Di Cintio, Marcello. “Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Life in Contemporary Palestine”, Counterpoint Press, 2018.

Looking at Palestine Through Literature

Amos Lassen

Marcello Di Cintio first visited Palestine in 1999, and as with most outsiders and what he knew was a story of unending struggle, of stories of oppression, exile, and occupation. This is what he had learned from the media. However in “Pay No Heed to the Rockets”, he shares a story that is more complex and that is the Palestinian experience as seen through authors, books, and literature. He explores what literature means to modern Palestinians and how Palestinians make sense of the conflict between a life of imagination and the daily violence of survival. He traveled the long route through the West Bank, into Jerusalem, across Israel, and finally into Gaza and he met with poets, authors, librarians, and booksellers to learn about Palestine through their eyes, and through the stories of their stories.

Di Cintio travels through the rich cultural and literary heritage of Palestine. He uncovered a humanity, and a beauty, often ignored and/or unnoticed by news media. This is a fresh story about Palestine and it begins with art instead of war.

We read of a powerful and perceptive look at Palestinian culture in a memoir that is both travelogue and literary appreciation We learn about libraries and bookstores that are dedicated to preserving and promoting a cultural history threatened with elimination and novels that are being written in prison on cigarette wrappers. We see that on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian who wish to live their lives free of the hatred that is the result of the conflict. We know little about everyday Palestinians but journalist Di Cintio means to change that by sharing his nearly 20 years of visits to the West Bank and Gaza and the writings of Palestine’s many literary figures. We see literature, history, and politics come together and take us to the modern Palestinian literary scene while introducing us to the rich diversity of voices that make it up.

Anziska, Seth. “Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo”, Princeton University Press, 2018.

Ensuring Palestinian Statelessness

Amos Lassen

Those of you who know me know that I am not a political person and n fact, I really dislike politics except we are speaking about Israel. I become really upset when people who have never lived there are ready to criticize whatever Israel says or does. I spent more than half of my life there and while it was not always good for me, I completely understand why Israel must exist and that we must support her. Israel has been around now for seventy years Israel and she has done some amazing things. For forty years Israel has honored a peace treaty with Egypt that is widely viewed as a triumph of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East. Yet the Palestinians who would-be beneficiaries of a vision for a comprehensive regional settlement that led to the Camp David Accords in 1978 still remain stateless. Seth Anziska’s credentials certainly qualify him to have his say on what has happened here and here he looks at how and why Palestinian statelessness persists. In “Preventing Palestine”, he examines the complex legacy of the agreement brokered by President Jimmy Carter.

Anziska bases what he has to say on newly declassified international sources and charts the emergence of the Middle East peace process, including the establishment of a separate track to deal with the issue of Palestine. From the very beginning of the peace process, Anziska tells us “Egyptian-Israeli peace came at the expense of the sovereignty of the Palestinians, whose aspirations for a homeland alongside Israel faced crippling challenges.” With the introduction of the idea of restrictive autonomy, Israeli settlement expansion, and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the chances for Palestinian statehood narrowed even more. I was there during the first Intifada in 1987 and it, along with the end of the Cold War brought new opportunities for a Palestinian state, but many players, refused to see Palestinians as a nation or a people and continued to steer international diplomacy away from their cause.

“Preventing Palestine” brings together excellent political analysis, extensive original research, and interviews with diplomats, military veterans, and communal leaders to give us a new interpretation of the struggle for self-determination.

Politically in Israel, the Camp David Accords are acclaimed while the Oslo Accords are bitterly debated between Left and Right. Anziska shows us the strong connection between the two agreements and the extent to which Oslo drew on Camp David’s autonomy plan. Reality was obscured by hostile political agendas and unabashed bias. Seth Anziska reveals the complex forces that have prevented Palestinian statehood and contributed to the destructive dynamic on the ground. He looks at the failures of the so-called Palestinian-Israeli peace process and why they failed and resulted in injustices for the Palestinians. We see how the breakthrough peace agreement between Egypt and Israel created a roadblock to peace between Israel and the Palestinians and has done research to back this up. While reading this, it is clear why a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict hasn’t been achieved. We see the objective political reality where a people’s rights are marginalized by a military power unchecked by international order and largely supported by the United States. This is a story of Israel’s success, but one that paradoxically leaves it facing an assertive existential enemy.

Anziska’s gives us a compelling analysis of the unexpected continuity that runs throughout the years of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and it is so important that we understand what we have here.

We already know the outcome of the contest at this point but that does not stop this from being a thrilling and gripping read. Anziska reveals the willingness of Americans and even Egyptians to go along with the Israeli campaign. I have read so much about this of late, but I can assure that this is a book that needs to be read if you are to understand.

Levin, Hanoch. “Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems”, (English and Multilingual Edition), translated by Atar Hadari, Art Productions, 2017.

Finally in English

Amos Lassen

Nineteen years after Hanoch Levin’s early death from bone cancer, the great Israeli playwright’s bleak, searing poetry is finally translated into English. Levin was a great Israeli playwright, an author, and a poet and above all else, he was a man who dared. He was born in born in 1943 and death was the one and only true muse, the great and bottomless well of inspiration. The cause of death was bone cancer and he was only 56-years-old. Death permeates, in some way or another, nearly every poem of this recently published collection which has been translated by British poet and playwright Atar Hadari. The volume, which received a prestigious PEN Translates award in England, is the first, and long overdue, book of Levin’s poetry to be released in English, and it is a cause for celebration.

Levin’s dramaturgical work had been formative for generations of Israelis. He was both revered and reviled for his radical left-wing politics, his iconic satire, obscenity and absurdism. He wrote 56 plays, and garnered numerous awards for them, but he only published six books of poetry, a genre, it seems, Levin reserved for his most intense, varied, and poignant thoughts about mortality. Levin’s work is the “profane, rude, unavoidably direct and modern answer to Ecclesiastes.

”Oh miserable dead, this isn’t California,

this is the dark grave and this is death!

So shall a son leave his father and mother

and man leave his wife and cleave unto his death”.

Here, Levin is giving generations of the dead a pep talk—lest they forget their predicament. The poet is playing with the well-known biblical verse, Genesis 2:24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.” But whereas Genesis optimistically points toward formation of new familial bonds—a chain of them—in Levin’s rendition, the true and final beloved, is the cessation of it all.

The volume is bilingual, and reading the original alongside Hadari’s translation, one notices that the opposite of sunny “California” is the musically resonant, dark grave. Reading this closely can make California no longer feel like California.

Despite Levin’s immense popularity, not a great deal is known about him. As Israeli scholar Freddie Rokem wrote in the introduction to The Labor of Life, a selection of Levin’s plays published in English translation in 2003: “In comparison with most of his contemporaries in literature and the arts, at least in Israel, who quite willingly expose themselves to the media, consciously creating a public persona and expressing their opinions about political and other issues, Levin fervently guarded his privacy throughout his career, giving only a few, rather angry interviews during his first steps as a writer.”

Igal Sarna’s essay, “The National Poet’s Mother,” has translated and included in abridged form in this volume. “Hanoch Levin spies on the neighborhood, I spy on Levin.” Sarna, who wrote this piece when he was just starting out as a writer, is now a renowned journalist and author. He describes his failed attempts to get through to Levin. It was worse than a failure: As Sarna put it, even “more surprising was the silence of his friends, even those he’d not seen for many years. … When I approached them, they sought his consent. Levin preferred them not to speak with me.” It was as if, in deference to the author’s desired privacy, those in his circle had taken a vow of silence.

At one point, however, Sarna found the South Tel Aviv building where Levin grew up. There, he found the poet’s mother, and something clicked: “In the abandoned buildings, used heroin syringes from the night before rolled on the floor; inside I also found Malka Levin, who spoke to me through the crack of the door. I was holding on to the door handle, she was pulling from the other side.”

Sarna says that it is “very Polish [i.e., Ashkenazi], to hide. … You care very much what other people think about you. It’s the shame. Especially when you’re poor, when you grow up with a weird mother.”

Levin’s parents immigrated to Palestine from Lodz in 1935, and Levin’s childhood was overshadowed by poverty and a keen awareness of all of his relatives who had perished in the Holocaust. On top of that, when Levin was only 13, his father died of a heart attack. The death of a father at a young age leaves one unprepared, and exposed. Poetry is a of hiding.

Levin’s first poetry collection, “Morning Prayers” (1965) which is, included in this volume, describes the life of an impoverished neighborhood and its inhabitants’ reaction to the death of one of their own. The opening poem “Sing to the Lord a New Song,” is both a satire on the well-known psalm and a literal attempt to compose a new kind of a mourning ritual, an elegy that is totally different from a kaddish. The narrator speaks directly to the dead body remembering:

… the smell of onion was wafting.

Then your wife leaned across,

then the neighbor came in a fright the way a neighbor does,

then the doctor came and certified the hour of your death

with his breath all toothpaste minty fresh.

The rain fell and fell on the synagogue.

At the first service they wondered where you went,

at the second service they already knew.

The tone is completely disaffected, detached, and almost disdainful. Levin’s attention to smell, particularly the unwanted and misplaced smells of onion and the doctor’s breath, brings home the sad smallness of the world surrounding the dead man.

This poem is the opposite of a prayer. Whereas prayer—on this occasion, kaddish—is a song of praise, this is a song of disdain. Prayer seeks connection but Levin’s poetry asserts loneliness and alienation. Prayer points to eternity, while Levin is bent on finality. Instead of piety and repentance, Levin uses humor and sarcasm. And yet, sublimity is here, too. A skeptic is entitled to a religious experience as much as a believer is.

Levin was really able to show that Israel is “a country of survivors, and it’s ugly.” Indeed, in his poetry, and in his plays, Levin depicts Israelis in less than flattering ways. Look at the character in “Morning Prayers”:

… Berta Levi’s already sitting by the window,

cracking nuts.

Her buttocks, two noble hefty weights of tender flesh

Bow to one another graciously as she walks,

now rest in their residue, the flowered cushion.

Her breasts, two curious good-fellows with swollen faces,

Rise up against the bra, belisha beacons to those who’ve

lost their way

There are no borders in Levin’s satire—women and men, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, rich and poor, pious and secular. Some feel that the reason his poetry had not been translated is because Levin never exercised good taste or political correctness.

“Hebrew is a much more compact language than English, so a real difficulty was making the much longer sets of beats in English keep moving.” Moreover, Levin sporadically and unexpectedly uses rhyme; often for emphasis of a sarcastic remark. Translation itself is a problem as Levin’s poetry

is not merely Hebrew, but Hebrew pertaining specifically to the world of Jewish ritual practice and culture. Levin’s characters are old-world and closer to the characters one finds in the works of Isaac Babel, I. B. Singer, and even Shalom Aleichem.

His heaviest poems are those written by Levin in the final years and months of his life, and addressed to his wife. He was very aware of his spreading cancer and he referenced it in brutally honest, disturbing, and heartbreaking lines. In the poems from this cycle, in death’s proximity, Levin admits to fear, disappointment, visions of his beloved with another, and goes at length into details about decomposition and yet these are love poems. The sublime enters through a strange and unexpected backdoor and even though he was a cynic and a skeptic, he felt passion and love.

The poems here are profound, disturbing, and deeply affecting. In “Morning Prayers”, he depicts the scene of the resurrection of the dead (which he clearly did not believe in).

And all the dead will wonder

How tall the trees have grown and how grey their grave

And still they’ll look and wonder at themselves

And Messiah pass among them and laugh

Handing out to each of them a mint cough drop.

I have been something of a Hanoch Levin groupie and this began when I first saw “Yaakovi and Liedenthal” and then saw new productions of “The Bathroom Queen” and “You, Me and the Next War”. I remember totally “The Great Whore of Babylon” and “Rubber Merchants” and “The Trials of Job”. I could watch them over and over. There is one poem that appears in one of Levin’s plays that I have fallen in love with “Checkmate”. Below is my attempt at translation:

Checkmate

My child, where did you go? My good child where are you?

A knight that is black strikes a white knight.

My father won’t return, he is never coming back

A white knight rams a black knight

There are tears in the homes and silence in the streets,

As the king is playing with the queen.

My child will never wake, he sleeps, he will not grow.

Black knight downs the white knight

My father is in the darkness and will never again see light

White knight downs a black knight

There is weeping in homes and silence in the streets

as the king is jostling with the queen.

My son who was at my breast is now in the clouds

Black knight fells a white knight

My father is in my heart but his heart has stopped

White night fells a black

There are funeral wails in homes and silence in the streets and

the king keeps playing with the queen.

My son where are you now, my dear son, where have you gone and why?

The white knight and the black knight are dead.

My father won’t return, he’s never coming back

There are no knights— black or white.

There are screeches in the rooms and silence in the streets,

on the empty chessboard there are just the living king and queen.

Fletcher. Martin. “Promised Land: A Novel of Israel”. Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2018.

“One Brother Builds Israel, the Other Protects it”

Amos Lassen

Martin Fletcher was the head of NBC TV’s Tel Aviv News Bureau and her certainly knows Israel. He brings us “Promised Land”, a story of Israel that will no doubt compared to Leon Uris’ “Exodus”. It is a “story of triumph and tragedy, new love and historic hate” that is told by unforgettable characters. The story of the creation of the state of Israel is in itself epic and therefore demands an expert storyteller and that describers Fletcher perfectly. The prose is gorgeous and the story is exciting. We could not ask for more. “Promised Land” is the story of two brothers and the woman they love set against the founding of Israel.

The story begins when fourteen-year-old Peter is sent to America in order to escape what was happening in Nazi Germany. His younger brother Arie and their entire family are sent to the death camps and only Arie survives.

Years later, the brothers reunite in the new Jewish state, where Arie has become a businessman and one of the richest men in Israel. Peter becomes a top Mossad agent heading some of Israel’s most vital espionage operations. “One brother builds Israel, the other protects it.”

They both fall in love with the same woman, Tamara, a lonely Jewish refugee from Cairo. During the following twenty years as their new homeland faces tremendous obstacles and odds that could destroy it, the brothers face intrigues, jealousies and political strife that could tear their new lives apart.

We are reminded that the pioneers, settlers, immigrants and founders of Israel worked very hard to build a powerful country and a democratic presence in a hostile environment and paid heavily to do so. Fletcher explains the history and conflicts of the early years of Israel’s statehood never letting us forget that those pioneers and builders were reeling from the horrors and pain of the Holocaust. Many of our characters here are struggling to cope with their losses and create new lives and homes for themselves. Everybody has his/her burden to bear.

Fletcher not only gives us the history of the country but also a look at how people lived in Israel at that time in her history. We are more than aware of the military struggles the young nation faces and how it was to live at a time when war was always imminent. The addition of Tamara and the romance heightens the already tense atmosphere that Israelis were forced to live with.

The major problem I had with the book is that Leon Uris set the mark very high with “Exodus” and most authors that tried to give us something similar did not measure up. While the story of Tamara helped us to understand the unease that existed then in the country, I had trouble understanding her purpose in the story and I felt she intruded on the larger picture.

Aside from that I wanted a bit more character development and I longed for a hero to fill the shoes of an Ari Ben Canaan and his brother Barak. I also question the timing of the release of this novel since Israel is going through a really rough period now and I think we need more of a sense of reality than fiction right now.

Quite basically, this is the story of the first twenty years of Israel and I was there during the last five years of that period and I found much of the novel to be true to life descriptively. Using the two brothers is a clever way to bring in the story as seen through the eyes of the founding generation. While this is fiction, it also gives us an inside look at the passion of the people building a nation and this is what matters above all else.