I have been avoiding answering a letter from the editor of Mashiv Haroach (a Jewish poetry newspaper) for some time. They are about to publish a volume about my homeland, the Negev and I have never written about my homeland seriously. One might say that everything you write is harks back to your home, and now, as I try to write a novel about Ben-Gurion University of the Negev I can see how many emotional charges are there, in the back of my mind. Still I feel that prose, being less concentrated than poetry is a far better way to overcome these obstacles. Or perhaps it’s because that there are some ways of writing that hurt too much, and the writer is only flesh and blood.
I did not plan this but the truth is the books that I chose to deal with this week of Polish literature somehow deal with the questions and problems that I have mentioned. Pochwala Snow, the wonderful poetry collection of Szymborska’s poetry edited by Rafi Weichert, has the unique ability to give you exactly the poems you need whenever you need them, not only that, the book has a very interesting point of view on the subject of what is a homeland. For the very first time, I’ve read her Nobel Prize speech and there is a lot to learn from it about being a poet, as I shall write in the post about her.
Another book is Witold Gombrowicz’s book Pornografia that tells the story of World War II Poland without being there. Gombrowicz is one of the most important novelists of 20th century Polish literature and in his first books he also wrote about the idea of youth and its internal battle in the grownup’s mind with adulthood.
The last article this week focuses on a Jewish-Polish writer called Israel Rabon. In his book, The Street, he describes his birthplace from the point of view of a Jewish soldier trying desperately to settle in Lodz. I will also talk about the simple and surreal Shund literature, which served as a basis for this book.