"I composed ... a song — which I had never sung till then, with an idea, and words, and rhymes — because my heart was with me and in my mouth.” ( S Y Agnon, 'With My Heart')
The great swaths of immigrants currently flooding Europe will soon learn that they’ll make and re-make their lives a dozen times over before finding some sense of place, let alone a sense of peace.
This is part of the refugee experience and sadly is very often how artistes are made. It most certainly helped to shape prize-winning poet Anne Ranasinghe (neé Anneliese Katz) whose parents were murdered by the Nazis after they sent her to safety in England on the Kindertransport.
Born in Essen, Germany, she went on to study midwifery but later changed careers to concentrate on writing. But what must be described as a novel twist in a familiar plot emerged when Ranasinghe met and married a Sri Lankan doctor, Don Abraham Ranasinghe. She then emigrated to Sri Lanka where she helped to raise her husband’s three children from a previous marriage as well as the four they had together.
Anne Ranasinghe took Sri Lankan citizenship in the fifties and has now lived there for 60 years. So it is little surprise that the Holocaust along with a sympathetic look at others’ alienation and minority persecution are frequent subjects in her poetry.
Anne Ranasinghe is an overseas member of Israel’s English language poetry society, Voices Israel and fellow members are delighted that her life story is being broadcast throughout October on Caesarea Al HaGal on Channel 98 each Monday at 3:30 p.m. and again on Thursday at 10:00 p.m.
"Auschwitz from Colombo
“Colombo. March. The city white fire That pours through vehement trees burst into flame, And only a faint but nearing wind Stirring the dust From relics of foreign invaders, thrown
“On this far littoral by chance or greed, Their stray memorial the odd word mispronounced, A book of laws, A pile of stones Or may be some vile deed.
“Once there was another city, but there It was cold - the trees leafless And already thin ice on the lake.
“It was that winter Snow hard upon the early morning street And frost flowers carved in hostile window panes - It was that winter
“Yet only yesterday Half a world away and twenty-five years later I learn of the narrow corridor And at the end a hole, four feet by four Through which they pushed them all - the children too Straight down a shaft of steel thirteen feet long And dark and icy cold Onto the concrete floor of what they called The strangling room. Dear God, the strangling room,
“Where they were stunned - the children too - By heavy wooden mallets, Garrotted, and then impaled On pointed iron hooks.
“I am glad of the un-echoing street Burnt white in the heat of many tropical years, For the mind, no longer sharp, Seared by the tropical sun Skims over the surface of things Like the wind That stirs but slightly the ancient dust”.
(FromAgainst eternity and darkness: [poems]Paperback – 1985)
Below is a clip of a reading by US Beat poet Herschel Silverman who died last month aged 89.
If you rub your chin and confide that his name does not readily spring to mind along side those of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and co, then you’re in good company!
How could the humdrum, stable life of a sweet shop owner with a wife and children to support possibly compete with those of the crazed but starred founders of the beat generation?
Even the obituarist inThe Telegraphwrote that Silverman worked “to little fanfare” while running his ‘luncheonette’, Hersch’s Beehive, in New Jersey.
But he became a long-time pen-pal of Ginsberg and his verse developed to combine Beat themes like jazz with details from his domestic life. So while influenced by his better known peers, he managed to produce what Ginsberg called an “inventive energy, New Jersey beauty and charm in his compositions”.
This excerpt fromNite Train Poemsas discussed on CultureCatchdisplays Silverman’s skill for raising the mundane to the level of art:
i run away in mind
in nite train
again and again
and again
something bugging me
money maybe
a need to scream to cry out
and curse with verbs
to release the utter Frustration
of a rent due
and electric gas bill --
the lack of tears so inhibiting
the train carrying me
filling with a nervous gas
the hang-ups
coming to a halt
for a while
in a bottle of Fleischman's
and some ginger ale
I conclude with an excerpt from Section VI ofJazz & the Changes, which the poet dedicated to his wife, neé Laura Rothschild and addressed to her:
“i told her
there's no Jazz
Real Jazz
without Gut
without Love
or Zen statement
no ear
without Jazz
no Jazz without Ear,
that Jazz is the daily statement
an unincorporated
release
of the condition of
an individual's soul
in relation
to God”
[*The four poems in the recording, documented byMitch Corber, are Crazy She Called Me, Cittee Cittee Cittee, For Jim Brodeyand To Construct the Blues for Moe.Perry Robinsonis on clarinet.]
Even as a strong IRAC (Israel Religion Action Centre) supporter and its feisty director, Anat Hoffman I can’t agree with everything she and her organisation do.
In the past week, for example, I felt more embarrassed than engaged when she used her newsletter, The Pluralist, to suggest that the tradition of ‘inviting’ historical guests to celebrate the festival of Succot be widened to include “seven Israeli-Arab and Palestinian treasures, including performers, politicians, and poets”.
Perhaps I’m not alone in feeling it’s the wrong time to mix religion and politics and that anyway her choice was rather arbitrary. Why did she not, for example, include the much-admired Egyptian writer, Ali Salem who had been widely ostracised by his fellow countrymen after visiting Israel in 1994 and died during September aged 79?
But never mind! It’s given me a reason to look at the work of one of Hoffman’s proposed ‘guests’, Taha Muhammad Ali, a Palestinian poet and short story writer who lived in Lebanon with his family during the 1948 Israel War of Independence but went on to spend the rest of his life in Nazareth where he owned a souvenir shop. He died there in 2011.
The Poetry Foundationsays of Ali: “Self-taught through his readings of classical Arabic literature, American fiction, and English poetry, Ali started writing poems in the 1970s. His collections in English include Never Mind: Twenty Poems and a Story (2000) and So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (2006).
Adina Hoffman’s biography of Ali,My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, won the 2010Jewish QuarterlyWingate Prize.
