David Grossman's echo of reality

03/25/15 • 8 min

"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."

Previous Episode

The she-fox under the thornbush

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.

Next Episode

Mysticism, messianism, and divine music

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