translators-from-israel

"Leah Goldberg expanded the spectrum of lyricism, her poems speaking of a search for love, contact and attention, and she inspired hordes of young poets, mostly women. But she became an easy target for the new rebellious generation of poets and critics, who feared to attack the male figureheads like Shlonsky and Alterman. She complained to Tuvia Ribner, 'What do they want from me, I was never at the centre of the stage. Why do they pick on me?'"

"Jerusalem, adorned with the memories of the past, appealed to her more than the 'white cardboard boxes', which she associated with Tel Aviv."

"She was a fascinating university lecturer, who loved to stand on the pedestal, her eternal cigarette in her hand, and read poetry in her deep, rough, unpleasant voice, that nevertheless drew crowds into over-stuffed auditoriums."

"Although she became the Head of Comparative Literature Studies, she remained alien in the academic establishment. 'Being both an artist and a woman, the male colleagues belittled her academic achievements, and she had a hard struggle to be nominated as a professor', recalls Esther Tishbi, a friend."

"My days are engraved in my poems like years in the rings of a tree like the years of my life in the furrows of my brow"

"death. Its weight is not great. How lightly and with what casual grace we carry it with us everywhere we go."

"A young poet suddenly falls silent for fear of telling the truth. An old poet falls silent for fear the best in a poem is its lie."

"The years have made up my face with memories of loves and have adorned my hair with light silver threads making me most beautiful. In my eyes are reflected the landscapes. And paths I have trod have straightened my stride – tired and lovely steps. If you should see me now you would not recognize your yesterdays – I am walking toward myself with a face you searched for in vain when I was walking toward you."

"How the passing of Time tries me, its double reckoning my duty and my right: Every day it constructs and ruins me completing thus my life and my death."

"The world is heavy on our eyelids"

"preeminent, versatile, and prolific writer of modern Hebrew letters"

"Leah Goldberg, as well as Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir, wrote verse for children, but she is best known for her modernist poetry. In line with contemporary European modernist poetry, she often expressed the poet's inner struggle during the act of writing, and the difficulties in overcoming this inherently artificial medium. Leah Goldberg was active in the field of literary criticism and translation, especially from Russian, and was in search of revolutionary techniques. She experimented with prose as well as drama. Her play "Ba'alat Ha'armon' ('The Castle Owner') introduced the difficult theme of the Holocaust to women's writing."

"one of the most important women in contemporary Hebrew literature...At her peak, Goldberg wrote beautifully and sadly about thwarted love"

"Goldberg lived the bohemian life, debating for days on end with her poet friends in the Tel Aviv cafés."

"The poet, Tuvia Ribner, a close friend for dozens of years, and the executor of her literary estate said: "The memory of the father and her fear accompanied Leah to adulthood. This is the reason, I believe, that she chose the stricter poetic forms, such as a sonnet, which has 14 lines, meticulous rhyming scheme and fixed rhythm, and avoided loose rhythms. Her poetics emerge from a strong need for self-control, every single one of her poems having a rational basis, meant to guard the poem and herself."

"biographer Professor Leiblich: "...from an early stage, she felt herself old, heavy, too serious. She had a sense of guilt about all her loves, she perceived love as a nuisance, something to beware of.""

"She was always guarding her secrets behind walls, and her love poems were covered under seven veils of mystery; among her most beautiful is the sonnet sequence, 'The Love of Theresa De-Mon'"

"Professor Amiya Leiblich: " 'She suffered from emotional deficiency...She had a permanent guilt towards all the men she was in love with, as well as an inferiority complex. Even in poetry, where her value and superiority were unmistakable, she always thought she was lacking, and not as good as Ben-Yitzhak. As a feminist, I am indignant that a poet as great as Goldberg, erased herself, not just as a woman, but as an artist.'"

"'At times of lack of inspiration in writing, she turned to painting. She often made sketches of the literary protagonists who furnished her life, as she visualized them in her imagination', remembers her friend, the poet T. Carmi."

"'Leah Goldberg felt herself kin with Dante, Kafka, Beethoven, who also had imaginary loves, which were the muses that ignited their great works', concludes Professor Amiya Leiblich: "First and foremost, she was a poet, willing to let go of life for art's sake. The woman who experienced a miserable love life, succeeded in producing gentle love poems, and remains Israel's High Priestess of Love, who couples quote in moments of the most intense emotional harmony.""

"If the Bible is the cornerstone of Judaism, then the Talmud is the central pillar, soaring up from the foundations and supporting the entire spiritual and intellectual edifice. In many ways the Talmud is the most important book in Jewish culture, the backbone of creativity and of national life. No other work has had a comparable influence on the theory and practice of Jewish life, shaping spiritual content and serving as a guide to conduct. … The Talmud is the repository of thousands of years of Jewish wisdom, and the oral law, which is as ancient and significant as the written law (the Torah), finds expression therein. It is a conglomerate of law, legend, and philosophy, a blend of unique logic and shrewd pragmatism, of history and science, anecdotes and humor."

"Once upon a time, under pressure of censorship, printers would inscribe in the flyleaves of volumes of the Talmud: "Whatever may be written herein about gentiles does not refer to the gentiles of today, but to gentiles of times past." Today, the flyleaves of our books bear a similar inscription, albeit an invisible one: "Whatever may be written herein about Jews does not refer to the Jews of today, but to Jews who lived in other times." So we are able to sit down and study Torah, Talmud, books of ethics, or books of faith without considering their relevance to our lives. Whatever is written there does not apply to us or to our generation, but only to other people, other times. We must expunge from those invisible prologues the notion that the words are written about someone else, about others, about anyone but us. Whether the book is a volume of Torah, a tractate of the Talmud, or a tract of faith, the opposite must be inscribed: "Whatever is written herein refers only to me; is written for me and obligates me. First and foremost, the content is addressed to me.""

"Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison."

"I've been called a traitor a few times in my life by some of my countrymen. But this is no exception. Almost every person who steps out of the consensus is accused of treason by his contemporaries, or by her contemporaries. In fact, my protagonist in this novel (Judas) says that a traitor is very often simply a person who changes in the eyes of those who despise change, who mistrust change, who are antagonized to every change."

"I feel much more comfortable talking about the past than about the future. I'm old enough to know that life is full of surprises, and this is true of this country as much as it is true of Israel. I have seen people surprising not only others but even themselves."

"(In the book (Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land), you describe your childhood as a “little Zionist-nationalist fanatic.” Your attitude changed because of your friendship with a British policeman. What happened?) Amos Oz: He shared with me different perspectives. He taught me to ask questions: If I were a Palestinian Arab whose family lived here for many, many generations, how would I feel about the influx of Jewish immigrants armed with the Bible and claiming exclusive rights to the land? How would I feel if I were a British [man] who shed his blood in order to beat Hitler, and now he is being labeled by militant Israelis, militant Zionists, as a continuation of the Nazis? Those conversations were eye-openers for me, because this was a kind of language I hadn’t heard spoken around me."

"Very often, fanaticism begins at home. It begins inside the family. It begins with the urge to change our kin, to change our beloved ones for their own good because we think we know better than them what is good and what is bad for them, what is right and what is wrong in their thinking. The urge to change other people contains sometimes a certain fanatic potential."

"I think loathing begets fanaticism, and in the end loathing begets hatred and violence. I listen to my political rivals sometimes with fear and trembling, sometimes with awe, sometimes with near panic, but always with a curiosity of nuances, curiosity for the language, curiosity for the story behind the “impossible” position. So I think curiosity, a certain capacity of imagining the other, and, yes, sense of humor, all of those are powerful antidotes to fanaticism."

"If I had to squeeze my wisdom into one word, I would say: "Listen, you don't necessarily have to agree to what you listen to, but listen very carefully. Listen even to voices which you regard as dangerous, abhorrent, terrible, monstrous." Even if your conclusion is going to be, "I have to rebuff those voices, I have to fight them, I regard them as a threat to the future of my people or the future of my family," you still would be wise to listen very carefully to what those other people are saying before you form your position or even your tactic of combating them or struggling against them. Listen with a certain degree of curiosity. Even try to ask yourself: What would it be that would have made me one of them? A different background? A different family? A different upbringing? Different values? A different environment? Could I be one of those? I think this is a very simple practice, but it’s a helpful one."

"I am old enough to tell you, here in the Middle East, words such as "never," "forever" or "eternity" mean something like six months to 30 years."

"Israel is a dream come true, and as a dream come true it is flawed, very flawed, and sometimes dangerously flawed or painfully flawed. But this is in the nature of dreams, not necessarily in the nature of Israel."

"Beyond his obvious intelligence and talent, Oz has done me several kindnesses, something not often associated with creative personalities of the first rank."

"Above and beyond the loss of a major literary talent Amos Oz’s passing is a huge blow to Israelis and Jews of conscience for whom he has long been an articulate, spiritual guide on the very elusive quest for peace"

"When I interviewed Amos Oz last month we joked about how the best examples of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians were in the medical field and the criminal world. Honored to have spent time in this prolific author’s presence…"

"Among Israeli writers, including the vociferous Amos Oz, renowned internationally for his brilliant novels and bold, critical publication of possible solutions for two-state justice, every Israeli writer I met was against the occupied territories and the harsh measures used against the Palestinian inhabitants."

"We lost a soul, a mind, a heart, Amos Oz, who brought so much beauty, so much love, and a vision of peace to our lives"

"I'm no Amos Oz, who's always ready to take a firm stance...(Interviewer: "In Europe, Amos Oz is often talked about as some kind of modern Israeli prophet.") DR: That's because he can't let go of the old prophetic gestures. It's a nice role and he's comfortable with it, and maybe we need him to open people's eyes. Who knows, maybe it's just me who's cynical. But there's nothing prophetic about the rest of us, particularly the younger writers. Your horoscope can tell you more about the future than we can."

"Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and Aharon Appelfeld, gained international recognition for works that turned inward, toward private obsessions."

"Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: 'Yids, go back to Palestine,' so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge [sic] shouts at us: 'Yids, get out of Palestine.'"

"Two months ago in the last interview Amos Oz gave infornt of the cameras he told me: “I want to leave this world with the feeling my words meant something to someone” – well they certainly did!"

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim. Now such a clash between right claims can be resolved in one of two manners. There's the Shakespeare tradition of resolving a tragedy with the stage hewed with dead bodies and justice of sorts prevails. But there is also the Chekhov tradition. In the conclusion of the tragedy by Chekhov, everyone is disappointed, disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, but alive. And my colleagues and I have been working, trying...not to find the sentimental happy ending, a brotherly love, a sudden honeymoon to the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, but a Chekhovian ending, which means clenched teeth compromise."

"The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border."

"The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination."

"The kibbutz way of life is not for everyone. It is meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don't really want, in order to impress people they don't really like."

"America is too large and too abstract to generalize about."

"The Hebrew writers who I feel should be more widely appreciated my own mentors, I suppose-are Micha Berdyczewski, Yosef Haim Brenner, and, of course, Shmuel Yosef Agnon. (HC: And on the world scene?) AO: That's too large an order. (HC: Well, whom of those you have read recently have you found impressive?) AO: The South Africans: Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and André Brink."

"[M]uch like Israel itself, this is a novel about great dreams, about great expectations, about bigger-than-life visions and, indeed, about the morning after and the sad realization that every dream come true is bound to be flawed by coming true. (about Black Box)"

"I am a great believer in compromising. I think the only alternative to compromising is fight to the death on any front, on any level."

"I don't believe in magnanimous dreams coming true. Every fulfillment of a dream or of an ambition is bound, destined, to be partial, especially because Israel was founded on such a shaky coalition of conflicting and contradicting dreams, master plans and visions. There was no way they all could come true. The other reason, of course, is that since its creation and even since earlier, Israel has been stuck with a nasty, violent conflict with its Arab neighbors. And I don't think an atmosphere of a constant, violent, hateful conflict is the right atmosphere to create the most egalitarian and just society in the world."

"I'd fight again and again if it would be a matter of life and death for the nation. I would not fight, though, for any other cause. I would not fight for resources. I'd not fight for interests. When it comes to life and death, I have always believed that there is one thing in this world which is more ugly, more sordid, than using violence. And this thing is giving in to violence. In this respect, I am a peacenik not a pacifist. And the Israeli Peace Now movement is clearly not a Make Love Not War movement - not one of those."