The Landscape of Israel in the Poems of the “Generation of Transition”*

Abstract

This article focuses on descriptions of landscape in the literary output of poets who immigrated to the Land of Israel from Islamic lands. It shows how problems related to “the anguish of double roots” are reflected in their descriptions of landscape. The immigrant poet projects onto the landscape his feelings of frustration arising from having to adjust to a new country: social problems, cultural difficulties, and often economic problems as well. This group of poets includes a large number of members of the “State generation” and shares a number of poetic characteristics, which were discussed in detail in my book, The Heartache of Dual Roots. Landscape was discussed there, but only indirectly, regarding the use of figurative language, symbols, and widely-used motifs, such as palm trees, migrating birds, a hyper-realistic use of Middle Eastern spices, etc.

The current article emphasizes poetic descriptions of landscape as an expression of “the heartache of dual roots” and analyzes this in selected poems. Every country of immigration is rich in ethnic groups and cultures. Obviously, the culture of the “stronger” population in these countries will be dominant and will push that of the “weaker” sectors to the periphery. The intelligentsia that sets the tone in the State of Israel does not sufficiently acknowledge the 156 major poets and writers from Islamic lands who, despite their evergrowing numbers, come from a different background. The response of these writers to their position in Israeli literary society permeates their literary output, either directly or indirectly, and tinges their descriptions of the Israeli landscape with a hue of protest.

In my book The Heartache of Dual Roots,¹ I dealt with the unique qualities of the literary generation of poets from Islamic lands belonging to the “declaration of the State” generation—or more specifically to the “generation of transition”—that underwent a cultural upheaval and in turn created a cultural upheaval in the Hebrew literary scene.² Among other things, I presented the “heartache of dual roots” poetry of this group (which includes Erez Biton, Ronny Somek, Dror Peretz-Banai, Balfour and Herzl Haqaq, Joseph Ozer, Sammy Shalom Shitrit, Eli Amir, Sammy Michael, Shimon Balas, and others), whose own personal social and cultural crisis emerges in their literary work, and whose description of Israel’s landscape carries a note of protest as a projection of their own absorption process.

An exception to this phenomenon may be found in a group of poets of Yemenite origin (Ratzon Halevi, Tuvia Sulami, Mordechai Tabib, and members of the second and third generation such as Aaron Almog, Avivit Levi Kapah, and others) who despite the difficulties they encountered upon their arrival in Israel, describe the country’s landscape in a manner reminiscent of the work of the anonymous Yemenite poets of previous generations.³ If protest appears in their work, it is in relation to an event grounded in a specific time and place and not as a general phenomenon.⁴ One can sense in their poetry a real affinity with the country’s landscape, which they dreamt about, prayed about, and chanted about throughout the generations. Now their abstract longing for the land in the Diaspora was replaced by a concrete and sensual attachment to the landscapes that surrounded them in their new home, as if they had been born to work the land. An explanation of this is that they actually considered the Land of Israel to be their homeland; for them Yemen was the Diaspora, and their poetry expresses the relative ease with which they left it behind.⁵ Anthony Afeyah claimed, as did others, that travel to a distant place results in self-revelation. Conflicts of identity are resolved abroad. Transferring the conflict to a foreign country strengthens the affinity with the homeland. The powerful yearning for the Land of Israel from their place of residence in the Diaspora and their strong feeling of belonging despite the conflicts and hardships they experienced on their way to the land may be explained by how they lived in their country of origin.⁶

A careful study of selected works of “the generation of transition” can reveal a number of common traits, both thematic and structural, among the poets who emmigrated from Islamic lands. Most striking is “the heartache of dual roots” and the dual landscape (of Israel and of scenes of their childhood in their country of origin), to which may be added dual language and dual culture.⁷

Some of these poets began their literary careers only after leaving their countries of origin, but due to their young age—most were in their teens or early twenties—they could not detach themselves from the landscapes of the Diaspora, which formulated their spiritual being and cultural heritage. Scenes of palm trees, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, village scenes, green fields, major cities such as Baghdad, Basra, Istanbul, and Alexandria abound, parallel with descriptions of the actual Israeli landscape of the time: transit camps, villages and kibbutzim, and major cities, especially Jerusalem.

Their descriptions of the country’s landscape are emotionally and socially charged and express the following:

1. a. The difficulty in breaking emotional ties with the landscapes of the Diaspora due to nostalgia for scenes of childhood and youth, especially for the family atmosphere and the religious heritage that was an integral part of Eastern Jewish culture.

2. b. The difficulty in overcoming the sense of estrangement in face of a physically and culturally desolate landscape. The immigrants from Islamic lands were sent to border areas as part of the national security network. These settlements were isolated from the cultural centers where literary activity was taking place and were a desert in every sense of the word.

3. c. A lack of public interest in the Eastern culture of this population, despite the fact that they form a major part of the country’s inhabitants. For example, to commemorate Israel’s Jubilee Year, a 688-page anthology was published including the work of fifty writers, only two of whom were of Eastern origin—A. B. Yehoshua and Dan Benaya Seri—despite the large number of writers that could have successfully represented this group.⁸

Every country of immigration is rich in ethnic and cultural groups. In every country of this type, the culture of the “stronger groups” is dominant. The intelligentsia that sets the tone in the State of Israel has not sufficiently taken account of the 156 acknowledged poets and authors from Islamic lands, who despite their ever-growing number, come from a different cultural background.⁹

The emotional climate emerging from this situation permeates the literary output of these writers either directly or indirectly, and influences the way they describe the country’s landscape. Through a process of projection, there often appears an element of protest. Examples of this are “Shopping on Dizengoff Street” by Erez Biton, “Love is the Homeland” by Herzl Haqaq, “The Gates of Mercy” by Balfour Haqaq, “Baghdad, February ’91” by Ronny Somek, “Closing” by Dror Peretz-Banai, “I Search for the Landscape” by Shalom Katab, “Soweto” by Ada Aharoni, “From Givatayim to Los Angeles” by Lev Haqaq, “The German Colony, 1948” by Dudu Eyal, and many more.

In the descriptions of the landscape by the poets from Islamic lands, one finds a concrete description of reality, grounded in time and place. This is especially true of poems relating to multicultural encounters or in poems and stories describing childhood scenes. There is a strong contrast between such scenes and the landscapes of their new country, in particular descriptions of the transit camps where the new immigrants were housed. At times, the imagery tends to be hyper-realistic, and first priority is given to concrete descriptions utilizing the senses and describing real life in great detail. An example of this would be Ronny Somek’s poem, “The Milk Underground”:¹⁰

The kids coming out of the empty fridge Will roll trash cans and poke light Out of the streetlamps’ eyes. In the great darkness, the most rotten tooth Will gleam biting into overstuffed cats, Will suck leftover cream from their tongues. And the cream— fancy lady— has long since forgotten The teats of the cow that dripped Her into this world. In the morning, the sun will rise, birds Will announce the fall, and there's nobody there to bring These lines closer to the nose To smell the milk underground.

This poem describes a scene in a Tel Aviv neighborhood on the “poverty line” and focuses on children playing hide-and-seek in an abandoned refrigerator. The surfeit of concrete details from real life makes the description hyper-realistic, thus expressing protest regarding the children who have inherited the “poverty line” from their parents who arrived from Eastern countries. In the reader’s imagination, “milk” is a metonymy for the basic nutritious needs of the child’s mind and body.

The poem is a kind of collage and typifies the use of realistic materials in the “dual-rooted” poetry of writers from Islamic lands. The use of real-life elements, especially details related to food, as metonymy is a theme common to poems belonging to the “dual-rooted” genre. This technique strongly expresses the social and economic upheaval experienced by the generation of immigrants from Islamic lands, which also had its impact on the second generation. In his poem “The Milk Underground,” Ronny Somek uses milk, a basic foodstuff that nourishes the newborn, to express a social protest against perpetual poverty and suffering. Although more than half a century has passed since the massive immigrations from Asia and North Africa, the urban landscape of 1950s neighborhoods on the “poverty line” still exists today.¹¹

In the poem “Shopping on Dizengoff,” Erez Biton, contrasting between different geographical and human landscapes, describes the disparity between the well-established residents and the new immigrants settled on the periphery. The first verse evokes the “Dizengoff society” by means of a long connected syntactical sentence that is divided into lines by pauses. The second verse evokes the landscape of the periphery inhabited by the poet and is very concise. The differences in length between the verses give expression to the disparity between the two landscapes. In the words of the poem, the buildings overwhelm the speaker. Despite their many doors and windows, they remain impermeable, whereas the low buildings of the periphery give him a greater feeling of comfort. The speaker is incapable of infiltrating Tel Aviv society, although he seems to have made the decisive step of buying a shop on Dizengoff (a major Tel Aviv shopping street) “in order to put down roots,” and as he adds, “in order to buy roots.”¹² Like most of Biton’s poetry, a tone of protest permeates the poem, and this is emphasized by repeated phrases taken from everyday speech:

Who are the people in Rowal? What have the people got in Rowal? What’s up with the people in Rowal?¹³

Peretz Dror Banai’s poem “Closing” evokes the “heartache of dual roots” through descriptions of geographical and social landscapes. The description of the changing landscape, of “growing buildings” and “stretching roads,” combines with an atmosphere of hidden protest. Beneath the apparent acceptance of the identity pressures applied by Israeli society on the new immigrant who has become an established resident, the reader perceives, despite the speaker’s open declaration, the tension between the two landscapes and the indirect protest. The “yes” seems to shout “no,” and the “no” yells “yes”:

Look at me! I know my place No longer a stranger in my city Because I’ve tracked the growth of these buildings I’ve witnessed the stretching of new roads Look at me! I know my place Because I have given up my past over time And my existence here is no longer contingent People greet me passing in the street I have a few friends And not a single enemy And if someone does gets angry or bothered Never mind // I speak this language as if I was born to it That’s how life is if one overcomes And rejects the futility of danger The days arrive like gifts And man’s fate is to come to terms with his existence.¹⁴

The poem surveys the landscape of the poet-speaker’s home, while relating to the extent to which he belongs to his surroundings and the society he lives in. From a retroactive standpoint, he examines things with a placating eye. From his use of negative statements—“No longer a stranger in my city”—one can perceive a feeling of physical estrangement towards the landscapes that greeted him upon arrival. The declaration “Look at me! I know my place” that opens the first two verses shows that in the past this was not the case (from the “yes” we hear the “no”). This relates not only to the physical landscape, but also to cultural, social, and historical aspects. The phrase “I have given up my past…” testifies to the impact of the “heartache of double roots” on the present; it is in fact impossible for a person to “give up” his past. As Tchernikhovsky wrote: “A person is nothing more than the shape of his native landscape.” Moreover, the poet is not referring to a harmful habit, such as smoking or alcohol, which must be given up. In fact, the speaker has not given up his past, but has rather learned to live with a dual landscape, a dual culture, and has signed an uneasy truce with the two worlds of his experience. From bitterness has emerged sweetness, or in the words of Michael Harsegor, “I break, therefore I am.”¹⁵

In 1993, Balfour Haqaq published a collection of poems entitled Poems of the Legend of the Bitter Honey. The expression “bitter honey” is an oxymoron that reflects ambivalence regarding the landscape of Israel, which caused heartache to the new immigrants from the East upon their arrival. Among the poems of this collection and the one that preceded it, A Forgotten Document (1987), may be found many landscape poems and poems that express the tension of the parent generation and the split between the culture they absorbed in Iraq, which was imbued with the traditions of Babylonian Jewry throughout the generations. Like his twin, Herzl, and many others who shared similar experiences, Balfour has included in his second collection poems that are more accepting than those that appeared in his first publication. The landscapes no longer express the tension between the two cultures, Eastern and Western, but are grounded in a different atmosphere, at times of a metaphysical nature. In style, they are no longer hyper-realistic, as was true of his earlier work. They do not include concrete details from everyday life, but tend to express something that lies beyond reality. For example, the poem “The Gates of Mercy” expresses protest against the social reality of the new immigrants by means of descriptions of the Mahaneh Yehuda Market in Jerusalem. The protest is based on a text from Maimonides, thus elevating the poem above the lowly status of the place that he calls “the slave market.”

In the “Gates of Mercy” study house in Nahlaot I copied Maimonides’ words: These are the species that emerged from the mire And in the bodies of carrion, like maggots and worms … That are not born of male and female But from stinking droppings.

And when going out to the people’s market, the slave market I ached for the rusty bodies That walk the earth without souls But they are trash, without the spirit of life Merely the outer layers And they creep and spawn with maggots’ eyes And I prayed to the God of Hosts … To open before them the Gates of Benevolence “The Gates of Mercy.”¹⁶

The prayer in the third verse, as well as the use of the term “the outer layers” (of spiritual impurity) employed by Rabbi Isaac Lurie, a Kabbalist rabbi, raises the poem to a transcendental level.

The protest employing descriptions of the “slave market” is fortified by the analogy with the species emerging from the mire described by Maimonides. In his more recent works, the poet Balfour Haqaq seems to have made peace with himself: “A man’s fate is to come to terms with his existence,” in the words of Peretz Dror Banai (see above). The landscapes in Balfour Haqaq’s present poems are softer, more accepting, as in the description of the Mahaneh Yehuda Market (the slave market):¹⁷

And I who came from Mahaneh Yehuda And did not see the blood of whipping I stand erect opposite the closing wall Regarding a Biblical morning With eyes revealing my beautiful city (“A view of Jerusalem’s walls”).

The phenomenon of employing landscape as protest in earlier poems and using softer, more accepting descriptions in later ones also holds true for Herzl, Balfour’s twin brother. His poem “On the Way Home” describes a desolate landscape: “Biting cold / Blind” emanates from it, and the broken bench serves as metonymy for scenes from the Nahlaot Quarter, for the “ailing Jerusalem” of his childhood:

A broken bench on my way home The face of the old opening is gone. Its years are behind it A mask: holding a kerosene can, salts Cracks, scratches My face is clear, I’m on the way to my old home To my little Temple.

A piece of bread steeped in olive oil Soft, sprinked with hyssop powder. She was ill in my childhood Jerusalem, soft as a vision And ice around her In the markets was sold. A sharp cold Blind…¹⁸

The breaking up of the phrases by the many pauses is a kind of metonymy for the broken bench and the ailing, divided Jerusalem. These personify the crisis in the speaker’s soul resulting from the dual roots of the new immigrants, whose situation changed from a high social and economic status before immigration to abject poverty after it. In all the rhyming poems, Jerusalem is described as ailing: “My ailing Jerusalem, enfold me / Even for a moment…/ To touch the whitewash and the rust and what lies beneath them / In pieces…”¹⁹ All the rhyming poems and the landscape poems in his first books are suffused with illness, crisis, and pain.

His latest work is devoid of pain and protest. Even when he returns to those childhood scenes described in his earlier poems, they are retroactively filled with light and longing, as in the poem “Memories of Life: Wonder”:

Memories of things, memories of houses Memories of life On the doorstep, searching, praying Childhood is gathered in, pieces, wrinkles What were we lacking all those years… A world that was…

And at this same time and season Light and more light A memory and another memory, Memories of life, wonder How were we lacking all these

(“lights of childhood”)²⁰

“This is the promised land. How beautiful the roofs above the market!”²¹ and similar passages.

In the poem “Camels,” Ronny Somek describes the changing landscapes of present-day Israel. The first part of the poem describes the market in Antalya, Turkey. The second part describes the landscapes of Petah-Tikva and Ramat-Gan (two established cities near Tel Aviv):²²

How many camels do you want For your daughter? Asks the jeweler in the market at Antalya. And suddenly the stake of years is no longer embedded In the edges of the tent canvas Flapping in the wind. That’s how it is. You father a daughter near the remains of orange groves in Petah Tikva Raise her around yawning animals In the Safari of Ramat Gan And here desert carpets are unrolling Under her feet. And I decorate the saddles with amber beads That once passed by in the East Wind From Nueba to Ras Muhammed. In the days of shifting sands.

Ronny Somek’s anthology Algiers, pays special attention to the Eastern aspects of Israeli society. The colors of the East are presented both as part of daily life, at times as a backdrop for the subject discussed in the poem, and also as a representational motif for the issue of cultural encounters. The poem “Camels” deals with the topic of a daughter’s growing up and a father’s coping with her suitors, and retains an Eastern atmosphere as a real-life part of the landscape: an analogy between the market at Antalya and the landscape of Petah-Tikva orange groves.²³

There are several examples of “dual-rooted” poets from Islamic lands, whose early work is suffused with the heartache of the dual landscape: Moshe Ben Harosh, Dan Elbo, Sammy Shalom Shitrit, Ada Aharoni, Lev Haqaq, Moshe Sartel, Dudu Eyal, Shalom Katab, among others. There are also dual-rooted poets (of the first and second generations) whose poetry expresses the protest of the dual landscape up to the present day. These include Ronny Somek, Joseph Ozer, Yossi Alfi, Shlomo Abau, Sammy Shalom Shitrit, Esther Kanka Shkalim, among others.

Expressing protest through descriptions of landscape may also be found in the output of poets who arrived from Eastern Europe. However, it must be said that their protest was more restrained. As the cultural trend setters and policy makers who founded the State of Israel were themselves of Eastern European origin, poets and writers with this background did not suffer from social discrimination. Nevertheless, in the work of current poets, such as Itamar Yaoz-Kest, who emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, protest may still be expressed in terms of landscape.

Leah Goldberg’s poem, “Pine,” has provided several variations on the theme of “the heartache of two homelands.” This poem has provided the inspiration for such terms as “the sorrow of severed roots” (in an essay by Eliezer Schweid), “dual-rootedness (in an essay by Itamar Yaoz-Kest) and “the heartache of dual roots” (the present author’s own research and publications).²⁴

The term “dual-rooted” coined by Itamar Yaoz-Kest is derived from tree imagery. Yaoz-Kest has written several poems that make use of figurative language and metaphorical images drawn from the tree and its parts.²⁵ Tree imagery seems to be particularly fitting for the concept of “dual-rootedness,” the dual ego, the dual landscape, the dual homeland, dual language and dual culture. Leah Goldberg’s poem, “Pine” describes a real-life encounter between the speaker and a pine tree. It soon becomes clear to the reader that the pine is a metaphor for the dual-rootedness of the speaker: “With you I grew up, pines/With roots in two different landscapes.” By means of the tree metaphor, which has become a symbol for immigrant poets, Leah Goldberg describes the experience of living in two landscapes as a result of her arrival in a new land. In the poem, which is in sonnet form, the speaker expresses longing for the snowy landscapes of Europe and for the culture of her childhood:²⁶

Here I will not hear the sound of the cuckoo. Here the tree will not assume a hood of snow, But in the shade of these pines All my childhood is resurrected.

The chime of the needles: once upon a time— I’ll call homeland to the snowy expanse, To the green ice binding the stream, To the language of a song in a foreign land.

Perhaps only migrant birds Suspended between heaven and earth Know the pain of two homelands.

With you I was planted twice, With you I grew, pines, With my roots in two different landscapes.

Goldberg senses that her true homeland is the snowy European landscape of her birthplace: “I’ll call homeland to the snowy expanse...”

In Itamar Yaoz-Kest’s poem, “Archives,” he deliberately uses his native tongue, Hungarian, to protest using the dual landscape. (Following the lead of Erez Biton, dual-rooted poets from Islamic lands also frequently make use of their mother tongue.) Scenes of the poet’s native Hungary float to the surface when he spots a plum tree in the Israeli landscape: ²⁷

Ringlo! Ringlo! Who’s shouting a foreign word In the heart of summer? And I hear: / ‘A rosy-cheeked plum’; And not having a scrap of paper I write on my hand hastily The double language—Translation against original, I seem to be an amphibian In this landscape that surrounds me like a skin; Even though I may still sometimes think About essences of mother milk suppressed in me Like the mangold garden or the Easter lilies And the chestnut-candled street behind the house And the girl with the bicycle Who is nothing more than a flickering shadow So that she cannot make a sound Ringlo! Ringlo! Expresses the code of my childhood,— But I too cannot Listen long in the heart of summer To her silent voice inside the fruit Which contains not a pit, but the scenes of my past.

The term “ringlo” (the fruit of the plum tree in Hungarian) is shouted out in defiance against all those dual-rooted poets who have suppressed childhood codes completely (in their poems, at least) in a way contrary to human nature. They have sought to find favor with the literary community by agreeing to sing the praises of the land of Israel, not of foreign landscapes. The poem raises the dilemma between the use of Hebrew terms that allow the writer to be integrated into Israeli society and the use of concepts that have a special meaning for the poet, since they raise sensory childhood memories encapsulated in expressions from the speaker’s native language.

The speaker in the poem has noted down the dual language—“translation opposite original”—on the back of his hand, and he calls himself “an amphibian” in the Israeli landscape. He has conjured up in his imagination the scenes of his childhood that are engraved deeply in his consciousness: the dual language has evoked the dual landscape, and deepened the heartache of dual roots.²⁸

Frequently in “dual-rooted” poetry, two simultaneous descriptions of landscape may appear in which the boundaries of “here” and “there” are blurred and unclear, since in the mind of the speaker they merge together without any division of time or space. Biographical details about the poet can help the reader understand and interpret his work. A reader who is unaware of Itamar Yaoz-Kest’s life story may find it difficult to understand which rivers are referred to in the poem that opens the collection, Dualrooted. He may fail to understand that the reference here is not only to the Yarkon River, that runs through the heart of Tel Aviv, but also to the river that runs through his native city of Szarvas, Hungary, that arises in the speaker’s consciousness in the here and now. It is unlikely that the reader will fully understand and enjoy the poem without this prior information. More understanding may be gained by reading additional poems, but not from reading this one only: ²⁹

—In the middle of the Tel Aviv street Suddenly To smell a drunken lilac, On the street Sweating like a man Because while the sweat covered my glasses The drunken, blue-eyed lilac grew In every corner of the Tel Aviv street, And it was too hot But the fragrance Was like a sleeping draught And in the middle of the street I saw a river I also heard the sound of a bell, And in the middle of the city— A man lives on the Mediterranean coast, And in the shade of the lilac, the stranger Has been sitting for years on the sea shore, But is still sitting on the banks of the river—

In the above poem, the “dual-rooted” experience is portrayed as “dualshored,” or as Moshe Shamir has written, two geographical landscapes appear that form an essential part of the poet’s being and the shape of his homeland.³⁰

As we can learn from Yaoz-Kest’s prose, poetry, and essays, the river played a central role in his native city. The Mediterranean coast fulfils a similar function in the “here and now” of Tel Aviv—both the river and the sea represent the mysteries of nature that both fascinate and terrify the observer. They symbolize eternity and emotions that tie the person observing the landscape to the universe and to the “transition.” The name of his book, The Language of the River, The Language of the Sea, embodies the writer’s dual existence.³¹

In the poem before us, the term “language” has two meanings: language as a geographical term that splits into the poet’s two landscapes (the banks of the river and the shores of the sea) and “language” as a cultural-spiritual concept that splits into his two cultures. The collection’s title (The Language of the River, The Language of the Sea) simultaneously confronts the real and the meta-realistic by means of metonymic phrases that represent the poet’s two selves: the self of the native land “the language of the river” and the Israeli self on the shores of Tel Aviv, “the language of the sea.”

One may find the dual landscape—of the native land and of the new land—in Hebrew poetry throughout the generations. In present-day Hebrew poetry the “dual-rooted heartache” bursts forth in descriptions of landscape through a process of projection, although in thin trickles, for example in the work of Tuvia Rivner, Yaakov Barzilai, Miriam Akavia, Yehuda Gur Aryeh, Esther Aizen, Chaim Nagid, Anat Zagorski-Springman, Ilana Rossano, Menachem Falek, and Adelina Klein, among others. The form of the poet’s work resembles the shape of his native landscape. The process of coming to terms with the geographical and social landscape in the later work of the poets of the “generation of transition” who immigrated to Israel from the East and the West in the 1950s and 1960s also includes poets who underwent the Holocaust. The process they experienced is best summed up by Yehuda Gur-Aryeh in his poem “Love of the Homeland”:³²

How many soles have we worn out On the rocky ground of the homeland, That we inherited in our youth With love, longing, pain, blisters…

Now it seems that its rocks have softened From their roughness, from their sharpness…