The Poems and Rivers of Jerusalem

“There are days when everything in Jerusalem is sails and sails . . . the flags, the tallitot, the kapotot.”

This Longing City: Modern Hebrew Poems of Jerusalem
Translated, edited, and introduced by Rachel Tzvia Back

The Psalmist sang of Jerusalem and the “mountains around it,” which recalled how “God surrounded His people now and forevermore” (Psalms 125:2). Other biblical poets found in the city a more morbid muse, lamenting that “the city that was full of people . . . sits alone, like a widow.” (Lamentations 1:1-2) Indeed, following the destruction of Jerusalem and the exiling of her poets, the city’s abiding association became longing, whether in the liturgical poetry of paytanim like Eleazer ha-Kalir, who wrote from the relative distance of the Galilee, or in the metered Hebrew of medieval bards like Judah Halevi, who while living on Europe’s western edge turned his heart to Jerusalem, in the distant east.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Jews returned to Jerusalem in overwhelming numbers, Hebrew poetry devoted to the city remained inspired by a type of longing that normally comes from yearning from a distance. This mood is the organizing principle of This Longing City: Modern Hebrew Poems of Jerusalem, a new anthology by Rachel Tzvia Back. Back, a poet and translator who teaches at Oranim College in the Galilee, has a long history in and out of Jerusalem, nourished by old family connections and newer, personal ones. Her grandfather was born in the Old City, to a family that had moved there from the Galilee in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although he built his life in America, he asked to be buried in the city’s Har ha-Menuhot cemetery, and Back remembers watching the funeral as a child from a second-floor balcony in one of the city’s older, haredi neighborhoods. Mirroring her grandfather’s life, Back grew up in the United States, in a family that looked to Jerusalem and traveled there frequently. She moved there as a young woman and spent a decade and a half in the city, before reestablishing the old family connection with the Galilee, while continuing to pine for Jerusalem.

This Longing City is not the first anthology of Jerusalem poetry. Not a few Hebrew poets have produced collections devoted to the city, including the Jewish poet most closely linked with the place, Yehuda Amichai (his wonderful Poems of Jerusalem was published in several bilingual editions). There are also anthologies of Jerusalem poems, two of which Back mentions: the novelist Haim Be’er’s classic Hebrew collection, Stone Bird (1983), and the more recent Fire Bird (2014), which assembles more contemporary Hebrew poems relating to Jerusalem. Nevertheless, I am not aware of another collection quite like This Longing City, certainly not as handsome (the sturdy cover is adorned by Heinrich Bünting’s famous Clover Leaf Map, which places Jerusalem at the heart of the Asian, African, and European continents), nor as well-crafted, with the bilingual poems spaced so that the Hebrew original and English translations line up nicely.

Rachel Tzvia Back.

“The air above Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams / Like the air above industrial cities. / It’s hard to breath.” That’s Yehuda Amichai’s famous poem, “Jerusalem Ecology,” which might just as well have been speaking not of prayers and dreams, but the problem of cliché. So many have written on Jerusalem that the poet’s mission of saying something fresh while speaking of something old is a formidable challenge. To her credit, Back is sensitive to this difficulty, and she does what she can to circumvent it. For one, Amichai, who is perhaps the best-known Hebrew poet among English speakers, doesn’t dominate the collection, giving space to more obscure figures like the Baghdad-born poet Shlomo Zamir, who first wrote in his native Arabic before penning his strange unorthodox visions in Hebrew (“Women believers, wrapped in prayer shawls and phylactery, / stand on the rooftops, blowing shofars for the clouds”).

Another editorial strategy Back uses to good effect is the inclusion of poems whose connection to Jerusalem is not immediately clear but on second glance is compelling. Take, for instance, Lea Goldberg’s wonderful 1959 poem, “Illuminations,” which answers the modernist call to “make it new”:

And so you go out into the streets
of the city that is always your city
to see things in which there is not
a trace of anything new . . .

And every face reminds you:
You’ve already seen it!
And all the voices tell you:
You heard them yesterday too.

But suddenly at the end of the street
there stands a single blue lamp
which stood there yesterday too
but all of a sudden there it stands.

And there is no knowing what happened,
no explanation for the blue light
no explanation for the windows
in the house nearby . . .

Back’s translations are generally excellent, though there are, unavoidably, occasional little infelicities, such as the repetition “but” in the third stanza above. By contrast, the word for “explanation”—perush—in the final stanza reflects the emphatic doubling in the original.

Sometimes Back artfully approximates Hebrew’s easier rhyming schemes, as in the poem “Evening” by Yehuda Karni:

Evening here does not secretly steal in
With the cat;
Night’s robe is not soft velvet, a gift given
To swaddle or wrap.

Evening here does not reach the heart, drink and suck
Until depleted fully drop by drop;
Not slowly does night’s curtain fall and set apart
What is marked from what is not.

Evening here abducts, spies, binds and hands
Over to night;
And in turn tramples, slaughters, buries,
Then seals the grave outright.

Jerusalem at night.

One of the advantages of an anthology like This Longing City is that it can bring out shared themes among diverse poets. Some are expected, like Jerusalem’s gorgeous evenings, though here too there are questions to be answered: Does evening in Jerusalem, in fact, “abduct, spy, bind, and hand over to night”?, or is “Evening in Jerusalem…slow to forget / the scorching words / of summer trapped between the cloven hills,” as David Rokach has it in the poem, “Siege.” Alternatively, is it as rabbi-scholar and the first rector of Tel Aviv University Israel Efros wrote in his poem, “Night in Jerusalem”:

Few are the colors of the Jerusalem night:
just the skies’ light blue,
just the ground’s trampled dark,
and the green of the cypresses.

But bold and pure is each color,
as bold and pure as the path
one is charged here to walk.

And between the colors, a sharp line,
as though cut in glass.
Like the crescent’s silvered circle in the blue,
Like the leaf’s quiver against the night . . . 

Some of the recurring subjects in the collection may seem unexpected, though perhaps only to those unlucky enough to have never lived in the city. This would include the matter of eros, which is thematized in the Mizrahi writer Ronny Someck’s more explicit poem, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Love and Didn’t Dare Search For in the Streets of Jerusalem,” which includes the startling phrase “and if love’s fulfillment can be called an intifada,” and more suggestively evoked in the poem “Around Jerusalem” by the feminist poet Dahlia Ravikovitch:

There’s a train that travels round
and around Jerusalem
at night . . . 

Mountains circle all around her
Winds from ruins rustle in her,
Birds screech from the calm air,
Eyes of an owl sparkling.

And then there are the genuinely surprising themes that show up, like an association between land-locked Jerusalem and bodies of water, like seas and rivers. Thus, Back translates the poem “Sitting on the Shores of Jerusalem” by Aryeh Sivan: “He sits on the shores of Jerusalem / his feet in the waters-of-nations: Romans and Ammonites, Greeks / and Jews, clouds of dust”; as well as Esther Ettinger’s “Like Dreamers We Were on St. James Street,” which remembers poets “who noticed how the city had arrived from between the edges of Jaffa Gate as blue as a sea.” The poem concludes by recalling “the rustling of shells as they plunge into the sea.”

Sometimes, the poems admit that it’s all an illusion, such as “The Water Queen of Jerusalem,” by Raquel Chalfi (“the Water Queen of Jerusalem has no / sea in Jerusalem. . .”), or Almog Behar’s poem “Jerusalem Has No River,” which acknowledges just that, yet cannot stop thinking how “the river that Jerusalem doesn’t have has no name . . .” But my favorite example is, unavoidably, another famous poem by Yehuda Amichai, which imagines the clothing of the city’s denizens as sails on a sailboat, cutting through Jerusalem’s own ponderous seas:

There are days when everything in Jerusalem is sails and sails
even though there’s no sea here and no river.
Everything is sails, the flags, the tallitot, the kapotot,
the priests’ robes, the galabiyot and kefiyot,
the young women’s dresses and their headscarves,
the ark coverings and prayer mats and the feelings filling up with wind
and the hopes setting sail in different directions.
Even my father’s hands extended in blessing
And my mother’s wide face and Ruth’s far away death
All, all of them are sails in an illustrious regatta
On the two Jerusalem seas,
The Sea of Memory and the Sea of Forgetting.