Roots in the air.

Kaufman, Shirley

A book by Leonard Fein, Where Are We? (1988), defines Jewish identity in relation to self and Israel for 300 pages and comes to the conclusion that "one is Jewish because one is Jewish, and because being Jewish is a way of connecting with the past and with other Jews in the present. . . . What defines Jews as Jews," Fein writes, "is community; not values, not ideology."

I used to think that nowhere in the Diaspora is the sense of community as powerful as in Israel in time of war or catastrophe, such as Rabin's assassination. But with the increasing number of suicide bombings in Israel and deaths of young soldiers in Lebanon, a day or so after the dead are buried and the sobbing faces of the mourners have filled our TV screens, out in the streets, and around the conference tables, we are breaking apart. If we are no longer one stunned and grieving family in times like these, how does community define us? What is community?

The need of Jews to define who they are is such a persistent phenomenon that it will probably go on long after we've stopped searching for unity or meaning. Jews seem to have such a need in every generation, especially American Jews with their Jewish studies programs and new books on the subject every year. More and more scholars and writers are encouraged to reflect on their Jewish identity in journals, anthologies, and symposia. Many Israelis I know are also grappling now with definition, partly in response to the increasing power of the extreme orthodox who refuse to accept them as Jews, and par fly because of a growing desire to know the truth about Zionist history (as if "truth" existed with a capital T), or to redefine their relationship to the Holocaust and the Diaspora. The post-post-Zionist Blues. What happens if we lose our sense of exile? If Israelis feel they are no longer "Jewish"?

After so many wars, social polarization, Palestinian self-definition, terrorism - the idea of the wandering Jew has surfaced again (perhaps it was always bobbing around), literally and imaginatively, and it is having a profound effect on Israeli art, popular music, and literature. A few years ago the Israel Museum had an exhibition called Maslulai Nedudim (Routes of Wandering), which was an attempt "to map Israeli identity" and to define the split between "yearning for . . . a collective identity" and experiencing "a condition of floating identity." Sagit Shapra, the curator of the show, writing a thoughtful essay on that exhibit, with reference to the poetry of Edmund Jabes and to Israeli art in the 1990s, locates Israeli identity "in the gap between the idea and the rupture." She points out that Israeli writers use the Bible, not as a claim to ancestral rights, but as an embodiment of patterns of wandering - "away from fixation in any defined territory or form: works that formulate the myth of the exodus from Egypt, not as the beginning of the voyage to the promised land, but as a text of the desert generation." And the exhibition demonstrated how many Israeli artists are recycling the text.

Since I have my feet, not my roots, in two worlds, I've joined the wandering. Robert Coles has written, "it is utterly part of our nature to want roots, to need roots, to struggle for roots, for a sense of belonging. . . ." But as an American-Israeli who travels often between two homelands, and in other parts of the world, it is just as utterly part of my nature (Jewish nature?) to wander in the wilderness, to be part of the long drift, unrooted and dislocated.

When I was growing up as a first-generation American, I had to define myself as a non-believer in relation to my orthodox grandparents. When I became a Zionist, while I was a student at UCLA during World War II and first read the terrifying, long-hidden news from Nazi Europe, along with the writings of Herzl, Pinsker, and Ahad Ha'Am, I had to clarify my sense of myself as an American. And when I began to publish my poems with my "alienated" friends of the '60s, and, before coming to Israel, to translate the poetry of Abba Kovner, leader of the Partisans in the Vilma ghetto and winner of the Israel Prize, I sometimes wondered whether I was a poet who happened to be Jewish, or a Jew who happened to be a poet.

The plot thickened from soup to stew (perhaps I should say from clam chowder to cholent) when I moved from San Francisco to Jerusalem, where I have struggled for more than two decades with a variety of questions, not the least of which is what happens to an American poet who chooses to live in Israel and can't write in Hebrew. In a country with so many immigrant writers, even today there are people who insist that Hebrew is the language of the Jewish people wherever they are, and the only authentic literature in Israel is in Hebrew. And why not, when you consider that, after all, we are the people of the Book, and that our ancient synchronic language has persisted for about 4,000 years, with all our history attached to it. So what kind of Jew am I? "The limits of my language are the limits of my world," said Wittengstein. And Nobel Laureate, Czeslow Milosz, who writes in Polish and lives in Berkeley, has said that "language is the only homeland."

I think in a sense all art is a coming to terms with the past. The literary imagination feeds on many sources. What do we do with history and mythic memory? With our western literary heritage? With our eastern literary heritage? (In San Francisco the T'ang Dynasty poets and Basho and Zen Buddhism, via Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth, were powerful influences on my early poetry.) How do we respond to the post-modern rupture of "certainties"? What do we do with the Bible as literature? With our immigrant families? With the landscape of childhood?

I was born and grew up in Seattle, Washington. My maternal grandmother, when the family left their village near Brest Litovsk in Poland, said she wanted to get as far from the Czar as she could get. She didn't realize when she got to the Pacific Ocean at the Canadian border, she was actually closer to Russia than she had been in New York where most of the immigrant Jews settled before the first World War. Outside of my enormous family - ten aunts and uncles, eight with spouses, dozens of cousins - I did not know too many Jews. Lenny Bruce once said, "If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you're going to be goyish even if you're Jewish." You could say almost the same thing about Seattle in those days.

I did, in fact, feel like a goy in Seattle. My grandmother and grandfather could not speak to me-I never learned Yiddish, and they never learned English. My mother, and all her sisters and brothers, broke away from the piety and orthodoxy of their parents who could never eat in their homes. I remember once watching my grandfather alone in the little succah he built in his backyard. My aunt served him his dinner. I was never invited in. And I remember Passover seders at his home, the men reading the Haggadah at the table, while the women cooked and gossiped in the kitchen. I learned very early that Jewish observance was only for men. (That was before women were called to the Torah in Conservative and Reform synagogues.) I was sent to the Reform Sunday School, but there was nothing in my home that was Jewish - no books, no sabbath, no symbols. Aside from my cousins, I did not have Jewish friends or live among Jews. I wrote poetry and wanted to be an actress. I went to Young Communist meetings in high school. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and America entered World War II while I was at UCLA.

My father asked a business associate to watch over me in Los Angeles. He was an ardent Zionist, a secular Jew with a very pure Socialist Labor ideology (as far as the Jewish state was concerned - he manufactured furniture), who supported the kibbutz movement and Mordechai Kaplan's Reconstructionism. He sent his daughter and me to a Zionist leadership training camp in the Pocono Mountains in 1943, a camp named after and established by Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. That year was a turning point in my life - the emphasis on cultural pluralism, traditional Sabbath observance, reading and arguing Jewish texts, the words of Brandeis. I hardly knew what Zionism was, but digging potatoes I fell in love with an agriculture student from Palestine (we called such Jews Palestinians in those days), and heard from Milton Steinberg that Palestine was the greatest single, constructive instrument for the survival and revival of Jewish life in America.

Oh blessed American dreams of 1943! What did I know? What did anybody know? It was there also, by an idyllic lake in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania, that I first heard the incomprehensible horror stories from the ghettos and camps.

The first poem I published, after high school and college magazines, was a cry against the British White Paper, a political sonnet about the death camp survivors who were not permitted to enter Palestine, published in The Reconstructionist in 1945. And the second poem was about planting a tree in the eroded soil of Palestine.

World War II and the Nazi genocide that my generation lived through in our formative years, even at a distance, could not help but intensify Jewish consciousness. Like many assimilated Jews, this was my first awakening. I think for some of us the fact that our parents came from Europe and were cut off so atrociously from their past and from their places of origin made us more eager to recover our roots, long before Alex Haley's famous book. I felt deprived that I hadn't really known my grandparents. I thought of my grandfather, wiping the gravy on his plate with a piece of challah, alone in his succah, or my grandmother handing me from the pocket of her apron some sticky rock candy, in place of the loving words she could not speak in my language. Except for a few images like that, my grandparents were shadows in my childhood. Because I had been raised with nothing but a vague sense of what they represented, and because I wanted to know more, I began to read about Jewish life in eastern Europe, Jewish history, Yiddish stories (translated), the Bible and Talmud in English, Holocaust testimonies, even to learn and practice some rituals, although I was never comfortable with religious affiliation. I only began to study Hebrew many years later.

That's the story of how a Seattle Jew grew into her Jewish identity, and kept it up for the next 27 years in San Francisco, while mothering and writing. Most of the poems in my first two books were about personal relationships, often connected with place, but not influenced by Jewish sources. Still, a few poems came from the Bible, memories of my grandparents and parents, and two visits to Israel.

Now that I am no longer an American or a Diaspora Jew exactly, I am not exactly an Israeli either. Even with two passports. I had to live in Israel to discover I was Anglo-Saxon! Troubled and frustrated, after years of study, by my kita gimmel (third grade) Hebrew, I have been privileged to translate some remarkable Hebrew poetry by working with the poets, as many poet-translators do. But without a long, shared personal history in the life and richly layered language- only (only!) 25 years in Jerusalem - my Israeli identity can never go deep enough. I have fallen in love with the landscape, the wooded mountains of the north, and the stark mountains of the Judean wilderness. I am overwhelmed by the history around me, ancient and modern, and the devoted energy of so many practical dreamers. But I'm always reminded of my marginality. I live in a city with some of the oldest rains and newest immigrants, among family (though longing for my own daughters and grandchildren), among friends with whom I share hope and disenchantment, joy and rage, sitting dazed by the radio and TV after each disaster, and developing a desperate skill at turning off and shutting out. I live by the Jewish calendar. It's not an American life (though singing "Give Peace A Chance" at rallies in Tel Aviv takes me back to the days of resistance to the war in Vietnam), but not truly an Israeli life, with such limited Hebrew. Perhaps you could call it a Jewish life, although I do not pray as a traditional Jew or observe very much, and only joined a Reform congregation three years ago as a moral imperative, a protest at the way Reform and Conservative Jews are treated by the establishment in Israel. Call it a Jewish woman's life, because in recent years, as my interest in gender studies and friendship with feminist writers has grown, so has my awareness of and anger at the attitude toward women and women's bodies in Jewish tradition and Israeli politics. And it is also, not least, the disordered and marginal life of a poet. What poets ask for mostly is to be left alone, to be given solitude and quiet, to write our poems, to accomplish our straggle somehow to overcome the limits of the self and the historical moment in which that self exists - to get at some meaning for our existence. I think that being unrooted and lonely is a human condition. Infants cry until they are picked up and fed and loved. Better to explore it than fight it.

Having said all this - about America and Israel and a Jewish woman who writes poems - perhaps the best word to describe my condition is hyphenated, American hyphen Israeli, a title by which I am frequently introduced. When I look at this hyphen - the little horizontal line between American and Israeli that substitutes for "and" or "and/or" - something hallucinatory happens. I watch the line become a bridge suspended in air. And I am on it, running back and forth, which is my existential condition. I don't seem to be connected to either side. Even when I think I have reached one end, paid my toll, and passed through the gate, there are difficulties. On the Israeli side, when I ask directions, I have trouble understanding the answers. On the other side, do they really care if I have a nice day?

In America almost everyone is hyphenated these days. Cultural anthropologists are studying a group they call Halfies, people whose national identities are mixed because of parentage, immigration, or overseas education. This works against definition or fixity. Instead of the paradigm of outsider/insider, at this historical moment we find shifting identification in a country of interpenetrating communities. Americans have discarded the melting-pot theory, and the mosaic theory that followed it, as if every immigrant community could be molded like a cube of Venetian glass and fitted into a perfect, colorful whole. The theory of the '90s has been multiculturalism, which is probably as old as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and which we called cultural pluralism 50 years ago. Teachers at Berkeley got extra pay a few years ago to create multicultural courses, everyone is making positive affirmations of ethnicity. And dozens, maybe hundreds by now, of poetry anthologies are being published by African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native-Americans, Asian-Americans (subdivided into Chinese-, Japanese-, Philippine-, etc. Americans). So many hyphens, but only one new anthology I know of for Jewish-American poets. Jews seen to be more confused than other ethnic groups, with our ongoing argument over who-is-a-Jew. For instance, in a recent collection of contemporary multicultural poetry, Unsettling America, there is a poem by the late Ruth Lisa Schechter mourning her mother's death, with images and words like kaddish, Passover, Jewish star. But in the contributors' notes, we are told she is of Russian and Polish descent.

I am looking at that hyphen - my hyphen - harder. The little line that has become a bridge between America and Israel, has begun to sway and swing like the Golden Gate Bridge suspended on cables between San Francisco and Marin County, and even though the wind is strong coming in from the ocean and over the bay, I begin to find my balance on it. I discover that, after all, it does connect me. I am not rootless, just floating, a kind of Calder mobile. I carry my moving parts, my roots, the shifting sense of who I am and what I've come from, with me even if they don't fasten me down in one place. I am learning to make a virtue of it. The view is grand, except when the fog rolls in. I am free to swing, though sometimes it's risky. The many parts of me - daughter, mother, grandmother, wife (twice), feminist, Jew, Zionist, post-Zionist, member of the vulnerable and endangered human race, poet, what else, from Brest Litovsk, Ulanov (my father), Seattle, San Francisco, Jerusalem - move in the air with all the clutter and memory of my life, with the sounds and smells and images of my days in different places. That hyphen - that bridge and what it connects me to - is my place in the world. It avoids the question of what I am doing here as opposed to there. It does more than avoid the question. It answers it.

In the village of Ulanov close to the border between the Austro-Hungarian empire and the province of Poland under the Russian empire, my father's brother Jack earned a living collecting tolls on the little bridge over the river San. There were only about 1,500 Jews in Ulanov, less than half the population, when my father's family lived there before the first World War. My father's most precious memory of that time was visiting his brother in the toll shack at the entrance of the bridge, while they read together from Schiller, all the books forbidden at the yeshiva where he studied. That bridge was his connection to the world, his way out of Ulanov. My bridge is my connection to two worlds, my way out of myself.

There is an old Hasidic story that Gershom Scholem has retold:

When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer - and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the Maggid of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers-and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs - and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation has passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done.

I don't much like that final wisdom of the Rabbi from Rishin, sitting in his castle on a gold chair. Like a good Midrashic Jew, I would change the end of this story. We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we seem to be confused about the task, the story has been deconstructed and psychoanalyzed. But we can internalize a new place, the way Jews do in their wandering, and take it from there. No closure.

I've had to move from a grounding of self in San Francisco or Jerusalem to a place no less real, swinging between two homelands which are less than homes but more than indifferent lands. What interests me most these days is not Jewish self-definition, not looking into a mirror, which is shattered anyway. But the difference between seeing and knowing - knowing imaginatively, knowing in a way that creates its own reality. Beauty and risk. Love and vulnerability.

When I was a child I remember summers on Puget Sound or on the numberless small lakes around Seattle. My father would take me out in a rented rowboat. Once I was standing on a dock where the water was slapping against the wood and the boats were tied up to pegs. My father was already seated in the leaky little boat, the tin can ready for my job which was to keep bailing out the water, the oars in their locks, as he worked at the knot around the peg. Just when I put my foot into the boat, he loosened the rope and pushed off. I swayed there for an instant, one foot in the boat, the other on the dock. "Jump in," he yelled as my legs were losing each other. I jumped, and fell into the water.

I want to stay on this bridge and not fall into the water. Living between cultures, languages, identifies, I will always be reminded of my difference. I have had to make a space between two longings and live in that space. If art, as I said earlier, is a coming to terms with the past, then the dream of art, the essence of poetry, is not to assert what is already known, but to illuminate what has been hidden.

One of my favorite poets, John Berryman, wrote a poem rifled "Roots":

Young men (young women) ask about my "roots," - as if I were a plant. Yeats said to me, with some pretentiousness, I felt even then, "London is useful, but I always go back

to Ireland, where my roots are." Mr. Eliot, too, worried about his roots whether beside the uncontrollable river the Mississippi, or the Thames, or elsewhere.

I can't see it. Many are wanderers, both Lawrence, Byron, & the better for it. Many stay home forever. Hardy: fine. Bother these bastards with their preconceptions.

The hell with it. Whether to go or stay be Fate's, or mine, no matter. Exile is in our time like blood. Depend on interior journeys taken anywhere.

I'd rather live in Venice or Kyoto, except for the language, but O really I don't care where I live or have lived. Wherever I am, young Sir, my wits about me,

memory blazing, I'll cope & make do.

I do care where I live or have lived, but the rest seems right. Exile is in our time like blood . . . memory blazing, I'll cope & make do.

Here is my own "roots" poem, which was published first in my book Claims, exploring my family's immigration to Seattle and my aliyah to Israel. At Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh, where many survivors of the Holocaust, including Vitka and Abba Kovner, have started their lives again, I saw a Bengal ficus tree, transplanted from India. In India the tree propagates itself by roots that grow from the branches of a single tree downward into the soil, rerooting itself. In Israel, fleshy white tubers dangle from the branches, but never reach the earth.

Roots in the Air

Over my head the Bengal ficus dangles its roots like seaweed out of the sea, licking the ashes from the air.

Sure of which way is down but unable to get there, one tree makes a hundred out of the steaming soil it comes from, replanting itself.

Not here. The roots are shaggy with trying in this land. No earth, no water, what are they doing in the light?(1)

NOTES

An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a lecture in honor of Professor Cershon Shaked on his retirement from the Hebrew University. The lecture was part of an ongoing Seminar of the University's Center for Literary Studies on "Narrataives of Jewish Serf-Definition in Israel and America," 1996-97.

1. From Roots in the Air: New and Selected Poems (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1996).

SHIRLEY KAUFMAN was born in Seattle, lived in San Francisco, and settled in Jerusalem in 1973. She has published seven volumes of her poetry in the USA, the most recent: Roots in the Air, New and Selected Poems (1996), translations from the Hebrew of the poetry of Amir Gilboa and Abba Kovner; and won numerous prizes. Her Selected Poems, translated by Aharon Shabtai, was published by the Bialik Press in Israel in 1995.