Busy-ness

These past Daniel-less weeks have been a whirlwind of activity - goodbye dinners, spending time with friends, writing papers, etc.
Tonight I said goodbye to some of our closest friends of our Year in Israel by going with to see a community theater production (in English) of Oklahoma. It was a pretty good show - the singing was terrific although the dancing left much to be desired. Ultimately I was left with a strong sense of pride for America, a kind of nostalgia for good-old-American patriotism as represented by Rogers and Hammerstein. Although the play did not end in the singing of Hatikvah, as did 1776 (see my post on the Zionistic ending to that play), the notes in the program answer the question "Why Oklahoma in Israel?" in an interesting way:

"It strikes me that makes the show particume that there are many similarities between the fledgling state (Oklahoma joined the Union in 1907) and our own country. Both reflect a microcosm of conflicting interests, loyalties, sectors, and traditions joining together to form a new polity. Bit it is another, subtler, common theme that makes the show particularly appropriate for the Israeli stage. Bridging the often conflcting interests of the formers and the cowmen is Oklahoma's peddler, Ali Hakim. Despite being labeled as a Syrian (in Lynn Riggs' play, Green Grow the Lilacs, which served as the basis for Oklahoma!) or Persian (as adapted by Oscar Hammerstein II), Hakim is ostensibly Jewish, as were most ofthe peddlers in the western territories at the time. In fact, the role was created by Joseph Buloff, a star of the Yiddish stage, and his Jewish inflection was the subject of considerable critical discusion at the time. Does that make Oklahoma! a Jewish play? Not really, but iot does reflect the overwhelming influence that Jewish immigrants and their descendants had on the American musical theater."

I'm not sure that the most important point is that the 'Jewish' peddler represents Jewish influence on the American stage, as the character, a hypersexualized, irresponsible, money/business focused outsider is a conglomeration of negative stereotypes, likeable though he may be as a comic character. His Jewish character, not unlike the women who are treated as objects to be bought and sold, won and owned, are the creations of the 1943 American imagination of Jews, and performing the play in Israel, with Jews performing all of the roles and sitting in the audience, truly changes the meaning of the play and places Jews as the insiders, the active characters, and the athletic, macho heroes - truly a feit suiting the Zionist spirit.


As today was my last day of Yiddish class, and as we've been reading some poetry in class lately, I decided to end this post by translating a Manni Leib poem for you:

To the Non-Jewish Poet

An heir of Shakespeare, of shepherds and knights,
So good and fine for you, non-Jewish poet!
The earth is yours, where your uncle pig trots:
She gives him feed and gives your muse sustenance.

You sit like a bird on your branch and twitter,
And all the wild space answers you:
From you see the satieatedness, the breadth of the cities,
The complete serenity of satiated spirits.

And here am I, unwanted, a poet of the Jews,
Growing with weeds upon not-our world
Of grandfathers - tired wanderers with dusty beards -

That nourish themselves from books and markets;
And melodically I sing in a strange world the tears
Of wandering in a desert under foreign stars.



And one more for good measure (sorry about my poor translation skills, but at least this gives you the rough idea, though you are missing the patterns of the sounds). Here is one by David Hofstein:

In a Winter Evening

In a winder evening in Russian fields...
Where can one be lonlier, where can one be lonlier?

An old horse, a creaking sled,
A snowcovered dirt road - and I am in the middle

Behind, in the only corner of the paleness,
Smouldering stripes of sun's light still extinguish themselves sadly.

Ahead, a white desert spreads out
And far ahead a few houses are scattered -

There sleeps a hamlet, sunk down in the snow...
A few paths lead to the Jewish home.

A house, like all the others, but with larger windows,
And among the children there I am the oldest.

And narrow is my little world, and small is my circle:
Once in two weeks I go from the hamlet to the village.

And longing in silence for fields an for the vast wideness,
For many roads and paths, covered by snowdrifts...

And I cary in my heart the hidden pain
Of seeds that wait and wait to be sewn...

In winter evenings in Russian fields...
Where can one be lonlier, where can one be lonlier?...

Second Draft of a Poem

Morning Confession

metal pierces blushing flesh
fingers probe, plunge into the land’s
heart-shaped child, pry into
intimate corners, prod
white fibers and pull forth
beads of flesh

they shatter
explode
between coffee-stained teeth

on the plate a carcass splayed open
bloodless, vacant, defunct

First Draft of a Poem

So I don't write poetry very often, and this is very much a first draft of something I've been thinking about for a while, but I'd appreciate your feedback as I think this has some potential if it were developed a bit.

Morning Confession

I eat pomegranates for breakfast.
And sometimes I yearn for the substance of
A slice of bread – its firmness and fullness
Familiarity, convenience, tidiness
Next to a cup of instant coffee
But instead

I slice into the pomegranate with my knife
And pry apart the insides with my hand
Prodding at the white fibers and
Pulling forth the beads of fruit
Pushing them between my lips
And crunching, devouring

I say that this connects me to the land
To the seasons – I eat what is
Growing here, now.
But I don’t know the land
And I don’t know the seasons
Although, at least, I do eat pomegranates
For breakfast.
From inside my apartment
I imagine myself a part of this vital world
And I cut into the land’s heart-shaped child
Grinding the seeds between my
Coffee-stained teeth

The environment is a cause for which
I enter my credit card number online
Donating chai for the source of all life
And closing my computer to shut it away
The environment is large and far away
It is a stranger whom I pity
An abstraction grounded only in the sky

But the round globe of the pomegranate
Feels firm in the palm of my hands
Flushed pink as I enter it with
My sticky fingers, plucking the
Pinkish blood and white, firm body
From a corpse splayed wide across my plate
A silenced heart upon a hospital bed

I drop the last teardrop-shaped seed
Into my cavernous mouth
The rind is empty, shredded
Its secrets revealed, it holds no more
And I throw the carcass in the trashcan
Close the lid, and
Walk away.

For Your Reading Pleasure

A poem we read in Yiddish class - the translation is mine, so bear with me...

By the White Tables, by Mani Leib

By the white tables I sat for a long while,
And looked into eyes, and talked, talked,
And in those eyes I forgot myself,
Until the old waiter said into my ear,
With a good smile and with a soft voice,
Apologetically told me: It's late...

OK, bye!... Tomorrow I will return.
Streets. Night. A fog blew, blew.
Streets. And from out of the fog emerged
Eyes. Those eyes, light and teary,
And like moving, shining stars,
They accompanied me, insignificant me, homeward.


Manny Leib, born Manny Leib Branhinsky in 1883 in Nizhn, a small town not far from Kiev, arrived in America at the age of 22. He worked in shoe factories in New York, where he eventually contracted tuberculosis from their poor working conditions. Leib began his poetry career by translating Ukranian and Russian poetry into Yiddish for the Yiddish daily newspaper, the Forverts. He wrote poetry for adults and also for children, and is known for having brought a formal complexity to Yiddish poetry, consisting of tight rhymes and soft, polished sounds. He was a leader and founding member of the American Yiddish poetry group Di Yunge (the Young Ones). (The information above I mostly found at the NYBC website).




By the way, thanks for the teddy bears and well wishes. I am on the mend.

Sabbath of Sabbaths and Rhyme Royal

Services were exquisite. They were an emotional journey after which I truly feel cleansed and renewed. They were a conversation between me and the community, the community and the infinite, the choir and the soloist, the tradition and the future, sleep and wakefulness, strength and weakness, life and death, joy and sorrow. I felt as though I was guided by strong and knowing hands through a fearsome and draining path toward deeper knowledge of self and a deeper sense of meaning, and then brought back again gently to a place of joy and relief. I am left in awe and bewilderment at the rainbow of my experiences over the holiday - the joy and grief, the longing and hope, the fear, faith, skepticism, desire, thankfulness.
Often I find the final moments of Yom Kippur the most moving, those moments when I want so badly for it all to be over, but want so badly for it to last forever, when I feel so holy and so desperate for holiness, my body weak and dizzy, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, even between life and death. It is then that I believe in the infinite most, when I can feel the presence of infinity leaving and prodding me back into myself. It is such a bittersweet marraige when my soul cleaves to my body and the community scatters into separate individuals and I am myself once more - how glad I am to return, and how sorry I am to leave. I often don't consider myself a spiritual person and it is often hard for me to reach a state of spirituality but on Yom Kippur I am taken there, and especially this year I feel that, accross a vast chasm, I glimpsed the divine.
So, of course, I wrote you a GRE review poem about it. It's in rhyme royal, which means that it's in seven-line iambic pentameter stanzas rhyming ababbcc. Rhyme royal was first used by Chaucer, but probably got its name because James I of Scotland also wrote using this verse form. It hasn't really been used since the Restoration.

We stand as one, an army afraid of the fight
Our voices joined, we breathe out our souls in song
The spirit drains as day fades into night
And we yearn for a home where our bodies don’t belong
The end grows near, and still the wait is long
Our words are fervent and yet the chasm grows wide
Our deaths and and lives grasp hands across the divide

We fear we may fall in the swelling rift – unsure,
Dizzy, and week, we step forward toward the abyss
And cry forgive us pardon us make us pure
Together in song but separate in thought we kiss
The edge of the tallis that wraps the world and this
Is the day of atonement, this is the time
When we return to ourselves and so doing become sublime

The clouds are tufts of pink in the evening sky
Our eyes turn to royal blue heavens that deepen toward night
It soon will be over, in these last moments we try
To promise to change, to grow to be good and upright
Transforming our conscience, absorbing these last shards of light
Through parched lips swallowing promise of hope and peace
And begging that in days to come our joys will increase

The iron gates slowly fold closed to shut out our pleas
To prod us back to our lives from this brush with the end
But surely, couldn’t I reach in my hand and squeeze
Out just a piece of that magic so I can extend
This teary-eyed, awe-filled prayer and transcend
My life all the days of the year? The shofar sounds
I let go of sublime as the harsh- holy call resounds


After Kol Nidre, we went on a walk to Emek Refaim, where the whole neighborhood wandered the streets, greeting friends and neighbors to apologize for the wrongdoing of the year. It was a sight to see, like a street fair without the bouncy castles or loud music. Swarms of people gathered in the road, children riding bicycles, clusters of friends chatting, strolling, people watching. We ran into someone who worked for UVA Hillel two years ago, and were excited to chat with her a little. She's living in Jerusalem and hopefully we'll have an opportunity to see her again before the year is through.

I hope you all had an easy and meaningful fast, and are looking forward to Sukkot, the season of our joy.

Ottava Rima

For this, I really must apologize - this poetry writing is pretty hard and I know the following is ridiculous. This is another poem written to help me study for the GRE literature in English exam.
Ottava Rima consists of 8 line stanzas usually in iambic pentameter rhyming abababcc. Originally used for heroic themes, it also became popular in the mock epic form. I have written a very short, poor quality, mock epic about a reverse mechitsa, which is supposed to be making fun of the idea that it is better for men and women to be separated - not sure if this was successful at all so I thought I'd summarize what I was trying to do up front.
Separation: A Mock Epic

Once upon an evil time that’s past
There was a sanctuary made of stone
Together there the folks would pray and fast
Although the women could not pray alone
A problem which to them seemed large and vast
For their sweet voices sounded like foul groans
When joined with prayer that came from mouths of men
A sound they never have to hear again

The women cried that they were quite concerned
They felt as though in prayer they were distracted
Because instead of heaven their thoughts turned
To the strong tall men to whom they were attracted
And wondered if their advances would be spurned
They desired to see a change, reform enacted
They wished to solve this problem and they prayed
This soul-deep longing heavy on them weighed

But lo! There was a woman young and pure
With muscles taut as wire round her bones
Who cried that co-ed prayer she’d not endure
She did not wish to hear the manly moans
By members of a sex that was impure
By virtue of their cruel Y chromosomes
Who were anchored to the world of everyday
Who could not their spirits lift and fly away

She built a wall between them strong and wide
Of quite strong cardboard sealed with Elmer’s glue
Stepped back from her work and said with pride
Girls, I think we’ve got some prayer to do!
The women laughed with smiles that spread wide
While praying, swaying, chanting Torah too
They sang and read and prayed and taught and learned
Together the other sex they scoffed and spurned

A separation keeps the deep-voiced and the low
Still today in that far of sainted land
Where women are in charge, as well you know
From mingling with the high-voiced and the grand
The men must ask and women must bestow
Permission to eat, pray, or sit, or stand
The land is just its ways are all of peace
The righteous live and joy will never cease

In Memorium A. H. H.

The following poem is written with the same structure as Tennyson's "In Memorium A.H.H." - each stanza is four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba. It's about nighttime in Jerusalem, as heard through our apartment window. Once again, I apologize for the amateur poetry, and you can skip this post if you like.


Alone I watch the evening fall
Like ink that spills across the sky
Some small mistake from G-d on high
Who wishes to erase it all

So darkness reigns throughout the land
Until the dawn, dark conquers us
A ruler that is merciless
Yet we ignore its stern command

Despite decrees that it be night
And silent darkness must now be
The darkness permits revelry
Despite the absence of the light

And so I hear the streets alive
Though darkness spreads across the sky
I hear the people passing by
The walkers walk, the drivers drive

Across the street the silver clinks
As diners laugh while downing wine
Music that I can’t divine
Blares from cars before they slink

To other streets or to their homes
And I can hear the wind blow by
A car horn honk, a baby cry
Friends meeting with the word “shalom”

The night is lively and it’s young
I listen gladly from my room
The city wakes yet fairly soon
I’ll be asleep, but hold your tongue

For I enjoy the sounds of eve
Though I’m alone in my bedroom
And in the morning I’ll resume
To love the life that I perceive

For me it is enough this time
To hear the sounds and know they’re here
And close my eyes to evening dear
Resuming life when the sun climbs

The ladder of the morning sky
And takes its place among the clouds
So birds begin to sing out loud
Announcing that it’s time to fly

Folk Ballad

Hi everyone,

So I've been thinking a lot about the word Israel, and the way that while it has so many meanings - Jacob of the Bible, the Jewish people (ancient, past, and present), the current modern state of Israel, and a hope of peace, to name a few - so many times the conflation of all of these meanings can be confusing, especially in prayer. Are we praying for peace in Israel - as in this Israel in the Middle East? No, I think it is something much bigger and more universal than this one country, and I think it always has been, but it is hard to remember that when I say the word Israel in prayer, hard to separate prayer Israel from the state of Israel in which I am living. I was going to post extensively and coherently on this, but instead decided to study for the Literature in English GRE subject test. Suddenly, I had a not-very-brilliant idea, for which I beg your forgiveness. I have decided to study poetic forms by writing poems of my own for this blog, using these forms, to express the ideas, experiences, or emotions I might otherwise convey in a much-more-pleasant-to-read way that is in many ways dissimilar from amateur poetry and cheap study tools. So, with my apologies, an attempt at a poem about the use of the word Israel in prayer, in the form of a Folk Ballad. The typical stanza of the folk ballad is called the ballad (go figure) and the length of the line isdetermined by the number of stressed syllables only (rather than all syllables) - in this way it is more similar to Old English poetry or to sprung rhythm than it is to, say, a sonnet (some of those will be coming your way soon if I keep up with this nonsense). The rhyme scheme is abcb.

With pride pouring from our lips
We speak of holy land
The words are words we all enjoy
Set to soulful tunes, and grand

And suddenly, although I wish
These solemn lines to pray
I feel as though they are a lie
I hesitate to say

Aligning past with present times
Our now with then and there
Conflating, confusing, entrapped in a maze
Of politics and prayer

Israel – what is this word
An ancient hope for peace?
The magic of which angels sing?
The goal that will not cease?

A people joined in blood or pride
A nation or a creed?
A promise made to Abraham?
An ever budding seed?

Or are our words directed toward
A Middle Eastern place
Imperfect as all nations are
With problems we all must face

Not holy, not perfect, not awesome, not pure
Not more righteous, noble, or just
Not above corruption or hate
Homelessness, hatred, or lust

Hear O Israel the Lord is One
I say with all my might
While children learn in religion-based schools
Before joining the army to fight

And I, an American living abroad
Who is this G-d I can’t see
Have I also been instructed to hear
Is Israel also me?

I am lost and confused in Israel
With no map for finding my way
Between the desire and reality
The ancient hope, the present day