Today's blogpost was written by Kayla Schneider-Smith, a Yahel Social Change fellow living, learning and volunteering for 9-months in the city of Rishon LeZion.
If you know I’ll be attending an MFA Creative Writing program next year, you may have heard me complain I’ve felt blocked in my ability to write poetry in Israel. Whether it’s too much culture shock at once, a geo-socio-political situation too complex to sort into words, feeling torn between the Jewish and democratic aspects of the country, or fear of offending an imaginary audience, I’ve struggled to put pen to paper this year.
But, as the end of my time in the Yahel Social Change Fellowship approaches, I’ve decided that none of the above are good enough excuses to suffocate my craft, to hold back my voice. For my final blogpost, I’ve managed to pull together six poems I’ve written throughout the year, highlighting themes of encountering ultra-orthodox relatives, uncovering family history, evaluating Israeli society and politics, travelling around the country, and meeting wonderful and frustrating people daily. I hope this is only the beginning of digesting and reflecting upon my time in Israel through poetry, and I hope you can find something here that resonates with you, too!
Holy Ground
Bubby holds up a fist and makes a
zero with her fingers
This is how “Jewish”
Reform Jews are to me,
she shuffles me through crowded markets where
boiling men wear summer coats and study
their feet as we pass them
step to the side, step to the side,
Bubby goads, but all I hear is
make yourself smaller,
make yourself zero
Bubby buys me a white shirt
and a white skirt for Yom Kippur
the way she thumbs through the racks and lights up when
she finds something right
makes me feel like she loves me
so that each time the hot familiar anger rises
I remember how she bought me a Yom Kippur outfit and
walked me through the city with her rolling shopping bag and
poured me iced coffee slushies and
paid for taxi rides home and told me
i’m waiting for you to wake up
Wake up to what, Bubby?
to your God who
invalidates my God?
to my God who challenges yours?
The Soldiers
The soldiers board the bus
just like that: as soldiers,
guns slung across slight arms
Why did you kiss me?
They exit the bus as boys,
mere teenagers, white under-
shirts clinging to skin
I know you once carried a gun,
too, what has it done to you?
Many people enter the bus, many
get off. Besides the soldiers there’s
the Chassid in the long black coat.
I sometimes wonder why any of this
exists anymore, in a country that has
steered the startup to the moon.
Perhaps none of this is real.
Perhaps the Chassid is just a man.
Perhaps the soldiers are simply boys.
Perhaps your kiss was just that,
just a kiss.
At the Bedouin Senior Center
How many times in life can we say that?
That we can die happy,
having fulfilled the most important thing in the world,
which comes down to a few things, really:
a colorful room, elaborate cushions,
an orange foam soccer ball passed from shoe to shoe,
laughter, a kiss on the cheek,
all the things that don’t need translation
All I Can Do
all i can do is be sad today,
and hear about the rockets flying from
one fence to the other
regardless of what mother and her baby
are strolling on the other side,
which man is rolling a cigarette
in the front seat of his truck,
wondering what he’ll bring home his
wife for the weekend
all i can do is not choose a side today,
for sides have already been chosen,
and secured, and posted on doorposts
and upon gates, clung to for life,
the indentation of angry hands meant
to hold instruments, to hold one another,
grasping pocketknives grasping guns
grasping flag poles waving colors in the wind,
blues and whites and greens and blacks and reds
that claim sovereignty claim territory claim God
claim blood
all i can do is keep walking today,
walking to work walking to class
walking to busses
trying to memorize the shape of shelters
the shape of my heart how long it’ll
take me to run when i should duck for cover
when it’ll be too late
all human loss is our loss,
all mess on our fingers is ours,
the brokenness of other bodies is
our bodies’ brokenness,
brothers and sisters refusing to let go
tearing out each other’s spines
pouring all this frustrating summer heat into the gutter,
to dirty the world instead of making it better,
to hurt instead of heal
A Letter to My Great Aunts and Uncle:
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942
for Miri, Rosa & Benny
Rosa (top l), Miri (top r), my Grandmother Faiygle (bottom l), Gitta (bottom r)
When you left your homes not knowing where you were going
I’m sorry I wasn’t there to tell you
turn around jump off the train don’t stop running
out of Poland out of Germany out of Holland
far until you reach the West or East
anywhere but here
when your cattle-car pulled through the arch
when you stumbled off the train without understanding
I’m sorry I wasn’t there to tell you
say you are 16 say you are a brick mason
don’t let them take you beyond the gate
to the tall trees where you cannot return
when they led you to the showers
and shaved your undressed bodies
I’m sorry I wasn’t there to tell you
stand close to the ventilation stand straight under the gas
if it hits you first it’ll be quick
it’ll be over in a second like a band aid like a blur
you won’t have to suffer long or
hear the wailing mothers and children or
climb the pyramid of suffocating bodies
gasping for air
when they shoveled you into the crematorium
in bursts of smoke and ash
I’m sorry I wasn’t there to tell you
I love you
to kiss you goodbye to say kaddish
to tear my clothes to get angry to start a revolution
I’m sorry I came too late.
Now, 77 years later
in this inhuman slaughterhouse
unthinkable bright green forest
in front of the lake in front of the puddle
where they took your lives and dumped your ashes
I only can tell you
I am alive
your nieces and nephews
and great nieces and nephews
and great-great nieces and nephews
are alive and thriving
Miri Rosa Benny
I carry, cherish, remember you always
I speak you back to life
I say your names aloud
Evening in Rishon
In a war, are there ever two sides?
Or are there only hundreds of thousands of
stories, voices, prejudices,
struggling to burst through?
Is this conflict really the facts and figures and
diagrams of lands possessed, lands granted, or is
it the amalgamation of difference
that neither you nor I can solve single-handedly,
the internal raging conflict of every human heart?
On your front porch in the sticky summer evening,
your eyes dark and foreboding
and having seen too much,
you try to convince me that everything I have witnessed thus far is a lie,
I try to convince you that everything you have witnessed thus far is a lie,
you call me what I am not,
I call you what you are not,
and the settlers keep settling
the rockets keep firing
the soldiers keep soldiering, and
you and I refuse to move.
