At one point during Corona's never-ending closure, Erez Bitton, who recently turned 80, returned to 10-year-old Erez Bitton.
After years of writing about ethnic oppression and what people (and quite a few hate) like to call "Israel the Second," an inexplicable force drew him to write about the boy Yaish who was, before he became Erez.
Bitton wrote about the migration experience, the neglected settlement in Lod and the hand grenade that rolled into his hands, where he played when the injury occurred that would change his life.
The one who stole the light from his eyes and cut off his left hand.
The result - his new book of poetry "Stitches" - is the most intimate, exposed and painful of his works.
"Before, I wrote about blindness, but only by indirect means. I did not touch the injury, its core, the inner volcano I closed on," he says.
"And it was precisely in the closure of the Corona, when I was isolated at home with my wife, that need came to me to write about November 19, 1951. I wrote: A boy went up in smoke and there was no one to catch his clothes. And it was me, and I fell, "Who tried to document the injury, the feelings of a child from an immigrant family in Lod are completely abandoned, and suddenly there are no tools to treat such a child. He is left alone at home."
You are also expressing a lot of anger towards the family here, about material things that your injury and the relief money have yielded to them. Is this closing an account?
"There is a mixture of feelings: on the one hand, there is great pity and awareness for the first 50 years of parents without means of subsistence. This pity and the difficult situation made me accept responsibility, help and take care of them, even buying them the neighborhood grocery, which later turned out to be a complete failure; "The family. Children sleep in their beds without a caressing hand. So there is also anger, for sure. These are complex feelings."
How do you think they will react to the book?
"They will say, 'Everything you wrote is true, but our lives today as adults are different.' There's a big guilt. "
"Stitches" will be launched tomorrow (Tuesday) at the Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv.
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