Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing

by Ammiel Alcalay (Editor)

This first anthology of twentieth-century Israeli literature to feature the work of writers who were born in—or whose families originated from—the Levant, Turkey, Iran, India and Arab worlds represents twenty-four authors whose concerns with cultural identity, race, class, gender and political allegiances place their work alongside today's emerging rediscovered and reinvented Arab, African, Indian, African-American and Caribbean traditions. "This brilliant collection makes the emphatic point that translation is of necessity political and gives us ample evidence of those who have been thus silenced. Our imagination of the Middle East and its peoples must alter, reading these completely moving texts by so many diverse writers of consummate authority. Ammiel Alcalay has done us all a great service."—Robert Creeley "We need this book! The soil is so deeply mixed, the stories and voices redolent with shared fragrances and new seedlings. Anyone who imagines Jews and Arabs to be strictly oppositional needs to explore the rich twining of roots offered here, and consider how this cross-pollination may hold the hope for the whole region. Ammiel Alcalay is a fine, wise gardener."—Naomi Shihab Nye "Having established himself as one of the most attentive readers of the Jewish-Arab Mediterranean past, Ammiel Alcalay sets out in this remarkable anthology to subversively redraw the boundaries and strata of modern Hebrew literature, introducing to the American reader key-notes that are almost inaudible within the Israeli literary establishment, and tracing the Oriental characters, long erased from the palimpsest of Hebrew literature."—Anton Shammas "A Jew writing in Arabic is not read in Israel . . . ' So writes Samir Naqqash. Ammiel Alcalay's remarkable selection of texts is a plea on behalf of Israeli imaginations in spiritual exile. One is driven to meditate on the genius of truth in every re-visionary monument of home."—Wilson Harris

Genres: Israel, Jewish, Short Stories

369 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1996

About the author

Ammiel Alcalay (b. 1956) is poet, translator, critic, and scholar who teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of, among other books, After Jews and Arabs (1993); the cairo notebooks (1993); Memories of Our Future (1999); from the warring factions (2002); Scrapmetal (2007); and a little history (2012). He was one of the initiators of the Poetry Is News Coalition, and helped to organize the Olson Now project. He has recently launched Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a publishing venture whose mission is to retrieve and make available key texts falling widely under the rubric of the New American Poetry.

Reviews

[Steven Bergson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keys to the Garden is an appropriate title for this eclectic collection of mizrahi short stories, poetry, novel excerpts and author interviews. As a key can unlock the door to reveal a hidden paradise, Ammiel Alacalay uses this anthology to provide readers in the West a glimpse into the imgination and experiences of a group of establihed writers who are not only unknown in North America, but are relatively unknown in their homeland of Irael.

Mizrahis (Israeli whose families immigrated from the Levant, Turkey, Iran, India and the Arab World), though a numerical majority, have continually been treated as a minority in Israeli society and their artistic and literary achievements have been overshadowed and marginalized by those in the mainstream. However, by translating selections of the works of Amira Hess, Ronny Someck, Samir Naqqash and the other talents represented in this volume, and presenting them in this anthology, Alcalay give them a voice and shows how their languge, conventions, assumptions, characterizations and references differ from the standard sort of Israeli writing that we have become accustomed to.

When one thinks of inter-ethnic conflict in Israel, one's mind automatically turns to Arab-Jewish tensions. Yet, within Israeli society itself, a sense of discord between mainstream Jews and mizrahis is also in evidence and this collection brings some of that to light. Tikva Levi's "We Live in Jessie Cohen..."'s reference to the ideological street name Zionism St. further develops the metaphor to describe her own situation: "We live inside Racism parallel to Holocaust awfully close to the graveyard." Sami Shalom Chetrit's poem about a rejected American corpse that had been sent to Israel for burial ("Who Is a Jew and What Kind of Jew") contains the acidic line, "if he is an Ashkenazic Jew, we will gladly bury him". This anthology is not meant to be a comprehensive collection of mizrahi literature but is meant to introduce a class of writing that has been absent for too long. While the sections themselves are not exhaustive, the reader is given a taste of the author's creativity and is referred to other works in the extensive biographical author sketches that precede each section. It is unfortunate that such an anthology is not yet available in Hebrew, as Chetrit laments in the book's final poem ("At an Auditorium of a Local University"): "When, for once, will our [mizrahi] translated poems be able to breathe in Hebrew?" Yet this remarkable collection of English translations is, at least, accesible in the English-speaking world and is a highly-reccommended addition for the collections of Jewish libraries, literature sections of public libraries and Middle East Studies collections of academic libraries. It will provide an excellent balance to any library's collection of Israeli litearture in translation.

This review originally appeared in Counterpoise, edited by Charles Willett.

[Joe]

Brings a diverse Mizrahi literature into English. Mizrahi are, roughly, Israeli Jews with Levant roots. Read about 1/4 of the anthology. Would like to spend more time with Samir Naqqash, Yehezkel Kedmi, & Tikva Levi.

Kedmi in particular. He's got the kind of biography Don DeLillo would invent in explaining the object of study of an American academic: autodidact, sometimes homeless cook and dishwasher in Jerusalem:

"if only the moon had fallen to the ground so you couldn't see your way to Jerusalem to the earth
of the Land of Israel and you would have gone every which way the wind blew except
in the direction of the wind leading to the city of Jerusalem
had even the Land our Land the Land of Israel the Land of Abraham Isaac and Jacob been conquered by the Nations
the land of our ancestors the land of the Jews and had they established in this Land holy to us a sovereign Arab land ruling over us
had even such a disaster taken place it would have been preferable to me and to you had such a thing as this
happened to my father for a disaster befalling our nation would be better than the disaster me and my father went through"

I dunno what I expected to find. But this certainly complicated it.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book I will continue to dip into. I hope that some of these writers get translated into English - I'd love to read more of their work.

Highly recommend, especially if your sum experience of Israeli lit is Amos Oz and David Grossman. This will really expand your horizons.