Translations of Poems by Shez

Translation and Commentary by Elliott batTzedek

Shez’s Rikud Ham’shuga’at / Dance of the Lunatic was published in Israel in 1999. It was the first openly, unapologetically lesbian poetry collection published in Israel (and in modern Hebrew). This was Shez’s first book, and is still in print. She’s since published three other books, including fiction and memoir, and has written plays and short stories and had work published in Israeli Jewish women’s erotica anthologies. A resident of Tel Aviv, she was named an “Honored Cultural Figure” of the Gay/Lesbian community in 2004.  Shez has two blog sites: http://www.harzaya.com/index1.html and http://www.blogs.bananot.co.il/showPost.php?blogID=153.

Shez’s name is an acronym for shem zaman, which means “temporary name.” It is the name she took after leaving her father’s house, which had for her been the site of years of physical and sexual abuse. Her family name was Yerushalmi, which you’ll find in a reference to her father in the poem “Exodus from Auschwitz.”  Throughout the book, she builds a complex set of images that both describe the abuse and give it a powerful and astonishing location within her culture; in many of the poems she identifies her father as Hitler in a deep way that contains the story of Hitler’s terror without diminishing it. This is no easy equating of “European Jewry” with “helpless children” but the voice of a powerful, mature poet exploring what it means to live under a violent power you cannot escape, one that violates every human boundary.

Shez’s father’s name was Abraham, and so she’s also built a series of tellings, twistings, and reinventions of the God/Abraham/sacrifice of Isaac story. God in her book is sometimes male and sometimes female, sometimes an ally of her father and sometimes a lesbian or compassionate woman. Fragmented images of the sexual violence she experienced as a child inform every part of this book, as does her resistance and resilience, from the opening poem about a tree struggling with the memory of having been broken, hammered into, and urinated on by dogs, but still knowing that its head is in the heavens and that its leaves are caressed by God’s breath, to the closing poem in which Shez envisions a day of redemption in which fathers who rape are finally silenced so terrorized girls can be heard.

Mother 1

My mother walks me through the spacious fields to die
pressing me to sing a sweet song in my coarse voice
while the soles of my repugnant feet tread upon the holy earth.
“Adamat Avraham avinu,” my mother repeats, whetting the words against
  my face,
small, my face, disgusting, my face
that will never be the face of a woman.

Mother 2

You will take the girl and you will wipe
the residue of semen from around her mouth and with
a wet rag wipe inside her mouth and wipe well
her small teeth
And you’ll sing to her a toddler’s lullaby and urge her to dream
of grass—green, sky—azure, birds—chirping

Exodus from Auschwitz

And in Kiriyat-Ono, 9 Montefiore Street, entrance one, third floor on the right
Father Yerushalmi will stir the pot of soup and he will laugh
at anything amusing on the radio. “Everything here is in order” he’ll say to
  his soul
and the heavens will echo. “All this is only a rebellious daughter blowing more hot air.”

In his love for me

In his love for me
Hitler slowly slides the first pearl of the necklace
into my throat—a second comes
then another pearl, and another, white snake
lengthening, slithering in

**********

Working Notes: Mother 1

In this retelling of the Abraham/Isaac story, it is Shez’s mother, fully complicit with her husband, who is leading the child to be sacrificed. Her mother says “The land of Abraham our father,” which is a phrase used in Jewish liturgy.

Working Notes: Mother 2

Translating these poems can be emotionally very difficult. I love the mental puzzle of pulling meaning out of a language I’m only beginning to read with any kind of depth or ease, but then part way into a line or image exactly what Shez has said rushes over me. If I hadn’t spent years writing my own work about this, I’m not sure I could face working through this entire book Although even for these most emotionally difficult poems, there is a real joy in getting to an English poem that conveys what she said and how she said it and yet works on its own as a poem.

Working Notes: Exodus from Auschwitz

This street address is where Shez grew up. I looked for it one day on Googlemaps, just so I would know, and could see satellite images of the house and the neighborhood. This poem is part of a cycle in the book of Shez’s words and writing being silenced, censored, erased by not only her father but all the fathers who rape. And yet, of course, the poems do exist, and are now reaching across an ocean with their hard and necessary truths.

Working notes: In his love for me

This is the first Shez poem I found online and began to translate. As it started to come together in English on the page I knew I had found a sister-poet, another writer in another language struggling to tell such a familiar story. Another theme in the book is the way surviving incest influences adult sexuality; in one love poem she uses the verb from this poem that means to slide in, to thread beads onto a necklace and that also carries a sense of being sleazy, dirty, obscene, to talk about her desire for a woman—a woman who wants gentle love songs which, Shez says, have been utterly stolen from her and destroyed.

About the author

I recently finished an MFA in poetry from Drew University where I studied with Alicia Ostriker, Joan Larkin, Ross Gay, and Anne Marie Macari. I’ve returned to Drew for the program in poetry in translation, where I am working closely with my mentor Ellen Doré Watson to translate Dance of the Lunatic. I work as a consultant, adjunct graduate school faculty, co-leader of Fringes, a poetry-based, feminist havurah in Philadelphia, and general gadfly in the face of the powerful. My own work shares many of Shez’s themes and appears or is forthcoming in Two Lines Translation Anthology, Armchair/Shotgun, Adanna Literary Journal, Naugatuck River Review, Poetica, Poemeleon, Lamba Literary Online, Sinister Wisdom, and as a Split This Rock poem of the week. My poem/memoir about surviving incest, “Wanting a Gun”, appeared in Trivia Issue 6, 2007. For more information, visit my blog at http://thisfrenzy.wordpress.com/.


For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.  

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