It’s me speaking: An interview with Yudit Shahar

4 januari 2012 Poetry has grown distant from people, and people have distanced themselves from it. Poetry too has been privatised. It bothers me to read a book of love poems, even first-rate poems, when they show no consciousness of actual everyday life, of what's going on. This is corruption and narcissism on the part of the writer. It’s our duty to talk about the core of what it is to be a human being today, and that includes the problem of survival. We live in a whorehouse society. Our governments are enemies of the people. They trample on whoever they can. As an example, take the cancellation of the [Israeli] bread subsidy. A government that ends the year with a budget surplus of 1.5 billion dollars cancels the couple of million it was spending to subsidise bread. If all this passes the poet by, and she merely fiddles while the situation burns, then the act of writing becomes a form of crime.

Who are your pupils?
I'm a special-education teacher in ‘challenge’ classes, the toughest classes in the system. The pupils have various undiagnosed problems. Once they were called ‘marginal youth’. They’re in 10th grade and don’t know the alphabet. They belch in class to be funny. They haven’t been professionally diagnosed because their parents can’t afford it. Here’s something else that’s been privatised. A diagnosis costs 1800 shekels [c. $500], and the parents have to pay. When you have six kids, you omit the diagnosis: maybe another kid will succeed.

How did you get into this field?
Ideals. I thought there were people who needed me, children who arrive with bruises from various parts of the educational system. I thought I could help them learn to believe in themselves. I’m good with them. They arrive as mavericks in the society. It stands out quite clearly that they’re from the lowest classes. My path to this profession was totally ideological, thanks to Galia Maor, CEO of Bank Leumi.

What does it have to do with her?
It’s a long story. I divorced at forty and had to build myself up from scratch, occupationally. The cost of supporting a family with two kids fell totally on me. I went to work for VISA in Bank Leumi. The ads described it as a “job with a future”. All day I sat at the computer, looking for accounts that had gone over their credit limit.

The job meant getting up early and getting home late, and here I was, a single parent. The salary was miniscule, though bigger than what I make as a teacher. One day the bank threw a party for the workers to celebrate the birth of VISA Leumi. Galia Maor told us that if we didn’t increase our output they would fire us. The audience was made up mainly of single parents and students, and here she is flaunting her diamonds at us and threatening dismissals. The demand kept rising. First they wanted 100 actions per day. When we reached 100, they demanded 120. Then 140. It was impossible to go back to an earlier quota. We had to keep raising our output or be fired.

I looked at Maor and asked myself, What am I doing in this bank? And who am I giving my best hours to? I wanted to throw up. I quit.

I had a degree in teaching history and preparing pupils for matriculation. I wanted to work from the heart, so I decided to retrain in special education at the Kibbutz Teachers College. Nights I worked in telemarketing for an insurance firm. I had terrible pangs of conscience as a mother who leaves her house in the morning and comes back late at night. My job was to phone people and offer them a deal where the company would help them get tax refunds. People got mad at me for calling them at 9 p.m. I felt uncomfortable about it, but I had no choice. “How dare you phone me at 9 o'clock!” “When you need to feed your kids, you’ll call me”.

They paid minimum wage, of course, and if I got people to sign up I’d get a percentage. I was among the better telemarketers, but I hated it. It’s awful. That's how we survived.

When I got my degree in special education, the supervisor in the Ministry of Education asked me, “Why have you done this retraining? We’ve already told the Kibbutz College that we won’t need any more special-education teachers”.

I'd reached a point where I was trained for all kinds of things that had nothing to do with each other, and I had two kids. Then I went through a series of jobs. I went to work as a secretary in the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel [the Israeli-occupied West Bank] for the boss who figures in one poem as “the God of Secretaries”. I was one in a series of women whose lives he’d embittered. He was a professor of social work. I used to force myself to go there. The whole time I looked for another job in order to escape from him. The only thing I found was work in the Customer Service department of Sakal [an electrical appliance chain] at the airport. The workers there were 19- or 20-year-olds from Ramle or Lod, with wild long gilded fingernails. I didn't fit in; there were no women my age. One day my supervisor comes to me and says, “Listen, Yudit honey, you're just wonderful with the customers, but you don’t fit us and we don’t fit you.” Two months later they fired her too because she got pregnant. One day before being fired from Sakal – and here was a piece of luck – I’d found a teaching job at the National Center for Learning Disabilities in Rosh Ha-eyn.

So things straightened out for you at last.
Not quite yet, unfortunately. They didn’t pay us for the last five months of the year. It was a private establishment. While I was trying to survive and taking loans, teachers were gradually resigning. But when you’re a single parent and need to work as if in the jungle, you’re constantly busy with how to go on and where to get money. So I didn’t leave till the year was over. I hoped they would pay.

They didn’t. Eventually I got to Nitzan, an association that deals with learning disabilities. From then on I began to find my way. I substituted at Amit High School in Rishon LeZion, and this year [2008] I’m part of the regular staff. The same at the Bleich school in Ramat Gan. But the pay is very low despite my two academic degrees, so I have to work three jobs.

I feel that I’m doing something true and real as a special-ed teacher. But I don’t understand why the state spits in our face. My son worked in telemarketing after he finished high school and made more than me. He asked me ironically if I wanted a loan.

God comes into your poems, God of the secretaries, a God that falls silent about the cost of bread. Where does he come from?
I grew up in a religious family. My father was a rabbi and my grandfather a cantor. As a girl I saw how they divide the men from the women in the synagogue, and that I wouldn’t be able to be a rabbi or carry the Torah. I would always sit apart with the women. I rebelled and entered the army. I’m still curious about religion, but I think that if God exists, he is so big that he probably won’t much care about things like separating meat and milk.

You are basically a poet of social issues.
I’m ambivalent about my writing. Life is stronger than words. I don’t always manage to express this. And I also wonder who would find it interesting. There’s so much suffering, and so much luxury and corruption beside it. Who reads poetry?

On the other hand, I feel that if I succeed in saying something socially significant, I’ll have a sense of achievement. I have standards of poetry netto, poetry as such. I don’t like the poetry of issues and causes. The tension between writing poetry for its own sake and doing something significant, something that contributes, tears me apart.

Do you see any change on the horizon for the state of Israel?
I don’t know what to think. The situation here is like a shadow dance. Apart from the social questions, there is the sin of the occupation and the racism. I was among the leftist voters, basically Meretz, but today I don’t know what to say. The Israeli side is the occupier, the one that is responsible, but I can’t blame Israel only. We are flailing about in a very deep swamp. I would recognize Hamas because there’s no other way, but the way they act isn’t clear to me. And within the country the society is in tatters, without solidarity.

The first time I voted was for Shulamit Aloni of Meretz. That was 1977. Now, thirty years later, I don’t know who to vote for, although I’m a super-responsible person and consider it my duty to vote. I’m disappointed with Meretz because of its lack of interest in a social agenda. Hadash has shrunk to the point that it only cares about the Arab population. I want to vote for a party that will care about Arabs and Jews and will try to resolve the conflict.

But I’d like to return to a more personal note. Despite everything that is happening, and to me as well, I feel lucky. I could have been born on a sidewalk in India. Or Gaza. There are people whose situation is harder, much harder, than mine. I go around with this pain, maybe because I grew up in an environment that was full of pain. I have pupils who are hungry. My own kids never went hungry. I’ll telemarket people at 2 a.m. to bring food home to my kids. I feel spoiled because I have a mind, because I am capable of analysing what happens to me. And besides, I have enough money to take a bus to Afula and buy sunflower seeds. Excerpted from Challenge, a magazine covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No. 108, March/April 2008.