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4 Have Demonstrated the Interaction Between Plans for Population Dispersal and the Ongoing Problems of Sociocultural Gaps

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4 Have Demonstrated the Interaction Between Plans for Population Dispersal and the Ongoing Problems of Sociocultural Gaps QUEST N. 16 – FOCUS Poetics of Identity: Mizrahi Poets between Here and There, Then and Now by Esther Schely-Newman Abstract The Israeli literary scene, particularly in the early years of the state, tended to represent the Israeli Zionist life, expressed in Eurocentric style and modes. Nevertheless, other voices and alternative narratives of the Israeli experience are heard, offering different styles and flavors, challenging the dominance of the hegemony and the ethos of mizug galuyot [merging of exiles] that negated Diasporic existence in the process of emergence of a new Hebrew people. In this paper I wish to demonstrate how renowned Mizrahi poets cope with the boundaries of poetics in relation to the Israeli “Other.” The poets are roughly divided between “founding fathers,” who arrived to Israel as children, and younger poets of Mizrahi origins born in Israel. The paper focuses on poems that specifically deal with Mizrahi-Ashkenazi relationships, themes that continue to concern migrant poets. The chronological perspective allows considering the content of poems as well as new venue of disseminating poetry – the Internet – that enables variations of positioning oneself vis-à-vis the literary hegemonic establishment. Introduction Background Founding Fathers of Mizrahi Poetics Mois Bennaroch - Between Here and There Technology - Third Millennium Poetry An Emergent We? Concluding Remarks ___________________ 72 Esther Schely-Newman Introduction Rihal Madrid by Ronny Someck ma nish-ar mib’itat haga’agu’im shel rabbi yehuda halevi? ulay kadur mitgalgel ‘al deshe novel ben sha’ar hamizrah lesha’ar hama’arav [What remains of the yearning kick Of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi? Perhaps a rolling ball on fading grass Between the goalpost of the East and the goalpost of the West.]1 What remains of the past once people leave their homeland and make Aliyah - ascend to the Land of Israel? Ronny Someck takes the yearning of millennia - sung on the rivers of Babylon, inscribed in liturgy and in Jewish memory - and sets this in the soccer field of Real Madrid Football Club. Through this playfulness, Someck mixes liturgy, nostalgia, and the Holy Land with contemporary times and places. Using the assonance of the acronym of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi (Rihal), the 11-12th-century Spanish philosopher and poet, with the name of the football club, Someck questions the contemporary meaning of the well-known poem of longing for the Holy Land: libbi bamizrah vaanokhi besof ma’arav [my heart is in the East and I am at the end of the West]. Someck’s own short poem thus connects times and places, with East and West valorized and assigned ethnic identities rather than representing geographical directions. This paper analyzes attitudes towards these issues from the point of view of Israeli Mizrahi poets and their relations with the Other, the Israeli literary milieu – the Ashkenazi establishment. I focus on the meaning of peripheral poets within the Israeli ethos of erasing the past concurrently with nostalgic longing for the old countries and languages. Israel and hutz la-aretz - the countries outside the Holy Land - Hebrew versus the various mother tongues, and the attempt to create a dialogue that may bridge ethnic tensions between Mizrahim and 1 Ronny Someck, Ha-metofef shel ha-Mahapecha [The Revolution Drummer] (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 2001), 30. By permission of the poet. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are my literate (not poetic) renditions of the original texts. 73 QUEST N. 16 – FOCUS Ashkenazim. Based on previous studies of Mizrahi poets who migrated to Israel as children (Mois Benarroch, Erez Biton, Sami Shalom Chetrit, and Ronny Someck), I compare their attitude to that of younger (relatively less studied) poets of Mizrahi origins born in Israel (Adi Keissar and Roy Hasan). The paper expands the arguments developed by Alon, Mendelson-Maoz, and Oppenheimer2 about the meaning of being Mizrahi in the Israeli literary scene, adding the contemporary ‘Ars Poetiqah phenomenon. Background Jewish ethnic identities in Israel are a thorny issue. Smooha identified the ethnic gap as one of the major sources of social inequality in Israel as early as 1978.3 Studies by leading sociologists and anthropologists since then have focused on the process of constructing Israeli identity out of the different ethnic groups comprising Israeli society. Other scholars, such as Ram, Swirsky, and Yonah,4 have demonstrated the interaction between plans for population dispersal and the ongoing problems of sociocultural gaps. The ideology of mizug galuyot [merging of exiles] assumed that the Israeli project would result in creating a new people turning its back on the old exilic identities to become Israelis; denial of the diaspora (shlilat hagalut) – if not of exile per se – is the upshot. Differences, it was argued, will disappear with intermarriage, so that within a few generations ethnic difference will no longer exist. However, Talia Sagiv,5 who analyzed narratives of Israelis born to Mizrahi-Ashkenazi parents, found that the “half- and-half” Israelis continue to maintain ethnic identities, overriding their “Israeliness.” Their perceptions follow stereotypes that equate Mizrahiyut with 2 Ktzia Alon and Yochai Oppenheimer, Ana min el-Maghreb: Reading Erez Biton Poetry, (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2014); Ktzia Alon, A Third Option for Poetry, (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2011); To Dwell in a Word, ed. Ktzia Alon, (Gama Publishing, 2015); Yochai Oppenheimer, Diasporic Mizrahi Poetry in Israel, (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2012); all in Hebrew. Adia Mendelson-Maoz, Multiculturalism in Israel: Literary Perspectives, (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014). 3 Sammy Smooha, Israel: Pluralism and Conflict, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978). 4 Shlomo Swirsky, Lo Nehshalim ela Menuhshalim: Mizrahim and Ashkenazim In Israel, (Haifa: Mahbarot Leviqoret, 1981); Israeli Society: Critical Perspectives, ed. Uri Ram, (Tel Aviv: Breirot Publishing, 1993); Yossi Yonah, In Virtue of Difference: The Multicultural Project in Israel, (Jerusalem: Van Leer Publishing, 2005). All in Hebrew. 5 Talia Sagiv, Hetzi-hetzi: Israelis of Mixed Ethnic Origins, (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2014). In Hebrew. 74 Esther Schely-Newman warmth and closeness, while the Ashkenaziyut has the associations of intellectualism, coldness, and better chances of upward mobility. In recent years, the topic of social inequality based on Jewish ethnicity has taken on a significant role in the media and popular culture. Television series such as the 2002 Ruach Qadim [Eastern Hot Wind] by David Ben Chetrit, which tells the story of the Mizrahi, mainly Moroccan, migration to Israel, were produced as a counter narrative to the well known television series Pillar of Fire (aired in 1981) and Tequma [Resurrection] of 1998 that ignored the contribution of Mizrahi Jews to the State of Israel. More recently, two television series focused on the treatment of Mizrahim in the early years of the state. Salah Po Ze Eretz Israel [Salah, This Is Israel], a documentary by David Der’i, aired in 2017, tells the story of Moroccan migrants in development towns. This was followed by the four- part series Ma’abarot [Transit Camps] aired in 2019, treating the mass migration during 1950-60. The struggle for recognition of alternative narratives continues, and the politics of identity appears in the literary field, perhaps as poetics of identity. The difficulties of migration have been experienced by people of other ethnic groups. A recent anthology of Israeli poetry on these themes brings together poems written between 1923 and 2016 by men and women who arrived in Israel from places as far from each other as Russia in the East from Morocco in the West.6 Alroey notes in his introduction that while studies in the social sciences usually treat migrants as groups, migration itself is an individual experience (p. 13). All poets, regardless of their origins, express the pain of leaving the known for the new and different. Exilic existence seems to continue in Israel, where the migrants still feel estranged; a displacement that takes on different forms, changing names, blurring landscapes, and rich in difficulties in the early encounters with the “natives” (Jews, Sabarim). The migration poems chosen by Weichart and Alroey for their anthology reinforce the relevance of the concept of diaspora in contemporary Israel, as argued by Oppenheimer and others.7 For poets who “dwell in words,” to cite Alon, the most difficult and painful is the pressure to adopt a new language. Silencing one’s own language is more traumatic for poets from Arabic-speaking countries; in the words of Ronit Mazuz, “Woe is me that the language of the enemy is my mother tongue,” or Almog Behar’s poem, Ha-Aravit sheli ilemet [My Arabic is Mute], “...My Arabic 6When I Arrived: Poems about Immigration to Israel, eds. Rafi Weichert, Gur Alroey, (‘Iton 77 Books, 2019). In Hebrew. 7 Oppenheimer, Diasporic Mizrahi Poetry in Israel. 75 QUEST N. 16 – FOCUS is scared / silently pretends to be Hebrew / ... /and my Hebrew is deaf / Sometimes very deaf.”8 Differences between poets who migrated to Israel and those born in Israel to migrant parents appear to be almost negligible in this recent collection, as are differences based on the countries of origin. Nevertheless, I wish to consider the struggle of Mizrahi poets of the migrant generation and those born in Israel to Mizrahi parents from two angles: the relationship with the Other, which is the Israeli Ashkenazi literary establishment, and the process of writing and dissemination of poems. My corpus includes early poems by Erez Biton, Ronny Someck, and Sami Shalom Chetrit, with Mois Benarroch as a link to the younger generation of ‘Ars Poetiqah, Adi Keissar and Roy Hasan. Given the extensive studies of Biton, Someck and Chetrit available to date, I will expand on the younger generation, which has not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. Founding Fathers of Mizrahi Poetics Erez Biton (born 1941 to Moroccan parents in Algeria, migrated in 1949), the “father of Mizrahi poetry in Israel,” is the author of eight poetry books, the earliest published in 1976 and the latest in 2019.
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