Category: Writing

 From Tripoli to Damascus

The Jerusalem Post, March 20, 2009 (published under a pen name to protect the identity of the interviewees)

I’d spent five days in Beirut partying too hard and sleeping on a friend’s small couch. I needed a respite from the city lined with bullet-pocked buildings and booming nightclubs. I considered Tripoli—a coastal city that has been swept by waves of successive empires, including the Phoenicians, Persians, and Romans, amongst others. But Tripoli has been swept by waves of recent violence as well and I’d come at a bad time—just two weeks before, Tripoli had been rocked by a series of explosions.

My host recommended a day trip to Byblos instead.

I boarded the half-empty northbound bus in central Beirut armed with a book, a cup of coffee, and a wristwatch. I usually don’t wear a watch, but my host had insisted, “Byblos is hard to spot, so be prepared to get off the bus about 20 minutes out of the city. Keep an eye on the time, or you’ll miss the stop.”

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A sad reflection of reality: interview with author Esther Blau Marcus

The Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2009

Esther Blau Marcus, author of the children’s book Tzeva Adom, offers the following story to illustrate her family’s experience of Operation Cast Lead: “During the war,” Marcus recalls, “I had the TV on one day and my son said, ‘Mom, look, the picture is the same as what I see from the window.'”

Her nine-year-old son, Tamir, wasn’t exaggerating. Marcus and her husband have lived on Kibbutz Alumim, within sight of Gaza, for 17 years. It is there the couple, both British born, has gone about the difficult task of raising four children in this hot zone.

“We have experienced the conflict directly,” she says. Of Tamir, her youngest child, she says that the tzeva adom (Color Red) alarm call has been a thread throughout his life. Living in an area that is under fire is “all he has known.”

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Mary, Mary, quite contrary: interview with author Mary Gordon

The Jerusalem Post, February 27, 2009

Mary Gordon’s work has been hailed as a prism that refracts Irish-American life, offering the reader a complex, multicolored look at this group, but the author herself is difficult to situate on the spectrum of writers. While she has been praised as a resounding voice for the inner world of Roman Catholics, and her writing is born of an abiding spirituality that is bound to the Church, she has resisted the term “Catholic writer.”

James Carroll, in his New York Times review of Gordon’s Joan of Arc, called her a “quintessentially American writer.” But in a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, Gordon shied away from this label, as well.

“American literature really links women with suffocation, strangulation and death,” she says. She cites bastions of the American literary guard – Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn and “even The Great Gatsby which seemed sympathetic to women” – as examples. “These male writers offered models for writing about women that were no use to me, that I knew to be wrong,” she explains.

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Words that can’t sit still: review of Warsaw Bikini and interview with author Sandra Simonds

The Jerusalem Post, January 30, 2009

To move through the pages of Sandra Simonds’s collection of poetry, Warsaw Bikini, is to move with intent, with care, as though you were walking through a minefield.

That’s not to say Warsaw Bikini, Simonds’s first full-length work, isn’t a pleasurable read. The title is a reflection of the range of the content – it varies from lead to helium, from apocalyptic and Holocaust imagery to pop culture references, often within the boundaries of one poem. The reader gets a sense of Simonds’s supreme comfort with the form – lines vary in length, some poems are dense, some are light and airy, some zip along, some move with a deliberate thickness. But the reader also gets an overriding sense of her discomfort with much of the content, and the resulting dissonance and tension is irresistible.

This friction is a driving force to the Pushcart Prize-nominated Simonds. “I feel that my poems are anxious,” she says, “and a large part of this anxiety is historical and familial.”

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The story behind the story: review of Thomas Keneally’s memoir Searching for Schindler

The Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2009

More than 25 years after the publication of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, which Steven Spielberg adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List, comes Keneally’s latest, Searching for Schindler. Keneally is a well-established figure in the world of words. In his long and distinguished career, he has been short-listed for and awarded a variety of honors, including the Booker Prize, which he won for Schindler’s Ark.

The reader is hooked from the first page by both the crisp, straightforward prose of his memoir as well as the utterly charming and colorfully portrayed Poldek Pfefferberg – the man who literally dropped the story of Oskar Schindler into Keneally’s hands. Keneally himself also makes for a likable character. But despite the allure, this memoir will leave readers searching for more.

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Up against a wall

The Jerusalem Post, December 26, 2008

Slapped over the graffiti and posters that decorate an abandoned building on otherwise glossy Dizengoff is an advertisement – in plain typeface on plain white paper – for “Desert Life,” the first exhibition of a new artists’ collective. The homegrown advertisement mirrors both the space and the spirit of the exhibition, it is do-it-yourself. Just steps away from Rothschild Boulevard’s art scene, which has been abuzz with international attention, this group of artists is attempting to carve out their own space both literally and figuratively.

Entering the exhibition on Herzl Street is a bit of a surprise – one doesn’t expect to encounter dirt floors, plants dripping from overhead balconies, and the sounds of people going about their daily lives in an art gallery. Chick Corea drifts down into the gallery, resonating between the walls. This clearly isn’t an ordinary space, but that’s the point.

Hidden from view, in the ground floor courtyard of a building noted for having Tel Aviv’s first elevator, a few people are milling about – passersby drawn in by the banner that is draped over the façade of this quintessentially Tel Aviv building. Everything about this exhibition speaks to the fact that it stands apart from the bubble of the mainstream art world.

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Bittersweet surrender

The Jerusalem Post, December 12, 2008

I landed in the Philippines as I land everywhere – with no plans. Though I didn’t know where I was going, I knew exactly what I was looking for: a mind-blowing beach, minus the mind-numbing tourist scene. I wanted meditatively quiet sands, a place to let a few days slip away. I wanted to be somewhere that I could slip out of my skin.

Manila was anything but quiet, and the minute I got a look at the city – from the backseat of a cab – I wanted out. I checked into a pension, dropped my bags and headed straight to the closest Cebu Pacific airline office, located in a nearby mall.

It’s a cliché of travel writing to talk about contrasts, but in Manila the class differences are too glaringly obvious to ignore. As I walked to the mall, I passed a family of eight living on a street corner. The mother, a baby hoisted on her hip, stood outside their makeshift shelter of cardboard. One of her children, a little boy who looked to be about four, ran barefoot and naked in and out of the street, merrily bouncing on and off the sidewalk. Air-conditioned cabs, their windows rolled up tight, spirited their shopping-bag-laden passengers by, whisking them past the family.

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