No Sign of Ceasefire: A Review Essay

No Sign of Ceasefire, the volume of poems collected and translated from the Hebrew by the now deceased collaborators Warren Bargad and Stanley Chyet, provides a unique cross section of Israeli poetry from the 1970s through the present. Bargad and Chyet's first volume, Israeli Poetry: A Contemporary Anthology (1986), dealt, for the most part, with those older, more "canonical" figures of the generation following Natan Alterman and Avraham Shlonsky: poets such as Amir Gilboa, Abba Kovner, Yehudah Amichai, Natan Zach, Dahlia Ravikovich, and Meir Wieseltier. The new anthology brings us poets who are either younger or less established as being among the "classics," even among Israeli readers and much more so in America.

For such a poet as Yair Hurvitz (1941-1988), an adored dominant voice of the Israeli poetic avant-garde in the 1970s, who died young, there is not likely to be a more adequate portrayal than that which we find in Bargad and Chyet's book. Hurvitz was, in the words of Yehonatan Geffen, "the Dylan Thomas of his generation," the successor to the mantle of Natan Alterman. As Bargad and Chyet write about Hurvitz's poetry: "Oxymorons and melancholy reign" in this "deeply romantic poesy that parallels Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, an artistic effort based on sarcasm, ambiguity and irony." Note this example from 'Onat ha-Makhshefah (1970); Bargad and Chyet, unfortunately, do not provide the original Hebrew texts:¹

"Darkness Turning Sweet"

A city have I, I have a suna sun have Ion the fruited tongue sweetness trembles with silken skinand its resonant soul celebrates my coming . . .A city of I its dwellers are mine,its roofs and balconies strolling a gentle breeze,as for me I've sung a city as a legacy.

The earth was perfect for burial, the sea was perfect too,the wind was beautiful.a sorrow festive with the seal of darkness turning sweet.

Bargad and Chyet also introduce the English reader to the work of the prolific poet, psychotherapist, and literary critic Mordechai Geldman (born 1946). One example of Geldman's enormous range and richness is this segment from his poem " 'Iyyun" (translated by the authors as "Eyeing") from 'Ayin (1993):

"Eyeing"

. . . the eye pecking at the worldlike a chicken at a heap of seedslike an automaton chicken, foolish and nervous,the eye which conceals the worldbeyond the screen of eyelidsin the shattering gloom of a shameful inwardness,the eye aided by eyeglassesor preferring inferior sight . . .the eye weeping over nothingness . . .the eye bewailing a pain thrustever deeper into the margins of consciousness . . .the eye whose twin is symmetricaland sometimes sees a poem.

Another, older poet, somewhat similar in intellectual virtuosity to Geldman, is Avner Treinin (born 1928), a professor of physical chemistry, who is very much the polymath and a native Israeli but one who also often brings into his poetry the experience of his family's background in Harbin, China; his father's labors over seventeen years in the Dead Sea potash fields; and a sense of having survived the Holocaust. In the poem "Opposites Combine" a casual swim in a pool elicits quaint musings on life's paradoxes, one of which is that touching the coolness of a woman's thigh in cool water can set the senses on fire:

"Opposites Combine (Heraclitus)"

The water that flowed in the orchard's hideoutis the water standing in the cells of my memoryas long as the blood flows in its vessels

In the cool water your thigh set afireyou were so cold still would understandwhat had happened and would finally consent

and it still drives me madthat these two oppositesare joined together, so to speak.

A quite different poet is the passionate, ethnic, and colorful native of Algeria, Erez Biton (born 1942), an activist in the Sephardi struggle for equality and a leading literary figure in Israel. Among the themes delineated by Bargad and Chyet are Biton's "traumatic experience of blindness when he was wounded in 1952; his life at the...