Culture and Ideas

Tribute and Desideratum

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Gershom Gorenberg

Strange as the memory is for me now, the first words I ever got published were poetry. In the last few years, poetry has been a very sporadic pursuit. Yesterday, though, looking for an entirely different file, I happened on a poem I wrote nearly eight years ago, early in 2001, apparently after returning to the wellspring of Ferlinghetti, and that I’d since forgotten.

Watching a videocast from Washington last night, it seemed to me that half of what seemed impossible when I wrote this has come true:  Across the ocean, where hope was written off like a bad debt, it has been reborn.

Here, in Jerusalem, one still has to dream of the very possibility of dreaming. The pseudonymous and very wise Jeremiah Haber chides for even considering the possibility. But I know of no biological difference that allows Americans to imagine a better future and prevents us from doing so. With some trepidation at daring poetry in a blog, I’m posting this.

Desiderata

I am hoping for the rebirth of hope
I am waiting for the beat of wheels on steel, the railroad drumbeat rhythm,
I am waiting for the long-distance heaven express.
I believe its time to lay tracks up to heaven
I am waiting for Jimi Hendrix to rise and climb on, for Phil Ochs to declare he’s retracted his resignation,
to rise all bones and anger banging a guitar and climb on,
I am waiting for the kids in the high schools to lay down their guns and climb on
I believe the generation born dead, raised dead, schooled dead in the malls’ mausoleum marble will pass
I believe with an imperfect faith, cracked but still serviceable, that a generation will be born that knows how to hope.

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The Rules of the Tubs: The Novelist as Ethnographer

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Haim Watzman

Plastic tubs have rules, Ronit Matalon told us last night at a reading at Tmol Shilshom, Jerusalem’s leading literary café. There’s the tub that’s used to soak the semolina and the tub that’s used for baths and many other tubs, and they are not interchangeable. Her new novel, The Sound of Our Footsteps, is a remembrance of childhood in a mother-led family in shack in a poor Israeli neighborhood fifty years ago. And it’s about a little girl learning the unspoken rules of female existence.

Tamar El-Or, the anthropologist who emceed the evening (and for whom I’ve translated three books), presented Matalon’s book as a piece of ethnography—the kind of material that anthropologists collect when they observe a society or culture. Novelists have much more freedom in how to present their material, El-Or noted, but fundamentally the process of observation and the act of telling are shared by the scholar and the writer. Both seek to understand and relate the rules and stories by which society operates.

The unwritten rules by which a family operates—the division of tasks, whether traditional or not; the use of spaces; the chain of command—all these must be accepted and observed by all parties if the family is to function and provide the security and sustenance that families are to provide. Of course, the rules are always being challenged, and sometimes the attempt to observe the rules in the face of challenges can lead to scenes that seem quite logical from the inside but absurd from the outside.

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Huntington’s Legacy

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Samuel Huntington has died, though it took a few days for the news to reach the media. Huntington, a Harvard professor of political science, was the author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. When someone dies, the custom is to praise him. I’d like to honor custom, but Huntington’s most famous book was a pernicious work that has seems to have served as ideological underpinning for America’s failed foreign policy under George W. Bush.

Soon after 9/11, when everyone was talking Huntington, I wrote a riff on the book and my concern that it would create unneeded battle lines. I’m sorry to say that my worries were justified. Here’s part of what I wrote then:

…as some ideas do, this one seeped into popular culture, ready to be quoted when the need arose even by people who couldn’t quite recall the source. September 11 created the need. Say “civilization,” and instead of a battle against an invisible enemy with an opaque ideology, you have a war of the West against Islam. The problem is that Huntington’s thesis is intellectually fuzzy, factually incorrect – and likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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The Pleasure of Simple Truths: The Dragon’s Beloved at the Khan Theater

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Haim Watzman

<em>Vitali Friedland and Udi Rotschild in</em> The Dragon's Beloved <em>at the Khan</em>
Vitali Friedland and Udi Rotschild in The Dragon's Beloved at the Khan
We really didn’t feel like seeing a play last night. It’s true that our pre-purchased season tickets have in the past sent us to the theater at highly inappropriate moments. The night after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, when the country was still in shock and no one had thought to shut the theaters yet, we found ourselves at the Jerusalem Theater watching a production of The Good Soldier Schweik. That play begins with an actor shouting “The Archduke Ferdinand has been assassinated!” Halfway into the first act a man in the audience had a heart attack. The omens were clear. We should have stayed home.

But now I’m glad we didn’t learn that lesson. We tore ourselves away from the television’s images of the attack on Gaza to head for the Khan theater’s production of a new comedy, The Dragon’s Beloved, and good thing that we did.

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Hebrew As She Is Spoke

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Haim Watzman

Is Hebrew the language of the prophets or the language of modern Israel? The question is symbolized by that well-known phenomenon of the new speaker of the language, fresh from her ulpan course, who sets off on a crusade to correct the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation to the benighted native speakers she encounters on the street.

<em>Hebrew needs change we can believe in</em>
Hebrew needs change we can believe in
The two stereotypical views of what constitutes proper Hebrew are played out this week on the centerfold of Ha’aretz ’s Hebrew book supplement, Sefarim . In side-by-side reviews of a new book, Israeli, a Beautiful Language by Ghil’ad Zuckerman, Hagai Hitron and Noam Ordan pursue a now-hoary debate about the actual and desirable relationship between the Hebrew language of the Bible and the Sages and the language spoken in Israel today. (I’m reacting here to the two articles, not to the book itself, which I haven’t read.)

According to Ordan, Zuckerman is correct to claim that the language we speak today in Israel is a language distinct from than that of the Hebrew-speakers of the biblical and classical periods. The Zionist revivers of the language, beginning at the end of the 19th century, sought to reinstate a pure Hebrew based on the language of the Bible (not the rabbis!). But, since they were native speakers of Yiddish and Slavic languages, what they actually ended up doing was grafting a Hebrew vocabulary onto the grammar and syntax of their mother tongues. Therefore, Ordan views with favor Zuckerman’s claim that the language spoken in Israel today should not be called “Hebrew” but rather “Israeli.”

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Birds on My Mind: “Doves” by C.K. Williams

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Haim Watzman

Photo by Chris Basset
Photo by Chris Basset
People who care about the world around them, about other people, about literature, are frustrated people. Once we get to adulthood, our lives fill up with junk and we never have enough time for the things we consider really important. We never seem to be able to devote enough attention to our lovers, friends, and children, so we never know them as intimately as we by all rights should. Calm contemplation of the landscape around us is a rare luxury; when do we have time to simply observe, simply to listen? And what of the worthwhile books we have never read, and the poems we know and love but have never had the time to commit, as we should, to memory?

C.K. William, a great bard of love askew and the missed opportunity, encapsulates this frustration with no little irritation and a measure of humor in his poem “Doves.” I came across it last week in my progress through Williams’ Collected Poems; it’s from his latest, best book, The Singing.

The poet has woken in the early dawn. He’s lying in bed, trying to focus on the morning light, on the morning’s sounds. But how can he? “So much crap in my head,/So many rubbishy facts,/So many half-baked/theories and opinions,” Williams sighs, like an overtaxed blogger.

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Why Pass on the Trauma? A Conversation with Avraham Burg

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On bloggingheads.tv, I’ve interviewed Avrum Burg about his nearly new book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes.  I say nearly new, because the book came out earlier in Israel, where it was roundly attacked, mostly by people who hadn’t read it but knew precisely what it said. I’m told that this … Read more

Art Parodies Life Parodies Art Parodies Life

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Gershom Gorenberg From the start, the war in Iraq seemed like a gruesome satire of that bitter satire, Wag the Dog: a war invented out of fabrications. When my wife saw a front-page pic this morning of Iraqis holding up a shoe in support of the journalist who hurled his footwear at George W. Bush, … Read more

Pioneer in the Swim — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman I am standing on the edge of the pool, in my Speedo swimsuit, feeling like a Second Aliya pioneer determined to speak only the language of their forefathers. It’s Sunday night, Masters Swim Group, Jerusalem Pool. I’m about to swim three kilometers. My swimming is as bad as the typical pioneer’s Hebrew was, … Read more

Arab Poetry for Jews: Sasson Somekh

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Haim Watzman “If we had soldiers read the poetry their enemies write, we could prevent war,” declared Haim Gouri , an old poet and an old soldier, at Jerusalem’s literary café Tmol Shilshom last night. Sasson Somekh, whose new memoir was the subject of the evening, smiled. While he was polite enough not to contradict … Read more

Muppet Mayhem: How I Mis-“Mah Nà Mah Nà”-ed My Daughter

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Haim Watzman

Here at South Jerusalem, Gershom and I sometimes feel like Statler and Waldorf, the two grumpy old critics in the balcony from The Muppet Show. Actually, my Muppet connection runs deep. I grew up identifying with Kermit (“It’s Not Easy Being Green”).

Then, when I came down with and survived a massive Group A Strep infection, I learned that Jim Henson, the Muppets’ creator, had been less lucky in his bout with the disease just six years earlier. And when I was in rehab, we had an occupational therapist who liked to get me and my fellow patients doing shoulder exercises to Kermit’s “Caribbean Amphibian”.

Last week, my daughter Mizmor brought home a set of Muppet Show DVDs from a neighbor and I walked in just as the Muppet classic “Mah Nà Mah Nà” was playing.

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