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Poetry || SubmissionsPoems by Karen Alkalay-GutFLIGHT 1. For thirteen hours I sit next to a man who will not exchange a word with me. I watch him mostly sidelong, sometimes full face, as he downs his vodkas before unwrapping the shining glatt-kosher tray - sometimes dinners, sometimes breakfasts, always meals parallel to those the airlines provides the rest of us. It is not that I am a woman - I saw him flirt with the blond French girl whose seat he wanted so he could sit thus apart from the others, with a seat between, like he sits with me. He will not speak because I am so obviously an apicourus, the Hebrew newspaper and book of Oscar Wilde on the seat that separates us showing the real separation. And so, given up for lost, I have my freedom, can unhook my bra and read my Wilde as if he too does not exist. 2. All my old friends in the States are into religion. It is their new salvation - even the most worldly slip into midrashim when we discuss other issues. They use Yiddish words from the ghetto I haven't heard since I was a child, but with a postmodern twist - take frum for instance. "Ah, is he righteous!" My mother would say, delineating the man who simply followed the rules from the intensely devout, "A truly frum Jew." Since we were all frum - there was no alternative but the degrees of devotion. Now it sets the Jew apart by dress, a stubborn discovery of ritual identity, frum with quotation marks. Or so they tell me. What do I know? I am so far away, an Israeli who has even picked up a bit of an accent into her twenty-two years away from the diaspora, who slips into Hebrew unwillingly when someone asks about whether there were familiar names on the list of the dead in the Tel Aviv bus-bombing, and shakes her head and cannot even give an opinion about what Israel should do. "My son is in the air force," I mumble, "I live there." 3. "You come from an observant family," a friend's friend asks in wonderment, "When did you stop keeping kosher?" "When I had to make deals with the Rabbinate in order to get divorced." 4. Every portion of our lives was interspersed with the desire for righteousness - a piece of cake, href="#glossary">lekach, offered with the reminder of God's words in the prayers, "for it is a good lesson, lekach, I have given you." "Here is a wing - you should fly to Heder" How I loved the wholeness of it - everything meaning something greater - how limiting it became when reduced to ritual. 5. How fine to be wrapped in a prayer shawl, surrounded by holiness, making a whole world - just you and God - in a portable tent. 6. Every flight I take to Israel is one of reordering, a renewed - sometimes reluctant - commitment to a place. Before I left New York today my daughter asked me to explain the meaning of the word "home," in the film she is making. "Home," said the other woman she interviewed, "is a place I can defend with a gun." "I don't like homes that keep others out," I tell my child, "and I can't be at home when there are homeless." (Both of us recall, suddenly, our penchant for passing out quarters in the street - a weakness we are both embarrassed about. We said nothing.) Then, when she asked me about feminism, I reminded her of something she once said that I stole and incorporated in a poem: "Women belong in the same jobs as men," she retorts when the Rabbi on TV calls for a demobilization of all women from the army. Then "Men belong in the same jobs as women, in their homes, in the kitchen, in safe places away from the borders." 7. Righteousness should not depend upon keeping me out, I think to the old man sitting next to me, on looking up surreptitiously at the in-flight movie, and cursing the corruption of the corrupt masses. Glossary apicourus: (Yiddish) Epicurean, apostate frum: (Yiddish) Devout lekach: (Yiddish) Cake, portion Heder: (Yiddish) Hebrew School Karen Alkalay-Gut teaches Victorian poetry at Tel Aviv University but in her own poems prefers a more direct approach than the subjects of her academic concerns. She is "always interested" in reader reactions to her poetry and can be emailed to Karen Alkalay-Gut Today's Situation
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