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What Exactly Was Lost Israel today

2022-01-12T15:40:13.828Z


Obsessive attention to visuals and high and noble Hebrew - along with heavy and awkward language - characterize Rita Kogan's stories.


In one of her poems, Rita Kogan wrote about immigration from the Soviet Union to Israel as a crisis of the loss of the thin calibration of the language: "I have lost a fine motor of language," she writes, "Heights-heights, heavy-heavy."

This Hebrew, which is at the same time pious and stone, high and noble and at the same time heavy and awkward, is Kogan's language even in large parts of her first prose book, Eretz-Sela, which is published after two books of poetry. Cogan externalizes this "motor impairment" in her use of language and makes it a sign of her foreignness. It is Hebrew, originally written in the same linguistic awkwardness typical of translated literature, which combines elitism and old-fashionedness, and places the text in an extra-local and extra-temporal space.

In this sense, Kogan's Hebrew presents immigration long before immigration itself breaks into the book, in the fourth story in the file, and it is especially present in the first two stories, which are located in the childhood of Russia. Not only is the language spoken between the characters clearly Russian, which is translated into highly recommended and "translational" Hebrew ("this is exactly how you get sepsis," the grandmother tells the girl, who later removes her "anaphylaxis" and notices "thin gloom, smells like lavender"), But also the pace is slow and contemplative, as if even time is not from here.

Kogan's writing, especially in the first stories, before immigration, but not only in them, pays almost obsessive attention to the visual details of the world around it.

Her gaze cruises through furniture and souvenirs that filled the world left behind, describing them as if they were under a heavy blanket of citrus and dust.

As she rides in a train car, her gaze will scan its corners and ornaments, reaching as far as the brass moldings shaped like "twigs and currant clusters."

Not only are the objects depicted in the details of the metal curls and velvet ribbons, but also the clusters of people are transcribed into their ridiculous details, in the cartoonish spirit of 19th-century literature, including the humpy nose that casts a shadow on the cheek, pouty skin, moist dog eyes, blond ponytail or blonde. The velvet tied around the neck, "inlaid with a single acacia stone."

Scattering of poignant descriptions and archaic words throughout "Rocky Land" is reminiscent of one of the book's opening scenes, with the girl dropping a kaleidoscope and his glass entrails scattering around the room.

The shattered kaleidoscope, which spreads glass and metal flakes throughout the room, is an effective image of the formal structure that Kogan operates here, blossoming throughout the book kaleidoscopic fragments of old-fashioned and foreign reality, word flakes and descriptions presented in a sad color mix and pointing to the fragment that created them.

This fragment only wound up in the fourth story in the file, "Sunset," which is one of the most beautiful in the book.

Through the blame for the flights to Israel, the protagonist misses two sunsets, and as in Isaac Asimov's "Sunset" story, here too the hiding of the sun irreparably disrupts the good order of things and heralds the beginning of a great calamity: when the girl finally lands in Israel and watches the sunset again, she is already In "Alien Planet," after being thrown off her planet.

Upon migration, the protagonist suddenly reports a "pit in memory," and her language also dwindles. The arid and monotonous Israeli landscape she sees around her empties not only her eyes but also her tongue. She describes it: "All around was hot, so hot. And empty ... and hot, so hot. And hot, and empty, and hot was. And brown, and empty, and hot was."


Only now, in the face of the trauma of immigration, does it become clear how much the erasure and depletion it brought with it comes along with the obsessive collection of broken kaleidoscope flakes. Only now, in the face of the emptied encounter with the new land, can one understand that the ornate language and poignant descriptions that appear throughout the book (and especially in the first stories) are an act of resistance to detachment and alienation, which are the fate of the immigrant.

And yet, "Land of Rock" is not a novel in episodes, and cannot be read as a single linear sequence.

The ten short stories and the novella included in the book are arranged in chronological order - from early childhood, through the beginning of sexual maturity, then immigration, high school, the army and the reunion with the neglected father's family, and finally the recollection of childhood in Russia (but much less nostalgic than before). But these are not the chapters of a novel in stories.

Kogan thwarts such a call not only through changing the names of her protagonists - sometimes called Masha, sometimes Alina and sometimes Vita - but also through the isolation she imposes on the stories, each of which is called an "island," and they rarely share characters and events.

Even key characters like mother, grandmother, neglected father and stepfather (whom the narrator calls "the monster") hardly recur between the stories, but in the margins.

You can not even say that it is a book about immigration. Immigration, a stain, is not counted here more than other traumas like rape, abuse, neglect, illness and suicide attempts. In any case, it is difficult to say what exactly the narrative of this immigration story is: it is certainly not a lost paradise whose gates closed with immigration, since even the memory of girls in Russia does not remain the same, and compared to the sweet and dreamy description of girls in Russia at the beginning of the book. On anti-Semitism and harassment.

Immigration is also not represented here in indulging in foods or a variety of anecdotes from previous lives, as is customary in Israeli immigration literature (although Kogan does incorporate quite a bit of cultural morabilia here: poems, quotes, etc.).

She manages to present immigration in a much more refined and sophisticated way, while also consolidating the book into one literary division, using the formal structure of the shattered kaleidoscope - sticking to foreign flakes and the old that will present what was lost, even if it is not clear what exactly was lost and the traumas He has not been overshadowed already. 

Rita Kogan / Eretz-Sela, Dvir Publishing and the Contexts, 240 pages

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Source: israelhayom

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