Mourning which contains love and compassion and is able to forgive

October 16, 2006 “I want to write poems for readers without parents/ because only they understand what they do not tell/ anyone,” Yitzhak Laor wrote in the poem ‘Intention’ in his book A Night in a Foreign Hotel. Poetry, it seems while reading these lines by Laor, almost ‘flows’ from the absence-loss of parents, who constitute the first audience to be addressed directly, so that the only possible readers of this poetry are those who ‘understand’ a similar absence, reflect on it, ‘tell’ about it. And perhaps this is also an ars poetica statement about the point at which the work of writing becomes an act of awareness about your own death, exposed suddenly within the death of the person who brought you into the world.

Perhaps because of the decisive importance of parents’ death (and of the “empty rooms” which follow), many writers return to the topic, to this crux of identity. To mention just a few poems pivotal to the new Hebrew poetry; poems about the time before and and the time after death (of a mother, of a father): those by Yehuda Amichai, T. Carmi, Ori Bernstein, Agi Mishol, Natan Zach and others. This tradition is now joined by the Jerusalemite Dorit Weisman with her book, Dancing Csardas with You.

This is the fifth book for Weisman, who began publishing in the 1990s; her poetic voice is thought to be one of the most refreshing and interesting heard today, a claim which is supported by the many prizes she has won. Weisman writes prosy, conversational poetry, nearly free of metaphor and image, sometimes almost documentary, revealing and filled with detail. She carries on a dialogue, it seems, mainly with American poetry; a book of her translations of Charles Bukowski was published in 2002.

This collection is a sort of poetic-documentary journey following the death of a mother. The stations are marked out with exact dates, ‘site-markers’, and sketches. The sketches observe “her last days . . . when I held her hand, with my other one I drew both our hands,” a drawing which appears on the closing page of the book. It opens with [a depiction of] the mother’s moment of death, which seems to take place, again and again, in the reading of the disturbing title poem, ‘Dancing Csardas with You ’. This poem imagines the scene of a Hungarian dance for two; the beginning of the dance, in which “I continued to hold your hand/ I stuck close to your temples” is replaced by a literal grasp of the dead mother, who has slowly turned into an object to be classified: “They put a sticker on your forehead/ they put you in a light blue sack.”

The next poem in the book, ‘A Sandwich with Radish and Green Onion’, takes place during the traditional seven day period of Jewish mourning. Chronology is disrupted from this point on and the documentary framework disturbed, in favor of free, circular movement in time and space. In this way the mother’s life, illness and death are presented as a chance to blur the borders of reality. The poems touch on the mother’s early life in Hungary and also that of the speaker, who ‘acquires’ a happy childhood from the dying mother; these sections are interspersed with scenes of illness and hospitalization.

At the same time, roles are reversed; the mother becomes a child, sometimes a demanding one, in contrast to her exhausted, grown daughter in the poem ‘Mom's Last Visit, July 2002’: 

Mom loves malt
and club soda. Two months ago
she started to drink beer. 
(…) Sitting on the red stairs,
awaiting her evening drive in the car.
When I’m up to it, Mom, we’ll go to the coffee shop. 

But age and illness also hold the promise of a different redemption, more aesthetic, which emerges when least expected. Thus, for example, the poems are filled with descriptions of the mother’s skin: “The treatments have ironed [her] wrinkles,” and, in another place, “Your forehead is smooth, your face smooth, your hands/ smooth (…)/ only now, when you are 82, I begin/ to enjoy your skin.”

The source of redemption is the delayed opportunity for affinity: “Fifty years passed/ until I could embrace you,” Weisman writes in the poem ‘Returning to Jerusalem, a Little Different’. The compassionate glance is what guarantees beauty as well as moments of epiphany inside the prosaic pain, the descriptions of tubes and the food packs containing “light brown mush.”

This is her almost impressionistic depiction of the sickroom: “Transparent the light through the curtains/ transparent the fluid in the infusion”; the precise moment of peace while sitting at the bedside of the mother-child is experienced while in the distance: 

children jumped on a trampoline to great heights,
one had to lift one's head to see them.
It was afternoon and no need
to hurry anywhere. 

This is a book in which old age is also lively; not for nothing is death pictured as a stormy dance. The poems are packed with eating scenes; the mother eats a whipped cream cake, the daughter buys herself “vegetable soup and humous on pita bread” in a restaurant near the mother’s home, on the day of her death, and so on.

The speaker, who in an earlier poem felt repugnance for “my mother's pairs of underpants,/ large and wide” is also depicted as someone whose closeness to the mother provides a response to her own femininity: “And this year I began to use perfumes,” she underscores, almost nonchalantly. The poetic identity of the speaker does not stem from talk about absence but rather out of the ability to converse again with the mother.

And even the mother’s death is projected against the pictures of the disintegrating spaceship, broadcast again and again on the television screen. The facts are final, allowing an opening to a conversation which is renewed over and over again. Despite several weaker portions, mainly the prose sections between poems, this is, in my opinion, Weisman’s best book – a poetic achievement, and no less than this, a human one. Ma'ayan Harel is a doctoral student who teaches in the Hebrew Literature department of Ben Gurion University.