MICHAL GOVRIN
623
suddenly opened up - that of the Indian
A.
K. Ramanujan , Bei Dao from
China, Salamun the Slovene?
After midnight, in Mishkenot, the hall is full. There is a reading of He–
brew poetry. I fear reading my latest poem, "Blood," written by the window
of the maternity ward on Mount Scopus: "... How killing is the thick taste of
blood, the heavy liquor stunned with milk, and the birth between us... "
What is poetry? What is Hebrew poetry? What is this difficult-to-interpret
poem called Jerusalem - "the most dreamed-of object," as (to paraphrase
Walter Benjamin) Paris was for the surrealists?
On Monday, the voices from Europe, from what Claude Lanzmann
calls
Les non-Lieux de La memoire,
or in Sandor Csoori's Hungarian poem,
"The Little Street": "... little street, little street, Europe's / Tiny poppy-seed
street; death 's footprint / Can you see in your black mud, / Despite your
eyesight, weakening," are heard. Europe's poetry is haunted by the return of
the repressed, of the dead buried by the regime's bulldozer or by forgetful–
ness. There are Agnes Gergeley of Hungary, Judith Herzberg of the
Netherlands, and the horizon ofMichel Deguy's philosophical poetry and the
book he has just edited,
On the Subject of Lanzmann's FiLm, Shoah.
A few days later I meet at his office Zwi Arad, "Tolka," the director of
Yad Vashem and a survivor of the Vilna ghetto. When we last met he was a
general and I a private in the army (another, Israeli, layer of relations). He
seizes me enthusiastically, "Michal, you've got to see the canyon we're
building." In the heat of the morning we drive in his car to the building site.
On the way I tell him about the poetry festival and about Deguy's new
book. The building site is a huge dug-out crater. On the gigantic walls, leading
ditch by ditch through Europe, are carved thousands of names of cities, vil–
lages, and towns whose Jewish populations were exterminated. At the bot–
tom of the path that descends between the walls of rock, I experience a mo–
ment's fear of entering, of being trapped; an incomprehensible refusal to
search, like a tourist, for the name of my mother's city. Wet lime oozes be–
neath our feet. A fissure in the rocks begins west of Germany and leads to
Brussels and France. Tolka urges the builders to hurry: what about the
foundations for Czechoslovakia? (Vaclav Havel, during his visit to Israel the
following month, is going to inaugurate it.) He points to a pit in the corner and
declares, "Here's where I'm building Czechoslovakia." Which Czechoslovakia,
in what geography, what time? Poets writing in Israel and Europe after
Auschwitz share a common fate, a crisis of expression and language.
It
is
echoed in the almost identical openings of poems by Holub from Czechoslo–
vakia and by Mordechai Geldman from Israel.
On Monday afternoon, a panel discussion, "The Poet as Revolution–
ary," gives the opportunity for theoretical discussion. Holub, Csoori, and
Salamun speak of the years of oppression
in
Central Europe, the nightmarish
"Games" in the poem cycle of the Serb Vasko Popa. They speak without
