Article
Editorial: 1 February 2012
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January 24, 2012
Esther Ettinger, for instance, was born to Polish parents in Jerusalem during the Second World War. “And these are my names:” opens her poem ‘History, Part II’. “I was named after my paternal grandmother’s mother / Esther and my grandfather whom I never saw / would have called me Estherel Schwestrel”. Compare that with the opening of Yudith Shahar’s poem ‘I Am Yudith’: “I am Yudit, the granddaughter of Rebbe Yudah / who sailed on his longings in a boat from Istanbul / to die in the shack where I was born.”
The variations on the name Esther in Ettinger’s poem – Esther’ke, Esther’ka, Esterika, Etti – and, with them, the shifting identities that are mentioned in this poem resonate with the permutations of a name in Shahar’s ‘Eighteen Years After He Passed Away’, in which the poet declares before officials that she is: “the daughter of he of blessed memory who / was born in 1911 in Turkey with the name Elazar Sabakh, who received / the name Eliezer Sabah in this country in 1929, and chose to live and die / as Eliezer Shahar”.
In 1941, the year Esther Ettinger was born, Tuvia Ruebner, a writer, translator and photographer, emigrated from Bratislava to Mandatory Palestine. In ‘My Father’, with warmth and wit, he remembers the man he never saw again after leaving home: “He stood a little to the side and shed a tear to himself / when we parted at the train station and all that remains of him is / the wave of a hand.” Ruebner continued to write in German until, in 1957, he published the first of many subsequent poetry collections in Hebrew. Nonetheless, as Lisa Katz notes, Ruebner does not express a sense of belonging to the Israeli state, nor does he see Slovakia as his homeland: “Slovakia spewed me out,” he said in an interview, “and what is happening in Israel today has uprooted me again [ . . . ] Zionist ideology saved my life in 1941, but that is not the point. I am here because I am here. Poetry became my homeland.” This homeland of his is a rich place to wander through, a memory landscape that is a composite of places – from Bratislava (“A very old city / so old I don’t know it any more”) to Hebron, from Zurich to Jerusalem – infused with lament, beauty and loss.
Our final poet of this issue, Maarten Inghels, has been making waves on the Flemish poetry scene since the publication of his debut collection, Tumult, when he was just twenty. Born in 1988, with three collections already under his belt, Inghels heads up the new generation of Flemish poets. Though he has been much lauded, he remains focused on the hard work of poetry. In an interview with 3:AM Magazine, he noted: “I was overwhelmed by the chorus of praise, especially because I didn’t expect to make my debut at such a young age. But afterwards, when you’re sitting back at your writing table, it means nothing when the doubt returns. The praise is only temporary, you have to prove your worth with every new book.” The title poem of his latest collection, Waakzaam (Vigilant), from which the poems published here are taken, reminds that “the poet should be ever / vigilant, be above all tender”. And indeed, it seems that Inghels – despite belonging to a generation that grew up with the Internet, and born over half a century after Tuvia Ruebner – searches for tenderness, for quietness, for eloquence and poetry amid the fractured noise of technologically driven communication in the twenty-first century: “All hope is in vain when from the farmette you warble chatter verses / into the world, compress your thoughts into a couple of status bars, / write an essay in one-hundred-and-forty characters,” he writes in ‘The Barking Dogs Have All Gone’. Instead, with decades ahead of him in his career, Inghels resolves to: “lift up head from chest, to give the ribs some space and keep on / writing: letters, essays, poems etcetera.” Image: New immigrant in Jerusalem. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license, courtesy of The Jewish Agency for Israel.
. . . one can’t
separate life from death, and sometimes language is nothing but
mourning for lost tenderness.
(from ‘My Father’ by Tuvia Ruebner)
We publish a trio of excellent poets from Israel in this issue of PIW, alongside a young, critically acclaimed Belgian poet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the history of immigration to Israel, all three of the poets PIW Israel editor Lisa Katz presents examine – among other themes – family lineage in their work, asserting and questioning their own identity through invocations of their lost forebears.Esther Ettinger, for instance, was born to Polish parents in Jerusalem during the Second World War. “And these are my names:” opens her poem ‘History, Part II’. “I was named after my paternal grandmother’s mother / Esther and my grandfather whom I never saw / would have called me Estherel Schwestrel”. Compare that with the opening of Yudith Shahar’s poem ‘I Am Yudith’: “I am Yudit, the granddaughter of Rebbe Yudah / who sailed on his longings in a boat from Istanbul / to die in the shack where I was born.”
The variations on the name Esther in Ettinger’s poem – Esther’ke, Esther’ka, Esterika, Etti – and, with them, the shifting identities that are mentioned in this poem resonate with the permutations of a name in Shahar’s ‘Eighteen Years After He Passed Away’, in which the poet declares before officials that she is: “the daughter of he of blessed memory who / was born in 1911 in Turkey with the name Elazar Sabakh, who received / the name Eliezer Sabah in this country in 1929, and chose to live and die / as Eliezer Shahar”.
In 1941, the year Esther Ettinger was born, Tuvia Ruebner, a writer, translator and photographer, emigrated from Bratislava to Mandatory Palestine. In ‘My Father’, with warmth and wit, he remembers the man he never saw again after leaving home: “He stood a little to the side and shed a tear to himself / when we parted at the train station and all that remains of him is / the wave of a hand.” Ruebner continued to write in German until, in 1957, he published the first of many subsequent poetry collections in Hebrew. Nonetheless, as Lisa Katz notes, Ruebner does not express a sense of belonging to the Israeli state, nor does he see Slovakia as his homeland: “Slovakia spewed me out,” he said in an interview, “and what is happening in Israel today has uprooted me again [ . . . ] Zionist ideology saved my life in 1941, but that is not the point. I am here because I am here. Poetry became my homeland.” This homeland of his is a rich place to wander through, a memory landscape that is a composite of places – from Bratislava (“A very old city / so old I don’t know it any more”) to Hebron, from Zurich to Jerusalem – infused with lament, beauty and loss.
Our final poet of this issue, Maarten Inghels, has been making waves on the Flemish poetry scene since the publication of his debut collection, Tumult, when he was just twenty. Born in 1988, with three collections already under his belt, Inghels heads up the new generation of Flemish poets. Though he has been much lauded, he remains focused on the hard work of poetry. In an interview with 3:AM Magazine, he noted: “I was overwhelmed by the chorus of praise, especially because I didn’t expect to make my debut at such a young age. But afterwards, when you’re sitting back at your writing table, it means nothing when the doubt returns. The praise is only temporary, you have to prove your worth with every new book.” The title poem of his latest collection, Waakzaam (Vigilant), from which the poems published here are taken, reminds that “the poet should be ever / vigilant, be above all tender”. And indeed, it seems that Inghels – despite belonging to a generation that grew up with the Internet, and born over half a century after Tuvia Ruebner – searches for tenderness, for quietness, for eloquence and poetry amid the fractured noise of technologically driven communication in the twenty-first century: “All hope is in vain when from the farmette you warble chatter verses / into the world, compress your thoughts into a couple of status bars, / write an essay in one-hundred-and-forty characters,” he writes in ‘The Barking Dogs Have All Gone’. Instead, with decades ahead of him in his career, Inghels resolves to: “lift up head from chest, to give the ribs some space and keep on / writing: letters, essays, poems etcetera.” Image: New immigrant in Jerusalem. Reproduced under a Creative Commons license, courtesy of The Jewish Agency for Israel.
© Sarah Ream
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