Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems

Khamsin

Khamsin This is the age of exile. Within the boundaries of homeland we dream of escape. And when we have gone out of the land, we cannot breathe in the new atmosphere; we long for homeland. For some, exile is imposed from without: war, famine, an untenable political regime, overwhelming pressure from the state whose requirements come before the individual’s, including the sacrifice of sons and daughters. And when the exile is not geographical, as with the Marranos , the one in exile appears to observe the outward norms all the while clinging to a people or a language, to the values and shared memories of a lost world that holds sway over him. Or as Moshe Dor writes in Khamsin1 (literally fifty, a hot desert wind originating in the Sahara, so intense as to alter perception of color and light), “Poets go into exile from interior exile . . . the land of exile is the motherland.” Or in his poem “Town”: The town of my birth is the town where I live, my guarantee against the anxieties of immigrants . . . 6 1 Why then, when the mulberries unscroll their sticky bright sprouts am I filled with nostalgia for towns where I wasn’t born, won’t ever live? This exile lends to the poet’s voice the anguish of dislocation, resignation , longing, and irony. He looks in from the outside, though he exists in the center of the fire. Like the dreamer who is both observing and observed, the poet is the central actor and audience at the same instant. He negotiates the distance between the two like one who swims for his life in a turbulent sea. And how is it to live in this condition? In “Shelter” Moshe Dor writes: We cleaned out the bomb shelter, a municipal edict too stringent to ignore. We worked diligently: . . . Now we can wait for evil from any direction. Only our image reflected in that sliver of mirror is slightly blurred, perhaps because we have let down our guard. A prophetic poem—witness the SCUD missiles not long ago volleying forth to Israel from Iraq’s western fringe—filled with the longing for normalcy, with what it means to live on the edge. Vigilance: Perhaps that is the lodestone of these poems. Behind Israel’s struggle for and achievement of the kind of life we, in more neutral territory, take for granted is that eye always open. To live that way for one’s whole life exacts an extraordinary price. It is said that God is like the fish of the sea, with eyes always open. But it is not God’s domain that requires vigilance. It is man’s: this homeland that Moshe Dor is made from, this wilderness. This oasis that is the land of Israel, this sea made in the shape of a harp. These mountains. These stones into which the sun pours its life. And out of which light goes back into the atmosphere. He is made of this land and it infuses every poem he writes. 6 2 OVER THE ROOFTOPS OF TIME In “Identifying Marks,” the poem asks why Byzantium has fallen when it could have survived a siege with its “granaries . . . overflowing,/ the walls” that “might have borne the impact/ of Turkish cannonballs.” And there is even the rumor of rescue by the Italians. Ah, how well we know about one country looking after another! “How to explain Metropolis’ fall,” he writes. “Historians say one small gate was left unlatched, perhaps/ from simple oversight. Through that gate/ the Sultan’s force penetrated the city.” In every image does the force of history ignite. Though it is Byzantium we remember Herod’s fortress and the mass suicide of the Hebrews, we remember the fall of Jerusalem and the exile to Babylon, the lament of Jeremiah. On neutral territory, centuries later, the poet examines the shards of defeat: Constantine’s “purple sandals” by which his corpse is identified. “One small gate . . . left unlatched”: Doors, gates, these are Israel’s trademarks—Mea Shearim, the place of 100 gates; the Golden gate sealed until resurrection; Jaffa gate, the Dung gate; the gates of the cabala. Ancient and modern, entwined. And the poignancy, the impossibility of salvation from enemies through the use of gates, the irony of airborne missiles, air that heretofore carried the likes of Ezekiel or the signs of covenant. Here are poems that...