It is Easier To Forget: Sayed Kashua And Haaretz

This morning I read that the Palestinian/Israeli writer Sayed Kashua, who resides now in a small town in the Midwest, told the newspaper Mondoweiss that he “doesn’t want to write in Hebrew for Haaretz anymore.” http://mondoweiss.net/2016/03/sayed-kashua-doesnt-want-to-write-in-hebrew-for-haaretz-anymore/

While other excellent Israeli writers, who write in Hebrew and don't publish in Haaretz remain anonymous, and quite poor, Sayed Kashua got an international fame thanks to that paper.

I don't expect him to remain forever grateful, but I wonder whether Kashua prefers to forget that it was exactly that column in Haaretz, which was translated into English, that gave him his big break in the US.

In 2014 I wrote an essay about the translatability of Sayed Kashua

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Some writers lend themselves to translation much better than others. A short while ago I heard on NPR a story by the Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed  Kashua. I was impressed how well Kashua’s story came across in English. I read the original in Hebrew and his insights, subtle criticism of both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and his wit shone in English as well as they did in Hebrew. As a Palestinian in Israel, Kashua is constantly translating from Arabic to Hebrew and from Hebrew to Arabic. His biography is the embodiment of translation: he was born in the Arab town of Tira, and in school he learnt both Arabic and Hebrew.  At the age of 15 he was accepted to the prestigious Israeli boarding school in West Jerusalem, the Israel High School of Arts and Science. At that school he may have been one of few (if not the only) Palestinian student in his year, and had to conduct his whole life in Hebrew. Kashua is married to a  Palestinian woman, and until a month ago he and his family lived in a Jewish neighborhood in West Jerusalem.

In Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Approaches Explained, Douglas Robinson argues that translated works from a minor culture into “a hegemonic culture” (in this case English) are often “perceived  and  presented as difficult, mysterious, strange, alien and of interest just to a small group of specialists in the field.” He further argues that “a hegemonic culture will only translate those works by authors in a dominated culture that fit the former’s preconceived notion of the latter.” I see the complex poems by Dahlia Ravikovitch, as an example of Robinson’s former claim. On the other hand, the ease and the translatability of the work of Sayed Kashua and the poet Yehuda Amichai  could illustrate the latter argument. While Ravikovitch is a “sabra”, who sees Israeli society from the inside, both Kashua and Amichai  are outsiders. Kashua exists simultaneously inside two cultures and two languages, and Amichai is  an immigrant whose mother tongue is German and his native culture is Western European. Standing outside  and peering into the window of Israeli society, both Kashua and Amichai see things which are transparent to the sabra. Their conclusions could indeed conform with the “preconceived notion” about Israeli society which Robinson mentions. When Kashua and Amichai imagine their reader, he or she are nothing like them, as most of Kashua‘s native community could not even read his work in Hebrew. Furthermore, as someone who was once an immigrant to the US, it is easy for me to recall a time when in order to be heard I had to choose and count my words carefully, and my message had to be relevant, simple, short and clear.  Reading the work of Kashua and Amichai I feel that they may have had a similar experience. This disadvantage gradually evolved into an advantage, and they learned how to captivate an audience, while at the same time keeping their message simple, precise and intriguing.  I believe that those are the main reasons why Kashua and Amichai are relevant and exciting to readers outside Israel.

Sayed Kashua left Israel over a month ago, he still writes regularly for Ha’aretz. However, now  instead of dealing with his reality as an Palestinian living in Israel he talks about his experience as an immigrant  in the New World.

According to Douglas Robinson “the only way to get read in today’s world is to write in or to be translated into English." It will be interesting to see whether, like Vladimir Nabokov, Sayed Kashua, chooses to start a new career writing in  English. I am not so sure, a mother tongue, like a home is not that easy to replace.

The essay appeared in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/it-is-easier-to-forget-sayed-kashua-and-haaretz/

Kindergarten Children Under A Magnifying Glass

Yesterday Ha’aretz reposted on Facebook  a popular article with the intriguing name: "Parents do not pity their Kindergarten children." This title is an ironic allusion to the famous poem by Yehuda Amichai: "God pities the Kindergarten children."

Among other issues, the article criticizes the new demand that children will know how to read while they are still in Kindergarten. I agree with the criticism, but can testify, from my personal experience, that it is not a new trend. This is an essay that I wrote about over parenting:

When another mother told me that I had to make sure that my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter knew how to read before she started kindergarten that fall, I knew that I was in trouble. She explained that in the event that she didn’t read she would be put in the lowest ability group, and that would be the end. I was sure no mother in her right mind would risk ruining her daughter’s future and teaching her to read seemed like a small price to pay. But that was only the beginning:

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/kindergarten-children-under-a-magnifying-glass/

Father’s Day and the fifth commandment

I never knew that we had a Father’s Day in Israel, but according to Wikipedia “In Israel, Father's day is called "Yom ha-av" and is usually celebrated on May 1 together with Workers' Day or labour Day.” This is another proof that Wikipedia could not be trusted for reliable information. The truth is that in Israel we don’t have Father’s Day, or Mother’s Day, only the most parve Family Day.

In the US, Father and Mother’s Day are celebrated on Sunday, so that families could have an opportunity to enjoy that time on their day off. Today, the third Sunday in June, is Father’s Day.

While honoring parents one day a year is quite simple and could even be enjoyable, it is much harder the other 363 days of the year. Here is an essay that I wrote some time ago about the special difficulties with the fifth commandment.

Please keep reading in the Times of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/fathers-day-and-the-fifth-commandment/

"I Beg Your Pardon?" My Foreign Accent

It shouldn't be like that but, having lived in the US for almost fifteen years, I know that too often a foreign accent is a handicap.

When I arrived to the Midwest to do my graduate degree in English at one of the state universities, I asked my linguistic professor how I could get rid of my Israeli accent. He wasn't optimistic, I wanted to know if a strong accent indicated a lack of musical talent. He answered that based on what he had read it was a matter of personal identity. There were some people, he called them the Chamaeleon type, who could speak with almost no trace of a foreign accent. He felt that  subconsciously I  probably didn't want to lose my Israeli identity. This explanation was reassuring, it was a relief to hear that it wasn't my fault. I am not sure if this is still a valid theory, but I am not going to look for conflicting evidence.

As a person with a foreign accent I was often  treated with superiority.

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/i-beg-your-pardon-my-foreign-accent/

A Skype Mother

 APR.21.2013

Thirty  some years ago when the US was still across the ocean, I left my parents in Israel and travelled with my husband to the US to attend graduate school. Living abroad at that time meant being disconnected from everything that was going on in Israel.  

 Every week I wrote long  letters to my parents  and reported all the details of our new life; they were filled with longing and love. The letters that my parents wrote back expressed similar sentiments, but they never questioned our decision to go away or doubted the merit of advancing our education abroad.

However, the idea that one should sacrifce being geographically close to family in order to advance a career or achieve a better life is not shared by everyone. When I wrote my PhD on the connection between life and literature in 1950s Britain, I was surprised to discover  a different reality in Family and Kinship in East London, a 1957 sociological study by Michael Young and Peter Willmott reporting on the life of working classes in Britain. Young and Wilmot  found that  being close to the mother was one of the most important considerations in finding housing, and that young people tended to stay within walking distance from their mothers.

Although I was very close to my  mother, staying nearby was never a a factor in my considerations of where to live.  I took for granted that in order to move ahead we needed to move away, and my parents agreed with me. Only later when I was already a mother myself, I would sit down to have a cup of coffee in the morning and think “What am I doing here? I could have had this cup of coffee with my mom”

We went back to Israel in 1994 and I had two good years to enjoy the company of my mother, but she died in 1996. To this day I regret all those years that I missed not being close to her.

Then, following our footsteps, in 2000 my 18-year-old daughter left Israel to study in Germany. At the time there was still very little internet connection, and Skype had not yet been invented. She had to wait a whole month for a phone, and I got a chance to experience what my mother must have felt: a nagging feeling of  worry and longing mixed together with happiness that my daughter was moving ahead with her life.

My two daughters are in the US now and we connect through email, Skype, Facebook and cellular phone. Thanks to video chat I can even see them when we talk.  Moreover, it seems that social network has trained young people in the art of documenting their life. They devote time to report what they do and attach appropriate photos.

People complain that the cheerful public persona reflected from Facebook, for example, is never the real person, but didn’t we write letters to our parents and report that all was well even when it wasn’t, as to not make them to worry?

Since to connect with my daughters we use all the technology available, we can detect even small worries from the hello on the phone to the frown in a video chat. The readily available technology is the “spoonful of sugar” that makes the distance between us “go down.” But still when I sit down for coffee in the middle of the morning now I miss my two daughters who are busy making a life for themselves over sea.

Born In The USA But My Heart Is In The East

“I was born in the US, but I am originally from Israel,” is how my American-born daughter described herself in a second  grade personal narrative booklet.  The statement must have surprised her teacher, but I felt that it made sense.

My two daughters were born in the Midwest during our long stay in the US. Although we were not sure whether we would ever return to Israel, we spoke Hebrew at home, taught the girls  to read and write Hebrew, and at bedtime read to them from Israeli children's books.  Still, we always lived in American neighborhoods, they attended public school, had American friends and when they read on their own it was always in English. 

Since I was born in Israel it was clear to me that my “real home” was Israel, but until I read my daughter’s biography I hadn’t  imagined that her idea of a real home was not the one that our family had in Texas.

When we were at university in the US we met a young cousin who told us that he planned to move to Israel once he graduated from university. “But you don’t know if you’d like it, you have never been there,”  I said in amazement, and he answered: “ I just know.”  He has been in Israel now for over 30 years

Longing for a “real home” from afar is an old Jewish tradition; for centuries diaspora Jews  have been  yearning for Zion. They have kept Jerusalem in their prayers, vowing never to forget it and wishing to be "next year in Jerusalem."

In the 12th century Spain the Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi wrote:

My heart is in the East

My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West;

How can I taste what I eat and how could it be pleasing to me?

How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet

Zion lies beneath the fetter of Edom, and I am in the chains of Arabia?

It would be easy for me to leave all the bounty of Spain --

As it is precious for me to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary.

As a poet  and a religious Jew, Halevi expressed his longings for Zion as a place and as a symbol, I, as a secular Israeli,  just missed my parents’ home in Israel. But although I had a concrete vision of that home, the  Israel that we encountered once we returned there was very different from the one that we had imagined.

 My daughter was quick to point it out; coming back from a social activity with her new class mates in Tel Aviv, she announced that "our" Israel was all wrong. She was right, my husband and I left Israel when we were in our early twenties and never experienced what it meant to live in Israel as grown- ups.  What we presented to our daughters as "home" was a fantasy made up of our childhood memories and the old fictional stories that we read as children.

Thus in our late thirties we finally had to grow up and reconcile our dreams with the  reality, which we found in our new home in Israel.

When I skated in the park today I listened to an episode of This American Life (number 130 from 1999): “Away from Home,” and  heard Ira Glass addressing the attachment to a faraway home.  I feel that his explanation of that metaphysical connection, whether it is place or a group of people, is beautiful:

“There's an uncanny quality when you fall in love. And there's an uncanny quality to finding the home you've never had. And at some level, what is there to say? What makes home feel like home? The fact that it feels like home.”

One Day In May

Shavouot (Feast of Weeks or Pentecost) came early in 1994, right in the middle of May. It wasn’t as though in the diaspora, especially in Texas, such minor Jewish occasions were even noticed. But on that morning before my husband Tzvi left for work, we had made plans to take the girls to celebrate the holiday in the nearest synagogue.

Two hours later Tzvi was back; when he stood at the doorway, his ashen face made it clear that something was very wrong. He told me that he had just lost his job at IBM. It came as a shock; I was aware of of the problems at his lab. Still somehow I believed that he was needed and that his job was secure, and never even imagined a moment like that. 

We didn’t go to services that night, instead we talked with our daughters about future plans; there was a lot to discuss. I remember that one of our daughters said in dismay “I didn’t think that people like my father could lose their jobs,” neither did I.

It was all very sudden and confusing and we were not sure what to do: there was an option of transferring to another IBM plant in the west coast. But those were very hard times for the company, and from what Tzvi had seen in his own lab he was pessimistic about the future of the company (he was wrong). He didn’t want to take the risk of moving the family just to face another wave of layoffs. Also, there was another, very Israeli, reason, being in California meant being even farther away from home.

In contrast, 1994 was a wonderful year for Israel: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had just signed a peace agreement with Jordan and people were hopeful. The economy boomed and we heard encouraging accounts from our family and friends. Even the skeptic Israeli newspapers sounded unusually enthusiastic.

It took us only few hours to make up our mind, we were moving back to Israel.

Four years earlier when we had been transferred from Beer Sheva Israel to Dallas Texas, Tzvi had a job waiting, IBM took care of our relocation, and paid for the expensive transatlantic move. This time it was different,  nothing waited for us in Israel and we had to pay for everything ourselves.

Still we were  lucky that we had a place to go back to, and felt  especially fortunate to be part of the new optimism in Israel. After November 1995 when Rabin was assassinated Israel has greatly changed and I am not sure that we would have returned.

Although the day when Tzvi was laid off was one of the hardest in our family history, it brought about new life and different opportunities for all of us. That relatively minor loss, which required swift and flexible change of plans, also prepared me for the real tragedy of losing Tzvi. It may sound strange but at the time of his illness I often thought how much harder it must be to be away from home when bad things happen.

Every year around this time I am reminded of that morning in May, but then another, more cheerful, memory comes to mind. I see myself waking up the following day thinking “my world, as I know it, has come to an end," and then another thought: “but it is not really the end of the world." Next I get up and start making the necessary arrangements for the move.

One Day in May: Walking Away from The House

I once heard from a friend in Iowa City that during the farm crisis in the early 1980s they “had walked away from their house.” I was unfamiliar with the expression, and she explained that as no one would buy or even rent their home, in the northern part of the state, they had no choice but “to give the house back to the bank.” I learnt that the two expressions were euphemisms for losing the house due to inability to make the mortgage payments. My friend told me the story sadly, and in confidence; for her it was a shameful secret.

Although I sympathized with her, at the time those kind of troubles seemed entirely disconnected from my world. Life was good: Tzvi, my husband, got tenure and we owned a small house in an area of town where most of the neighbors were people like us: young families associated with the university.

Then several years later in another part of the continent, in Texas, we too were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Few days ago I wrote a post "One day in May," about the day when Tzvi was fired from IBM. And now I would like to focus on one of the least pleasant consequences of that event.

When we moved to Texas Tzvi wanted to buy a house with a swimming pool, I objected. It seemed to me highly inappropriate, even immoral, to waste so much water while Israel suffers from such an acute shortage (we were always taught to conserve water). Tzvi reminded me that this was the US, and came up with a winning argument: it would help our daughters make friends in the new place; I gave in. Still, athough some kids did come to play in our pool, apparently many parents subscribed to Tzvi's position and their kids stayed in their own backyard pool.

Once Tzvi lost his job, we had to sell the house right away. However, the same realtor, who 4 years earlier had assured us that our lovely house in the very good good neighborhood was a great investment, said that since it was “an older” home (13 year old) it would be hard to sell (all the more due to its, already, dated pool). Sadly with so many new houses on the market, nobody wanted to even look at ours.

Even prior to that plight, I had no faith in American houses. While in my country houses are made out of concrete and are meant to last forever, many American houses, even the most impressive mansions, are made of wood. Why would I trust a wooden house which could be blown away by a huff or a puff, and surely by an ordinary tornado, within seconds? Indeed our house proved to be not only a broken reed, but a liability.

 It always surprised me, that the “brick houses," in the new developments of our little town in Texas had brick tiles pasted on top of the wood frame. Those tiles were there only for aesthetic reason and contributed nothing to support the structure of the house. In a way, those flimsy short-term, yet sturdy looking, houses were a good metaphor for our condition. Once Tzvi lost his job our own structure collapsed, and there was nothing that could support it and keep us from falling.

Back in Israel we couldn't make the mortgage payments, and after a while, like my friend in Iowa we had to "walk away from our house.” But her loss was the result of a larger economic crisis in her part of the country, ours was just an unfortunate outcome of a local housing surplus. And since it was not an excusable reason, our loss was especially difficult to understand, and almost impossible to come to terms with.

About six years later, we received a legal letter from a law firm concerning our debt to the bank. We responded by offering a modest monthly payment, it was declined.

Unfortunately, there was neither a happy ending, nor a great lesson to be learnt from the whole affair. We didn׳t get a chance to remove that stain from our record, and we never restored our pride: at least it has served as an on-going reminder about our limitations.