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PARTISA REVIEW
cent, richly cloaks his blindness. His poem is an immigrant's palimpsest of the
sounds and scents of North Africa and Israel. Bella Akhmadulina, emotional,
says some words in English about her dream of being in Jerusalem having
come true.
All of the following evenings in the Khan Theater, hundreds upon
hundreds of poetry addicts fill the hall until one or two in the morning. They
sit for hours in darkness, hanging on the reading voices, the words of
translation dancing on the giant screen. And there is the whisper of listening,
the joining of immigrants, the "exiles" from there, to their language. Yehuda
Amichai, almost the poet of the people, greets both the guests and audience.
He sketches the fear that passed over this same place, over the Sultan's Pool
facing the illuminated city walls, the no-man's-land before 1967. In the face
ofJerusalem, which is constantly changing, his poem, "An Arab Shepherd Is
Searching for His Goat," becomes a mapping of the unconscious, the archae–
ology of fear which awakens suddenly in the dense quiet among the trees on
Mount Zion:
An
Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching
for my little boy.
An
Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet
above the Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants
the child or the goat
to
get caught in the wheels
of the terrible
Had Gadya
machine.
After we found them among the bushes
and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying
Searching for a goat or a son
has always been the beginning
of a new religion in these mountains.
(tr. Chana Bloch)
From another poem, "The Collection," Avot Yeshurun, the grand old
man of Hebrew poetry, Tel Aviv rises - city of refugees camped on the
sands of the Mediterranean, clutching their possessions, migratory birds be–
tween immigration and death. Tel Aviv is sung in a loud, bustling, nomadic,
Jewish voice.
It
is a "Tel Aviv" evening. Meir Wieseltier reads from "The
Burning of Holy Books": "At noon light rips / through the room, and we
know what's what: / over the holy we'll put a transparent / greed." The
troubadourism of Roni Somek, Pinchas Sadeh, the political involvement of
Yitzhak Laor - what is Hebrew poetry, in the international context that has
