Israel in Translation

Lali Tsipi Michaeli's work attempts to capture, not just the mind at work, but also the spirit, the soul, as it becomes aware of itself as an entity both anchored in, and apart from, the body. Likewise, the body is often viewed as a physical object, one of many that occupy the world.

Lali Tsipi Michaeli was born in the Georgian republic and immigrated to Israel with her parents at the age of seven. She studied comparative literature at Bar-Ilan University, and returned to Georgia in the early 1990s as a Hebrew teacher for the Jewish Agency. From 2005-2007, she worked in Denmark, editing human rights texts. She currently teaches Hebrew language at Ben Gurion University.

Text:

Poems by Lali Tsipi Michaeli, translated by Michael Simkin and Alexa Christopher-Daniels in Poetry International Rotterdam

"Sketches of Tel Aviv" by Lali Tsipi Michaeli, translated by Michael Simkin. Mediterranean Poetry

The poetry of Adi Assis injects us with the distress that consumes his days and nights. His laments madden us as we find ourselves rare witness to circumstances usually hidden from view, and even more profoundly, to the hidden reaches of the poet's heart.

Podcast on Anat Levin's poetry

Text:

Various poems by Adi Assis from Poetry International Rotterdam

It's July—school and university are out for the summer; it's hot. This month is often a strange mix of the ecstatic and the supremely boring. It's a month that does not usually receive much praise or fanfare. It's the perfect month to focus on poetry—that intensifier that makes the joy more joyful and the pain more painful, and the days just a little more delightfully strange and ripe.

Kicking off this month of poems will be Haya Esther, a woman born into an ultra orthodox household in Jerusalem, and who was fired from her job in a girl's Haredi school after her first book of poems was published in 1983. She went on to write 18 volumes of poetry.

Text:

Three poems Haya Esther, translated by Linda Zisquit and Shira Twersky-Cassel Poetry International Rotterdam

Ayat Abou Shmeiss is an Arab-speaker who writes in Hebrew in part because she was educated in that language, and in French, at a Christian school in Jaffa, and has been writing since she was a teen.

In her second book, her subjects include an examination of her life as the mother of one child, and as a student at the Open University, where she is now finishing a degree in political science. The poet has a clear grasp of her position. "I'm this and that" she said.

Text:

"My Identity Has Nothing to do with the Language in which I Write." Tel Aviv Review of Books

Poems: Poetry International Rotterdam

We continue what we began in last week's episode, discussing the historian Flavius Josephus, focusing on his biography, "The Life."

In terms of his future career and authorship, Flavius Josephus could not have arrived in this world at a better time or place. In the year 37—four years after Jesus was crucified—Josephus was born in Jerusalem as Yosef bar Mattathyahu in Aramaic or ben mattathias in Hebrew, the son of a priestly family on both sides. His mother could trace her ancestry to the royal Hasmoneans, the Maccabean family dynasts who had led the struggle for Jewish independence prior to the Roman conquest.

Text:

This edition of Josephus's works was translated from the Greek original by William Whiston (1667-1752).

To mark the completion of the Shavuot holiday, this week Marcela reads from Josephus's account of the giving of the Torah, in his volume "Jewish Antiquities."

Text:

This edition of Josephus's works was translated from the Greek original by William Whiston (1667-1752).

Arab Israeli women are one of the most underrepresented groups of writers in Israel and the world. It's very difficult to find such work that's been translated into English. And so today, we spotlight the poetry of three such women.

I'm using Nathalie Handal's anthology "The Poetry of Arab Women."

Text:

"The Path of Affection" by Laila Allush, translated by Abdelwahab M Elmessiri.

"I Love in White Ink" by Siham Da'oud, translated by Helen Knox and Smadar Lavie.

"Interlaced Lines for the Same Moment" by Ghada el-Shafa'I, translated by Atef Abu-Seif with Nathalie Handal.

The fast of Ramadan ends next week. Here in Israel, lights are strung up all over the cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Akko, Jaffa, and many smaller towns and villages. Festive lanterns with beautiful designs in a variety of colors throw their light around. It is a season of heightened charity and prayer as well.

To mark the Eid Al Fitr holiday, we read poems by Sumaiya El-Sousy.

Sumaiya El-Sousy was born in Gaza City and works in a research center in Gaza. She's published multiple collections of poetry.

Text:

"Voices" by Sumaiya El-Sousy, translated by Atef Abu-Seif, with Nathalie Handal, in The Poetry of Arab Women. A Contemporary Anthology. Ed. Nathalie Handal. Interlink Books, 2001.

"The City" by Sumaiya El-Sousy, in "The Angel of History and the Ghetto of Gaza by Leonard Schwartz in Counterpunch, June 15, 2009.

Music:

Le Trio Joubran – Majâz; Masar

Today we excerpt from the short story "The Plague" by Nurit Zarchi, translated by Yael Lotan, and found in the anthology Fifty Stories from Israel.

The story is set during the time of the 14th century great plague in Jerusalem, which killed a quarter of the city's population. In this story, the monks who lived on the mountain, at a distance of an hour and a half outside of the city, would take turns, by drawing lots, to go into the city to help. The monk who was then sent to the city would return at night to sleep in an isolated hut in the monastery garden, so as not to infect his brethren. When he woke in the morning, he would ring a bell so that all would know that he was alive and ready to depart for the city. If the bell failed to ring, the monks would know that they would have to choose a new delegate.

The climax of this story occurs when Aaron, the foundling child, has drawn the lot to go into Jerusalem.

Nurit Zarchi, who often writes for children, set one of the conflicts in this story to be between protecting what you love and allowing your beloved child to risk danger and pain in order to grow.

Previous Episode on Nurit Zarchi: Baby Blues

Text:

Nurit Zarchi, "The Plague." Translated by Yael Lotan. 50 Stories from Israel. Ed. Zisi Stavi. Yedioth Books. 2007.

Today we read an excerpt from Aharon Appelfeld's novel, The Age of Wonders, published in Israel in 1978 and translated by Dalya Bilu in 1981.

A holocaust survivor himself, this novel is remarkable in that it skips over the war, and does not even use the word holocaust, as it chronicles the dissolution of an assimilated Austrian family, in a petit-bourgeois Jewish world, and the anti-semitism leading up to the war.

Told in two parts, the first part ends with a scene in the town's synagogue, where all the Jews have been requested to assemble. The last sentence of the section is "By the next day we were on the cattle train hurtling south." Book Two opens with the line, "Many years later, when everything was over." In the interim, the narrator has somehow escaped to Palestine.

Previous Episodes on Aharon Appelfeld:

Ticho Café interview

The Story of a Life

Text:

Aharon Appelfeld. The Age of Wonders. Translated by Dalya Bilu. Boston: David R. Godine, 1981