Aryeh Sivan: Love of cheese . . . and country

19 mei 2011 Sivan eagerly adopted the Likrat group manifesto of writing poetry in a a personal, everyday, ironic voice, even when talking about matters of national importance and [including] current affairs like the Second Intifada: they come together in this book in one final, short section of three poems, following the central, autobiographical section.

Here Aryeh Sivan has thrown off literary grandeur, as if to say “Let me tell you something about the story of my life” in brief, simple terms. And the story of Aryeh Sivan’s life is in fact the story of the young Hebrew state, seen through the poetic lens of the individual, sensitive and sharp memory of the poet. The book is in fact a mosaic of memories, beginning with ‘Tel Aviv in the Early Forties’, the time of the poet’s childhood and his literary initiation.

The opening of the poem is so touching, despite the fine irony of the elderly poet looking down from the height of his years on the child thrilled by reading a history of his people (“I take off from the sofa which is my air field”). We absolutely believe the poet, who conveys a lyrical experience, unembellished, but picturesquely unique at the same time. The frame of the poem, the poet’s childhood, is clear, and we enter it with ease. The poet, having defended his people from imagined savages, wakes up from his daydream and returns to his childhood.

The poem ends soberly, sadly recalling the Holocaust, emphasizing the fact that it also took place in White Russia, his parents’ native land, and in utter contrast with his Tel Aviv childhood, where they sat in the famous cafés of the time “Cassit, Rovel and Pinati” and celebrated life.

When the poet comes to figures close to him, related by blood or memory, long since passed away, he does so in a wonderful conflation of the national and the personal, as in ‘Love of Cheese’ dedicated to the memory of his aunt. The poem opens with a precise description of his aunt’s preoccupation with persuading him to eat cheese, at a time of violent disturbances in the population of Palestine/pre-state Israel.

The subtle parallel between the poet’s childhood and the tender new plants is quite beautiful, as is a similar parallel, between the shoots peeping through the earth in the plant boxes and his budding sexuality.

That year I could already read the newspaper headlines
and the names inside black-framed boxes
of Jews killed with knives and bullets,
and in the hut among the plantings
my aunt peeled the wrapper from the cheese
and I imagined to myself
that the wrapper was a partition between me and her breast
which never filled
since she had no children.

Along with his sexual development, the poet’s social awareness is growing, into an understanding about what is going on in the small population of Palestine. Again, using everyday language, the poet likens newspapers, the most everyday of objects, to the paper wrapping the cheese, which in turn he describes as a partition between him and his aunt’s shrunken breast. So much is said and hinted at here in a few words. The aunt’s barrenness, for example, is perhaps a figure for the sword hanging over the neck of the small Jewish population, and that childish-adolescent anxiety, seeking relief for unsatisfied sexual desire.

Clearly, the statement “I am still alive” hints at national survival too, and Sivan’s love of cheese (“soft and white”) is simply pure memory, a feeling of personal affection for his dead aunt, albeit shot through with the establishment of a national home, but no less important in itself. In other words, the private is not relinquished for the sake of the national, but rather the national is part of and subject to private experience. Excerpted and translated from Poetry Place Online, Vol. 25, July 2007