thinking it will be more effective to show the work of one than many sporadic poems of many. The poet I chose was Yehuda Amichai

The format of the presentation.

I debated with myself for awhile on the way to present this content, as a regular document, an internet site, or a blog and chose the last option for few reasons. I wanted to use some visuals (pictures) to give the presentation more impact but more than that I wanted the time flow of a blog and the ability to present the poems, poets, and ideas as a stream of thought, not as a static complete project. The blog- form enables me to present the poems, with my thought, over a period of time (a month,) it appeared to be the right way to do it.

 

  The Dialogue of Poetry: Palestinian and Israeli Poets Writing Through Conflict and Peace

 I spent last July in Tel-Aviv helping my daughter with her newborn twin babies. 

Between sleepless nights of feeding, and changing, and sleepless days of listening to the endless stream of news, and the minute by minute reports of the falling of the rockets,  I had plenty of time to think about the futility of war and the slippery peace.

So 

When I returned and was searching for an idea for this presentation, war and peace were on my mind and then I came across a book called:

After the First Rain

It is a collection of translated poems written by Israeli poets about war and peace and all that is in between. While I found the idea very compelling I thought that it will be even more interesting to look for poems written by Palestinian poets about the same topic. I did find some (it is hard to find translated poems). And then I decided , because of the short time and the magnitude of the subject to limit  myself to the presentation of one Israeli poet and one Palestinian. 

While I am rather familiar with the Israeli poetry on this topic, Palestinian  poetry for me is like having a chance to look at world completely foreign, and wrapped with many misconceptions. So to me personally, the experience was very interesting.