Poets From Israel

"Either born in Palestine or having come with their parents at such an early age that Hebrew became their natural language, writers like S. Yizhar, Benjamin Tammuz, Aharon Megged, Moshe Shamir, Natan Shaham, David Shahar, Hanoch Bartov]] and Shulamith Hareven wrote in the emerging local idiom, of orange groves and olive trees rather than birch woods and evergreens."

"They were born without, and I was quibbling over a housecoat."

"I am a poet largely because poetry verges closely on mythic power...The fool is the one who insists on his truth to the exclusion of others. And after all, truth, beauty, the very meaning of words-all these are relative values. This is the realm of poetry. However, you could also say that I am a poet as the result of laziness. I am too lazy to write more prose than I do. Prose is like making love to one woman instead of to fifty, which you can do with poetry...Writing should always be a pleasure, spontaneous-like making love."

"America is, after all, the only Jewish community outside of Israel that is surviving. British Jewry is stagnant, dying. Then there are the French, of course, but in the Diaspora only in America is there open Jewish dialogue, vitality. Its Jewish community is thriving and will, I feel, survive. Sometimes, perhaps, it moves in the wrong direction. But it is self-confident and alive. Many people retain their Jewish identity despite marrying non-Jews. I myself have seen it. [Smiling] Perhaps you don't agree, but the mixed marriages they have there are not all that bad. We Israelis tend to patronize American Jewry. Why not instead be happy about it? American Jews accept their Jewishness. I feel, in fact, that we in Israel could learn a little something from this the better to enjoy our being Jewish."

"It could be fairly said that I disagree with the old, false romanticism about Judaism. In practice, Orthodox Judaism can keep you busy nearly all of the time with things you should be doing. Keeps you feeling guilty. But feeling Jewish should also feel pleasurable. What can be wrong with that?"

"I myself tell people that Israel is the only place that Jews can live where they don't have always to be thinking about being Jewish. For, as you are aware, the practice of Judaism is, in practice, impractical for many of us Jews."

"When I was eighteen, I joined the British army for four years. I served in Egypt and the western desert: Palestinian [Jewish!] units were kept distant from combat zones. After that came a year in the Hagana [pre-State Israeli army], mainly smuggling arms. Such experience makes one wonder how someone like Reagan, who has never been under fire, can order others to fight and shoot. It's crazy! Immoral!"

"Here in Israel, of course, every generation backs away from its parents. Rebels against the old. That has always been the case, and not here alone. Take, for example, Dylan Thomas, now largely ignored. You may be sure that in a few years some Yale professor will rediscover his genius. But I've always kept away from the so-called literary scene, from current fashions. Really, I write for my own pleasure, for my own enjoyment. It's been that way from the very beginning. I have never been involved in any circle or group. In a sense, my politics is in my poetry; it is my poetry. Slogan poetry, the kind written out of guilt, is bad poetry. It just coddles the poet's ego, makes him think that he's done something. But my politics are, in reality, involved in my every poem."

"I've spoken a few times at Peace Now rallies. I am generally against the right wing taking over. But I think I exert more influence, such as it is, through my poems than I would by espousing public positions."

"The Ashkenazic West is more ideological; the Sephardim are, I think, more easy, more human. They don't disown their own because of a football game on Shabbat. Of course I am not talking about Shas; they're just political gangsters. The problem is that the politicians-Shulamit Aloni, Yossi Sarid, all of them have cushy jobs on the side. They don't truly feel responsible for representing voters, the citizens…In Israel your vote has nothing to do with the outcome of an election. Unlike in America, here alienation is built right into the system. But to return to the Sephardim, their good side is that although they may hate each other, they manage to live together...but some of the right-wing Ashkenazim are really psychopaths."

"I am opposed to our keeping all of the West Bank. It's plain that the time has not yet come for Arabs and Jews to be together. All that I really want is to live in a Jewish State. It's a remarkable paradox: the Left is now for policies which would separate the communities while the very far Right, living right there in the occupied territories, are in reality working for integration. Left and Right have exchanged positions, turned completely around. A true paradox! But you know, all such abstractions are relative. What is the "beautiful"? Instead of a sunset or a flower, today it could be a jet plane. Words inflate like money: the more they're printed, the more value they lose. (HC: Do you ever ponder what seems to have gone wrong here in Israel?) YA: Oh, I don't like to complain. We now have our Jewish State. The reality is far from the ideal. The Jewish people have married Israel, this land. But as in a real marriage, things have cooled down. Complaining about it sounds like an old man complaining about his age. An old couple should just live together. That's all. It is, after all, perfectly normal. We have, after all, passed the honeymoon stage, passed the romance, but this is, nonetheless, a true marriage. Such is my Zionism. I am, you see, beyond illusions. In America people, without the slightest intention of doing so, every year repeat "Next year in Jerusalem." Now that is what I call true cynicism."

"(HC: You may now be quasi-retired, but you don't at all sound ready to stop working. Nevertheless, you can look back on much of a lifetime of significant achievement and many awards. What projects have you yet in mind? What do you still want to accomplish?) YA: Oh, to continue with my own thing with poetry: to clean up the language, to use it the right way. I have no wish to be a prophet or a guru. As always, I shall use my own life as my material. You know, I have never been a poet in the professional sense. It's been that way all my life, and so it should remain."

"Yehuda Amichai and Haim Gouri, both poets, also wrote memorable fiction."

"Amichai’s poems about Jerusalem give us Jerusalemites the ability to lead an almost normal life in a place that always seems on the verge of collapse from the weight of so much history and holiness."

"The boundaries which will determine our future are not geographic...The true boundary is, rather, the knowledge that there is a limit to power. The respect which we need will not come through conquest by the sword: it can be obtained only through respect for others. Our ultimate hope is not for the undivided land of Israel, but for an Israel which is undivided in spirit and at peace with itself."

"The peace must not be seen as a peace of industrialists and yuppies; it must not be seen as a peace between people in suits who have Philippine maids, on the backs of, and over the heads of those who are referred to too clinically as the “lower tenth percentiles”—in simple Hebrew, the have-nots."

"Sara's father, never having met Morality, had perhaps been exempted from it. Even in Jerusalem of the early century, which was a warm-hearted city of warm-hearted quarters, Don Isaac Amarillo was considered an exceptionally warm-hearted man, unable to resist the general sweetness of things, such as the pure breeze that blew down the oboes of the alleyways when the day's heat suddenly broke, driving before it sun-bronzed women, all colors of children, smells of jasmine crying out loud in Arab courtyards from an abundance of evening, a dusty shepherd returning from the fields of Nikophoria with a new lamb on his arm, a fragrance of arak, thyme, and repose. At such times his defenses were down, tears of utter helplessness flooded his good-natured, near-sighted eyes, any baby could bowl him over; he was capable of giving away all he possessed, his own soul, had anyone requested it, tying it in his not always immaculate handkerchief, and bestowing. One might compare him then to a big, kind Gulliver with a horde of children perched on his hat brim, tweaking his ears to make him run and stamping their feet on his forehead for the fun of it. And when summertime came, bringing the wild red rut of watermelons piled high in the market by the Jaffa Gate, along the path that led down to Hebron Road from the Old City wall, he was at the mercy of the first woman who came along. (first lines)"

"The sounds of a small city. As small as a man's palm. (chapter 2 p22)"

"Her laugh is like slivers of sunlight. (about Hulda, chapter 3 p40)"

""The first child forces you to define yourself," he said. "When the second comes, you're already defined. Not just as a parent. Whatever you are and aren't, you can be sure that's what your child will learn to demand from you. I was very critical of my own father from an early age. (Elias, chapter 5 p111)"

"An ocean of music foams through him in great waves and keeps on going. (about Tony Crowther, chapter 6 p130)"

"Sara, attuned to the vibrating city, went back to work. Not to the hospital: the thought of that great dungeon of suffering oppressed her. She looked for, and found, a job as a field worker, visiting needy homes on welfare all over the city. The work came to several hours a day. She was usually paired with another nurse, a Christian Arab named Thérèse. Neither of them had known before what depths of misery there were in the city, what poverty holed up in burrows, buried in mildew, stirring amid the huge stones covered with slobber and moss. An age-old underworld of poverty. Holes in the walls. Stinking puddles on the ground. (chapter 7 p144)"

"One has to love, Sara, she says softly, one has to love, human beings are so pitiful, we can't prevent a single death, all we can do is stave it off a little. Give comfort. "That's what Dr. Bimbi says too, but he sees that staving off as a sign of human strength." "Oh, no," Thérèse recoils. "Human beings have no strength. We live like flowers, by the grace of God." (chapter 7 p146)"

"Elias no longer hesitates. More and more he throws himself into their affairs. All the energy that had been dammed up in him while he had struggled to make up his mind now bursts loose. Even his movements have changed: his stride is taller now, quicker, firmer. No longer does he amble lazily along on tall legs. His long mouth is not the brown wound it used to be, having lost much of its sadness. Like that of any new convert, his zeal outdoes itself. (chapter 9 178)"

"She no longer sought fortune-tellers, but relied on herself, on her own two arms, as if she had only now discovered their true strength to support. To sustain. (chapter 9 p180)"

"The ways of the world began to turn upside down about one hour after sunrise. (first line of "Prophet")"

"They kept leaving all the time. One from a town, two from a family, they fled the settled districts of the land of Egypt to join those who had left before them. They did not go far: no further than the nearest oasis or the first gully that had a spring. They sought only to put the sand between themselves and Egypt, to get away from its lords and officials. No more than that. (first lines)"

"An immense freedom, vast beyond human measure, hung over everything. The days had no rules and the laws of nature themselves seemed suspended. There was no longer any need to rise for work in the morning. There were no masters and no slaves. There was only the desert, which held no threat, and the gullies among the rocks. And the fresh, boundless mornings with the thinnest of mists rising from the thorn trees and from the flowering star thistles in the plain. The silence was palpable. There was no end of sky. (p 16)"

"And yet, thought many of the camp dwellers without saying it, and yet we should have had a god to show them. So as not to be shamed. (p 32)"

"In a small stone hut, not far from the Valley of Zin, lived a young man whose father had sought to kill him. Ever since then his eyes blinked rapidly, as if fending off a strong light. The villagers kept away from him and he from them, their speech brief and halting, no more room in it for good or evil than the space between a cloud and a lone thorn tree in the desert. (first lines)"

"Sometimes it rained a little. Sometimes they went thirsty. They knew that God was far away. Perhaps he was in the mountains, the place of the priests and the tabernacle. (p 133)"

"The Hittite woman would not give up. Each time Salu came, she clutched desperately at the threads of his life as if at a garment she could pull him by. (p 171)"

"Nationalism reinforced by fundamentalist religion equals conflict. In this region, we are drugged on man-made drama; on a perpetual high of violent politics. It will take more than a few men signing a paper to make people realize the strength of the ordinary; to feel that sanity can be exciting. Only visible, everyday change can, gradually, with great patience, make it happen. (Preface)"

"One essential thing did change: from now on it is not automatically Jew against Arab and Arab against Jew; it is the Jews and Arabs who support peace, and those, Jews and Arabs both, who oppose it-not one nation against another, but two bi-national coalitions. That in itself constitutes the greatest change in the Middle East, perhaps the only one that might succeed, indeed, perhaps a last chance. (Preface)"