In these days of unspeakable horror and terror and grief, I share a few small things, as well as important, meaningful words from my friend Moriel Rothman-Zecher who has spent his life working for peace and connections in Israel and Gaza and America.
I find it is getting to be time to say goodbye to the magical village of Auvillar, where I have been working on my third novel, and visiting with villagers and artists and other writers, and talking and walking.
Here’s my new review in POINTE Magazine of Marina Harss’s stunning biography of Ukranian/Russian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky: THE BOY FROM KIEV (let me know if you have trouble with the paywall).
Here is a new podcast interview with host Kate Sheppard who generously terms her program the Creative Genius Podcast (!). The title of our discussion is Don’t Wait for Inspiration to Strike.
And ICYMI, here is my most recent (October 4) newsletter: Après Paris, le travail.
The picture below is of my friend Moriel at our gig at Main Point Books in Wayne, PA last October. Moriel is a beautiful writer and a beautiful person. For this current moment, I recommend his first novel, SILENCE IS A WHITE BIRD, which takes a deep dive into the friendship between two young men, a Palestinian and an Israeli. His second novel, BEFORE ALL THE WORLD, is set in my home town of Philadelphia, and resonates with my background, as it profiles Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, but in a wholly new, imaginative, and provocative way. Moriel is also an accomplished poet.
Mori sent the below around last night, and I share an excerpt with you. [Please let me or Mori know if you want the complete text]
On this suffering, by Moriel Rothman-Zecher
October 15, 2023
This is not a statement, or an analysis. This is a keening, a screaming, a giving way. If you find, sweet friend, that you’re in a rush as you read these words, I’d encourage you to put this letter aside for later … or don’t read it at all. There are enough words floating around the ether, many of them more eloquent and intelligent than mine will be. I don’t know exactly what these words are meant to be, to do. May they be for the benefit of all who are suffering right now, for the benefit of all beings, for the benefit of all of us.
So first, and last, the suffering.
The weight, the waves. For much of this past week, I have felt almost wordless, clinging to the small life rafts of reading and writing poems, to WhatsApp messages of “I love you and hope the people you love are safe” sent to beloved ones in Gaza City and in Jerusalem and in Ramallah and Haifa and Tel Aviv and Bethlehem and in Jaffa and Ein Iron and Deir al-Assad other towns and villages (and the answer has not consistently been “they are”; my own closest circle is physically safe as of the time of this writing, Sunday morning, October 15th, 2023, but people I love have loved ones who have been killed or kidnapped).
Small life rafts like my friend Sahar Vardi’s call for “Dual Loyalty”: “It’s that moment when you talk to a friend who doesn’t know whether their relatives are dead or kidnapped and what they should even hope for, and to see the helplessness, the fear, the deep pain. And a moment later, it’s talking to a friend from Gaza who can only say that every night is now the scariest night of his life; that he calculates his chances, and those of his daughters, of waking up alive the next morning.”
Early last week, I did a text study of Sahar’s piece, alongside Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab’s “Kindness,” with my 14-year-old niece in Tel Aviv, part of the call taking place from their apartment’s bomb shelter:
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth….
A week’s worth of days into this chapter of the nightmare, I am choking on my own breath, sobbing at my kitchen counter after putting Nahari to bed next to the scarf Fadi sent us from Gaza City after she was born; Fadi, who, just a few months ago, was over at my place in Philly, and we went out to a weird, overwrought little diner near Media, PA, and drank milkshakes and ate fries and smoked cigarettes under a low Pennsylvania sky; Fadi, whose voice cracks as he tells MSNBC that there is not enough food, not enough bread. As our mutual friend and link Jen Marlow shared in an email yesterday:
In the middle of talking, Fadi broke down. “I stare at their faces as they’re sleeping,” he said, talking about his three children. “I don’t know what will happen to them, I want to be sure I memorize their faces.”
I say this to my Jewish and Israeli siblings, still reeling from “our” unspeakable catastrophe, and now looking away, or taking part, as more of “their” universes are being extinguished. But there is no other. There is no “ours” and “theirs.” I say this too to my siblings whose support for Palestinian freedom — which I pray only grows and deepens around the world — has slipped into a sickly, self-mutilating mathematics, in which the equation is “Israeli Jeiwsh lives = worthless or worth very little, because of what their regime has done.” … If we are all deserving to be put to death because of what our purported leaders and representatives have done, then there is no person on this planet not deserving of execution….
But there is no we, I remind myself, and no you. Just like we taught ourselves. There is no other. Everyone who cares about Israeli Jewish lives — not the brutal apartheid state, the regime, the concept, but my life, my family’s, my child’s — should be in favor of complete freedom for every single Palestinian. It is not altruism — there is no other: it is for all of us….
I do not believe that there is anyone in the world whose indifference is pure…. I just want these children, who I happen to know and love, and all children, to be able to live lives of safety and freedom.
We need help. Help us all….
I cannot stop weeping, I pray not to be able to stop….
I’m asking for help because I am suffering, and my loved ones are suffering, and I am afraid, and my loved ones are afraid.
Hold your hearts open, dear ones, as much as you can, patience, continued attention, without looking away as “The New York Times” and “Instagram” grow bored of this, in coming days or weeks.
Another poem, before I end this letter:
THE OCEAN
When the veil lifts
from your eyes
and you see that
there are no demons
in this world, only
humans, then there
is no relief from
the suffering, the suffering
becomes an ocean
and there is no shore.
We watch our siblings—
siblings, not demons—
celebrate as our siblings
are hurt and killed,
and they do this because
they are suffering
and they want relief
and we cannot cheer
with them but nor
can we wish them
anything but relief, so
we hesitate to extend
the invitation for them
to join us out here
in the middle of the ocean
of suffering from which
there is no exit, but
we extend it anyway:
join us out here.
Maybe together we will
discover that being
human also means
having gills, shimmering
fins, that maybe after
all we can breathe
better from within
this ocean of salt water,
and we will hold each
other’s hands and kick
our tails and follow
the dead where they lead us.
As my friend Antwan, in Bethlehem, texted me, guiding me once more to weep, and blessedly, bottomlessly, weep:
Habibi love will win, I keep my faith
Thank you Mori.
With love, Martha