Women Authors From Poland

"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)"

"To my mind, the whole world is nothing more than an invitation to take part in creation. Literature, at least-or at least the magic of opening sentences-answers this need. ("Beginnings")"

"What should we do about myth: tell it from generation to generation, love it, and, in some part of ourselves, even believe it a little; but also open it, and add to it another midrash and another interpretation and some more knowledge, ours and that of others. There is no contradiction to them; "all are words of the living God," and the ability of man to contain different things is limitless. We may discuss myth at the dinner table, and say the blessing over these candles without any difficulty, and know and tell our children that the jar of oil, as a metaphor for continuous culture, will never be lacking. ("What Should We Do about Myth?")"

"Food is a world view. It is the real relationship between man and his environment; it is enjoying all this bounty, or forcing and being forced. ("On Being a Levantine")"

"I am a Levantine because I see war as the total failure of common sense, an execrable last resort. And because I am a Levantine, all fundamentalists on all sides, from Khomeini to Kahane, will always want to destroy me and all Levantines like me, here and in the neighboring"

"The strength to carve signs in stones is for me the Levant, and is what makes it all worthwhile."

"reference to a Georgis Seferis poem, in the essay "On Being a Levantine""

"This writer said in October 1967, in an article in Ha'aretz, that if we hold on to the territories, the first consequence will be that we will start lying to ourselves. That is exactly what happened, very rapidly, and that is what is happening today, when a weak population, deprived of citizenship and rights, lacking arms and the means to defend itself, is claiming its rights-a claim that is consonant with the Israeli social interest itself-but is reflected in our warped mirror as actually threatening the existence of the state. Not only an outsider will have trouble understanding this; so will the historian of the future. The worst of it is that these tribal mythologies leave us with no alternative, no scale of possibilities, no prospect of culture, no choice of identity-except to be either murderers, the murdered, or both. As though Israel had no other identity. As though, in the biggest lie of all, this were Judaism. ("Israel: The First Forty Years")"

"One of the things Zionism was meant to make from scratch was a Hebrew present. Not only in reality; in the language, too. In ancient Hebrew, there was very little grammatical present. There was a past and a future--that is, memory and longing. We almost never said "I go," "I do." It was necessary to make the present a linguistic habit, a routine part of life. Perhaps Zionism came into being primarily to create for us a present tense. To say at long last that the Jews, too, have a present. Whoever now denies this present has forgotten the whole lesson of Zionism; he would send us back to the days of remembering and longing of the Diaspora. We came to Israel so as to not wait for a messiah who is yet to come; rather, we came to be here now, today. That is Zionism in a nutshell. ("Life Is Now, Mr. Shamir")"

"We write of what we know, but a large part of our local culture-not all but a large part-tends to lose its significance in transposition."

"It is probable that the time of governments' wishing to control literature is past. What we are faced with now is the frightening authority of great, terrifying masses of people who hardly ever read, who prefer television and the movies, and who carry the terrible weight of sheer huge numbers. What can we do? Essentially, what we have been doing so far: write of what we know, our places, our environment, our families. Tribal literature, if you wish. All the world understands families. A family contributes to the understanding of people as people."

"One example of our inability to cope with large numbers is our lack of comprehension of the magnitude of the Holocaust. During the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel, it was the individual murders that registered in our memories and our senses rather than the descriptions of mass murders. For many of us who attended the trial, Eichmann had to answer for personally whipping to death a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy who stole an apple. Large numbers tend to become abstract, too abstract to identify with. No writer can write about the six million of the Holocaust; we must write about individuals, about families."

"To a certain extent, all writing is working within tradition: we use idioms, linguistic connections, and associations known to our tribe, because we cannot go outside language, and languages are tribal affairs."

"Writing, real writing, has very little to do with so-called typical behavior. It must be whittled down from our familiar spheres of reference to what the person actually is and does; in good writing, no person is "typical.""

"To this day our language has kept its stony, concentrated, concise character, striving for the essential. This makes Hebrew practically untranslatable; a phrase of three words in Hebrew becomes a phrase of eighteen words in French, so you can imagine what it does to poetry."

"By means of her advocacy of a new Jewish secularism, Irena Klepfisz calls to our attention the seriousness of the break and in so doing begins the necessary work of repair."

"I feel a sense of urgency when it comes to Trump and his administration. I’m here today because I’m beginning to see what my parents saw in the 1930s in Europe. I always tried to imagined how it was like for them, but this is the first time in my life when I feel that I’m experiencing something similar. It has enormous echos for me. ‘America First’ is not substantially different from ‘Deutschland über Alles.’ One of the things that scares me is the global rise of right-wing movements in the United States, Europe and Israel. The American alt-right is in dialogue with similar movements in Israel, and this might pose a danger to both Israelis and Americans."

"no theory about American Jews has been able to express quite as well the nature and power of Jewish identity as the moment when I realized I had passed without a second thought a group of homeless people on a New York City street because I was rushing to a Jewish women's vigil protesting Israeli policies against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. I saw myself instinctively redefining geography and distance, experiencing how much closer Israel, the West Bank and Gaza felt than the 59th Street stop of the Lexington line. Moments like these, integral parts of our daily lives, simultaneously embody theory and concrete experience and I continue to trust them most."

"From the age of twenty, my ego has been invested in poetry. For me, the prospect of expression through poetry transforms solitary silence and an empty page into sheer pleasure. I feel unafraid, knowing I can break all the rules, invent my own forms. No matter what persona I take on, my voice remains accessible and recognizable. There is no artifice, no pose, no sense that I have to transform myself into someone else. As a poet, I remain comfortably disrespectful. I experiment, take risks which sometimes work and sometimes don't. For years I have had no such courage in essay writing. It has seemed an iron-clad genre that I could neither escape nor fit into."

"di bavegung, "the movement," has pushed, encouraged, and given me space, like it has to many women who lacked confidence in their skills and in the value of their perspectives. Above all, it challenged me to present publicly what I discuss privately, to raise issues that I care about and that are central to my experience as a feminist and lesbian, as a Jew sorting out my identity and my relationship to Jewish history, as an American Jew defining my relationship to events in the Middle East."

"At thirteen I tried silence. At sixteen I tried anonymity. I have since learned these are not the only options."

"Repeatedly, I find that I am preoccupied not with countering anti-Semitism, but with trying to prove that anti-Semitism exists, that it is serious, and that, as lesbian/feminists, we should be paying attention to it both inside and outside of the movement."

"I want the issue of anti-Semitism to be incorporated into our overall struggle because there are lesbian/feminists among us who are threatened in this country not only as lesbians, but also as Jews. If that incorporation simply takes the form of adding us on to the already existing list of problems, then it will be mere tokenism and lip service. But if it includes self-examination, analysis of the Jew in America, and dialogue between Jews and non-Jews, then I think this movement will have made a real attempt to deal with the issue."

"When the Jews finally staged the uprising in April 1943, the Polish underground refused them almost every form of assistance. Even though they were facing the same enemy, even though their country was occupied, the Poles could not overcome their anti-Semitism and join the Jews in the struggle for the freedom of both groups, and instead chose to stage a separate Polish uprising more than a year later."

"I think it is time for all of us in this movement, Jews and non-Jews alike, to examine our silence on this subject, to examine its source. And Jews especially need to consider their feelings about their Jewishness, for any self-consciousness, any desire to draw attention away from one's Jewishness is an internalization of anti-Semitism. And if we want others to deal with this issue, then we ourselves must start to develop a sense of pride and a sense that our survival as Jews is important."

"If someone were to ask me did I think a Jewish Holocaust was possible in this country, I would answer immediately: "Of course." Has not America had other holocausts? Has not America exterminated others, those it deemed undesirable or those in its way? Are there not holocausts going on right now in this country? Why should I believe it will forever remain benevolent towards the non-Christian who is the source of all its troubles, the thief of all its wealth, the commie betrayer of its secrets, the hidden juggler of its power, the killer of its god? Why should I believe that, given the right circumstances, America will prove kind to the Jew? That given enough power to the fascists, the Jew will remain untouched?"

"As a child, my first conscious feeling about being Jewish was that it was dangerous, something to be hidden."

"As I grew older, I learned the full breadth of Yiddish literature; but this early introduction with its inherent political vision became as powerful an influence in my life as did the war."

"Experience has obviously taught me that Jews are not the only ones in danger and that what is "undesirable" in me is not limited to my Jewishness."

"As a writer I still cherish poetry that tells a story, especially the dramatic monologue. I still value most a poetry that deals with people, especially those alienated and out of the mainstream-the overworked and dreamless, Third World, women, gay-a subdued, earnest poetry that expresses their feelings, their struggles, the conditions of their lives."

"the Holocaust. I find it almost impossible to write that word because here-in America-the word has lost almost all meaning. And the fault lies with both non-Jews and Jews. It lies with the "American way of life," with the process of Americanization, with American Big Business, with commercialism, with posing, with artificial feelings...I find-and am repeatedly stunned by it-that people (including non-Jews) insist on dredging it up. Writers, for example, who have no feelings or connection to the war, insist on it as literary metaphor, as an epigraph, as some kind of necessary addition. A casual allusion to Auschwitz. An oblique reference to the Warsaw Ghetto. Somehow this "sprinkling" of Jewish experiences is thought to reflect sensitivity, a largeness of heart. And of course it does not. It is simply the literary Holocaust, the Holocaust of words that has nothing to do with fact. It is nothing more than a pose. I must say that my teeth grind whenever I see these gratuitous gestures-usually devoid of any Jewish context, devoid of any sense of the Jewish experience or history."

"I've been thinking a lot about it lately, about the corruption here in America, how everything becomes big business, how everything becomes diseased. Everything."

"How can I say to people that for the survivors with whom I grew up the Holocaust never ended? That all my life I will feel the loss of never having known my father, never even having a photograph of him after the age of seventeen. That all my life I will feel the loss of aunts and cousins and grandparents I never knew. That my mother still stacks shelves and shelves of food-just in case. That twenty years after the war, when some plaster fell down from the living room ceiling, she froze with fear because she thought we were being bombed...The Holocaust was not an event that ended in 1945-at least not for the survivors. Not for me. It continued on and on because my mother and I were alone."

"This is the confusion. Being Jewish. Being a lesbian. Being an American. It all converges. It is like feelings about one's parents. Love and embarrassment. The painful realization that they are not perfect."

"When it comes to the bottom line, the Moral Majority is Christian. So is the Ku Klux Klan. So is the Nazi Party. And I am completely stymied that large segments of the Jewish population have not absorbed these simple basic facts."

"I am also angry that Jews have somehow, during this process, gotten stuck—I'm not sure if that's the right word, but I don't know how else to express it. They have been unable to absorb the experience of the Holocaust, have not learned how to transcend the catastrophe. They've mistakenly thought that to transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it's kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression—not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression."

"This is perhaps the most painful aspect for me of being Jewish, for I identify strongly as a Jew, am proud to be a Jew. And yet I sometimes feel so torn-so torn from the Jewish community, from the Jews I grew up with, who nurtured me, helped me. And yet I don't understand what America has done to them and how it has seduced them. The conservatism is there and really hard to accept. But it is there, definitely there with the mainstreaming."

"what the Jewish lesbian encounters are the typical conservative stances. Closed doors. Silence. Disgust."

"Those of the Left, Jew and non-Jew alike, seem to believe what the Right has always maintained-that Jews run the world and are, therefore, most responsible for its ills. The casualness, the indifference with which the Left accepts this anti-Semitic stance enrages me. It is usually subtle, often taking the form of anti-Semitism by omission. Its form is to show or speak about Jews only as oppressors, never as anything else. That is anti-Semitic."

"I cannot end without affirming as strongly as I can my deep feelings of identification and pride in being a Jew. It was Jews who first instilled in me the meaning of oppression and its consequences. It was Jews who first taught me about socialism, class, racism and what in the fifties was called "injustice." It is from Jews that I adopted ideals that I still hold and principles that I still believe are true and must be fought for and put into practice. It was from Jews that I learned about the necessity for resistance. It was from Jews that I also learned that literature is not simply fancy words or clever metaphor, but instead is deeply, intimately connected to life, to a life that I am a part of. It is really almost impossible to compress this inheritance into a single paragraph. But I know its depth and vitality, and I know that I have absorbed it thoroughly into my consciousness."

"I write as much out of a Jewish consciousness as I do out of a lesbian/feminist consciousness. They are both always there, no matter what topic I might be working on. They are embedded in my writing, embedded and enmeshed to the point that they are not necessarily distinguishable as discrete elements. They merge and blend and blur, for in many ways they are the same."