Israel in Translation

I call you now to answer me despite my prayer’s silence in the mornings despite the moth’s presence in my closet despite my fullness with rusted talk

These are lines from Haviva Pedaya's poem "When I Come From the Place of Crying," translated by Harvey Bock, which host Marcela Sulak reads.

Pedaya was born into an Iraqi family of rabbis and Kabbalists. She is a professor of Jewish history at Ben Gurion University specializing in mysticism, and her poetry echoes her scholarly research on time and place; center and periphery; and messianism.

Pedaya is also involved in musical and artistic projects; she founded the Yonah Ensemble which has succeeded in revitalizing liturgical and mystical music of the Near East. Many of her poems have been put to music, and we hear some in the podcast.

The text can be found at Poetry International Rotterdam

Music:

Shai Tsabari - The King (words by Haviva Pedaya)

Yuval Gershtein and Maureen Nehedar - There's A Very Small Place

I call you now to answer me 
despite my prayer’s silence in the mornings 
despite the moth’s presence in my closet 
despite my fullness with rusted talk

These are lines from Haviva Pedaya's poem "When I Come From the Place of Crying," translated by Harvey Bock, which host Marcela Sulak reads.

Pedaya was born into an Iraqi family of rabbis and Kabbalists. She is a professor of Jewish history at Ben Gurion University specializing in mysticism, and her poetry echoes her scholarly research on time and place; center and periphery; and messianism.

Pedaya is also involved in musical and artistic projects; she founded the Yonah Ensemble which has succeeded in revitalizing liturgical and mystical music of the Near East. Many of her poems have been put to music, and we hear some in the podcast.

The text can be found at Poetry International Rotterdam

Music:

Shai Tsabari - The King  (words by Haviva Pedaya)

Yuval Gershtein and Maureen Nehedar - There's A Very Small Place

"After we finished sitting shiva, I went back to the book. Most of it was already written. What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written."

"After we finished sitting shiva, I went back to the book. Most of it was already written. What changed, above all, was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written."

According to Anne Lerner, the poet Esther Raab presented herself to her first readers in 1922 with the lines:

I am under the thornbush

Nimble, menacing,

Laughing [at] its thorns

To greet you I straightened up.

At a time when Hebrew poetry by women was just beginning to be published, these lines introduced many of the themes and poetic devices that came to characterize Raab’s poetry and the way it was read: A stark landscape, an unconventional female central character, a hint of a biblical inter-text, bold color, a linkage between eroticism and nature, and sparse, idiosyncratic punctuation.

Host Marcela Sulak reads Raab's poems "Holy Grandmothers in Jerusalem" and "Night" (translated by Shirley Kaufman), and "She-fox" (translated by Kinereth Gensler), which ends with these lines:

A hungry she-fox lifts her head to the Pleiades,

a cold star mirrored in her eye

could be a tear in her pupil.

The cub will suckle at life’s sad marrow—

the howl of foxes splits the night.

Text:

The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Tamar S. Hess. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.

Music:

Chava Alberstein - "The Birds Don’t Know"

Limor Oved - "A Woman's Song." Melody by Ahuva Ozeri, arranged and produced by Gadi Sari, words by Esther Raab.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb - "A Woman’s Song." Words by Esther Raab.

According to Anne Lerner, the poet Esther Raab presented herself to her first readers in 1922 with the lines:

I am under the thornbush

Nimble, menacing,

Laughing [at] its thorns

To greet you I straightened up.

At a time when Hebrew poetry by women was just beginning to be published, these lines introduced many of the themes and poetic devices that came to characterize Raab’s poetry and the way it was read: A stark landscape, an unconventional female central character, a hint of a biblical inter-text, bold color, a linkage between eroticism and nature, and sparse, idiosyncratic punctuation.

Host Marcela Sulak reads Raab's poems "Holy Grandmothers in Jerusalem" and "Night" (translated by Shirley Kaufman), and "She-fox" (translated by Kinereth Gensler), which ends with these lines:

A hungry she-fox lifts her head to the Pleiades,

a cold star mirrored in her eye

could be a tear in her pupil.

The cub will suckle at life’s sad marrow—

the howl of foxes splits the night.

Text:

The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. Ed. Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Tamar S. Hess. New York: The Feminist Press, 1999.

Music:

Chava Alberstein - "The Birds Don’t Know"

Limor Oved - "A Woman's Song." Melody by Ahuva Ozeri, arranged and produced by Gadi Sari, words by Esther Raab.

Ayelet Rose Gottlieb - "A Woman’s Song." Words by Esther Raab.

We met the Christian Arab village of Fassuta, on the north-western slope of Mount Meron in the Upper Galilee, in a previous podcast: http://tlv1.fm/?p=30469 Host Marcela Sulak takes us there again to discover the work of Nidaa Khoury, who was born in Fassuta in 1959 and still lives there.

Khoury’s seven collections of poetry include The Barefoot River, The Prettiest of Gods Cry, and The Bitter Crown, published in Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt. She is a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and the subject of the recent film, Nidaa Through Silence.

Khoury is a socially and politically engaged poet; she helped create the Path to Peace Organization; she founded the Association of Survival; and she works for the Association of Forty, which works for the full acceptance of the "Unrecognized Arab Villages" in Israel.

We met the Christian Arab village of Fassuta, on the north-western slope of Mount Meron in the Upper Galilee, in a previous podcast: http://tlv1.fm/?p=30469 Host Marcela Sulak takes us there again to discover the work of Nidaa Khoury, who was born in Fassuta in 1959 and still lives there.

Khoury’s seven collections of poetry include The Barefoot River, The Prettiest of Gods Cry, and The Bitter Crown, published in Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt. She is a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University and the subject of the recent film, Nidaa Through Silence.

Khoury is a socially and politically engaged poet; she helped create the Path to Peace Organization; she founded the Association of Survival; and she works for the Association of Forty, which works for the full acceptance of the "Unrecognized Arab Villages" in Israel.

In the Bus/Purim Eve:

Little kids in costume giggle happily

real flower children

and Margalit Tzan’ani sings

“The Honey in the Groove”

Today, host Marcela Sulak takes an unusual approach to Purim, reading excerpts from Tikva Levi’s Purim Sequence, translated by Ammiel Alcalay.

We intersperse the first parts of Levi's poem, a Purim bus journey, with excerpts from Itzik Manger’s 'Megillah' — a retelling of the Purim story in the Book of Esther.

Tikva Levi was a feminist activist Mizrahi Jew, born in Ashkelon of Iraqi parents. She died in 2012, at the age of 52. Her life was devoted to the educational rights of Mizrahi Jews in Israel.

Text:

Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books, 1996.

Music:

Songs of the Megilla - Itzik Manger

Nafas - Rabih Abou-Khalil

In the Bus/Purim Eve:

Little kids in costume giggle happily

real flower children

and Margalit Tzan’ani sings

“The Honey in the Groove”

Today, host Marcela Sulak takes an unusual approach to Purim, reading excerpts from Tikva Levi’s Purim Sequence, translated by Ammiel Alcalay.

We intersperse the first parts of Levi's poem, a Purim bus journey, with excerpts from Itzik Manger’s 'Megillah' — a retelling of the Purim story in the Book of Esther.

Tikva Levi was a feminist activist Mizrahi Jew, born in Ashkelon of Iraqi parents. She died in 2012, at the age of 52. Her life was devoted to the educational rights of Mizrahi Jews in Israel.

Text:

Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing. Edited by Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books, 1996.

Music:

Songs of the Megilla - Itzik Manger

Nafas - Rabih Abou-Khalil