I know she loves me. She’s told me as much. And I’ve tried my best to love her back, and I do—or have.
Activism
The Problem of Evil: Campus, 1968
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A Short Story
Elena was saying something about how exploited the TA’s were. Maureen, who was also a TA, leaned her head closer, trying to hear her above the din of the students’ chatter in the cavernous auditorium. Then Elena suddenly sat up and pointed toward the front. A short man with long, wavy white hair was rapping a ruler against the podium, attempting to get the students’ attention. He began clearing his throat authoritatively.
Fiction & Poetry Articles
Through Amichai’s Window
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Editor’s note: We deeply appreciate the way that Yehuda Amichai was available to Tikkun magazine. He not only allowed many of his poems to be printed in Tikkun, but also participated in the Tikkun Conference in Jerusalem, where we brought together all the various factions of the Israeli peace movement to reflect on why they had been less successful than they could have been. Amichai’s presence there, and his reading of his poetry as part of the conference program, was a powerful statement of his commitment to peace and reconciliation with the Palestinian people.
A widely acclaimed poet of the 20th century, Yehuda Amichai was a voice of sanity in a world that often denies it. Born in Germany, Amichai immigrated to Palestine in the mid-1930s and spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of the calamitous events that his generation endured. He won numerous awards, both in Israel and abroad, and was a frequent contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Fiction & Poetry Articles
Across the Border
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Ruins
Peter Kuper
SelfMadeHero Books, 2015. The artist most well known for his Mad Magazine “Spy vs. Spy” pages has had quite a career, artistic and political. Much of it began when he abandoned his hometown Cleveland, back in 1977, for Manhattan. The creation of World War 3 Illustrated, the now long-lasting comics annual, encompassed but did not exhaust his views of his adopted location, summed up artistically in the gorgeous Drawn to New York, published in 2013.
About Tikkun
New Poetry by Philip Terman
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Walking to Jerusalem
Pedometer attached to her belt, your mother, spry and strong
at eighty, joins the other Methodist Church members
in calculating the 5,915 miles, no matter the weather, to add up
all the way from Linesville, Pennsylvania to Jerusalem. They need not worry about miracles or pausing
at the signs of the cross. They need not stop for security
to check their purses for weapons. They need no visa
nor baggage, no money to exchange for shekels, no guide-
book, no guide. They need no ancient tongue or prophecies.
About Tikkun
Journey
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by Admiel Kosman
We fastened ourselves to the holy texts
and witnessed wonders,
great was the city that lay before us
lights stretched like ornamental carpets
at night when we entered this cartoon city
within the holy texts
we saw this exquisite place,
spires, towers, gates, niches, stairways. On the stairs the people of the city,
caricatures on parchment, emerged,
received us in friendship
with welcoming faces,
their disasters
very much like ours. Happily in their dream
they also dressed us fed us bread
and were so glad
to serve us, free, the living
waters from the stream.
From Ma ani yakhol/What I Can, 1995
Adapted from the Hebrew by the author with Lisa Katz. Translator Lisa Katz is editor of the Israeli pages of the Rotterdam-based Poetry International Web.
Culture
The Short Crappy Life of Walter J. Palmer, or, The Oddities of American Wealth
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Anyone who has followed the demise of Cecil, the African lion, and Walter J. Palmer, his American slayer, can’t help but be struck by the parallels with Hemingway’s classic story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” where a wealthy but timid American bumbles around the African savannah under the protection of a guide, procures a few hides, and ultimately meets his demise.
Culture
Time Between Trains
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Now in a gusty April…she sat in the place where roads cross, the lonely four corners where, with nothing stopping it, the wind sweeps along without regard for anything.
Fiction & Poetry Articles
In Search of the Thing-Itself
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The Complete Stories
Clarice Lispector
Translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
Edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser
New Directions, 2015
“I have found one contemporary I like,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote from Rio de Janeiro. “She has a wonderful name—Clarice Lispector.” Today’s English-language readers of Lispector, bewitched by recent translations of novels such as The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star, might be surprised to learn that Bishop admired the Brazilian for her work in a different form. “Her 2 or 3 novels I don’t think are so good but her short stories are almost like the stories I’ve always thought should be written about Brazil—Tchekovian, slightly sinister and fantastic,” Bishop wrote. “Actually I think she is better than J.L. Borges—who is good, but not all that good!”
2015
The Poetry of a Jewish Humanist
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Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems 1980-2015
by Chana Bloch
Autumn House Press, 2015
A child of immigrant parents who was raised in an observant Jewish household, poet Chana Bloch has absorbed the details of her ethnic and linguistic heritage; this includes what she has called “the habit of questioning,” which is “not only sanctioned by Jewish tradition, it’s an honored part of it.” As a poet, biblical scholar, and translator of ancient and modern Hebrew poetry, she has followed her teacher Robert Lowell’s advice to “learn to write from [her] own translations.”
Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems demonstrates that Bloch has converted that important lesson into a unique poetic voice that modulates from the homespun to the literary and shifts from wit and humor to a pull-no-punches toughness. Spare and musical, intimate while open to history, intelligent and emotionally rich in the details of divisions and connections, Bloch’s poetry negotiates the complexities of her identity as a first-generation Jew, a woman, a child, a parent, a wife, a lover, and a citizen. A self-proclaimed “Jewish humanist,” Bloch quarrels with tradition by asking why God has to make divisions. Some of the divisions she writes about include those between husband and wife, parents and children, illness and health, historical memory and momentary joy, and the contradictions within Judaism itself. Bloch critiques these divisions and, when she finds them, offers alternatives that are more inclusive and more humanistic.
Culture
Foie Gras, Bondage, Cronuts at Dawn
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Blair’s relationship with him was a particularly Californian brand of Elektra complex, constellated by lavish sushi dinners, the interruption of business negotiations to attend her poetry readings, the purchase of swimwear well into her 20s, and on her end, worrying constantly over his health (ironically, in retrospect), visiting him weekly during his brief stint at a minimum security prison, and dedicating to him her two volumes of poetry, Other Minds, Other Bodies and Quantum Vulva.
About Tikkun
Featured Poet: Chana Bloch
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Selections by Philip Terman
Swimming in the Rain
Swaddled and sleeved in water,
I dive to the rocky bottom and rise
as the first drops of sky
find the ocean. The waters above
meet the waters below,
the sweet and the salt,
and I’m swimming back to the beginning. The forecasts were wrong. Half the sky is dark
but it keeps changing. Half the stories
I used to believe are false.
Fiction & Poetry Articles
The Weighing of the Heart in the Hall of Truth
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Heaven’s not for bodies, at least not my perfect one,
and mirrors in heaven still lie as on earth, and still disgust.
Heaven’s not for past or present or future. It’s not everything that should have happened but didn’t.
Dead faces there don’t bristle with hope, there’s no whiskery
feeling of some pointful life to which you never got around.
God’s so dark in heaven, like that car in the rear-view last night
with no headlights on.
Israel/Palestine
For Hazhir
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Jon Swan’s poem about drones is a haunting vision. “The drone hovers under the iron-gray dome of heaven . . .”
Articles
Promises to Keep
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Ultimately, the novel raises many issues of immediate relevance to Jews today—the struggle to find oneself on the ever-widening spectrum of Jewish identities, the complex ways that “Jewish values” can be realized in the world, the impact of intermarriage on Jewish continuity, and the tension between personal desire and responsibility to one’s people.