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under the ground | Israel today

2022-08-19T10:06:37.224Z


"Tzelem", Einat Yakir's new book, will surprise her readers: the preoccupation with Tel Aviv urbanism was replaced by worlds ruled by demons and Kabbalistic verses in Kadita • She describes the magic she found in the north of the country: "The space began to seep into me" • Responds to labeling her writing as difficult to read: "Those who give up the immediacy in favor of other media will benefit" • and criticizes the changes that have befallen the institution of literary criticism: "The change in standards is sickening, the economy has entered there as well"


In her new book, Tzelem, Einat Yakir leaves her familiar living areas, the Tel Aviv urbanity she has been identified with since the collection of stories "Eski Tivach" and the novel "Craftsmen's Center" (both published by "Ketar"), and goes out into the vastness of the land - not only those on the surface but also those below.

Its hero, Natan, is attacked by anxiety and strange paralysis attacks, which cause him to leave his job as a biology teacher and come to the north, to the unknown ecological settlement of Kadita.

There he experiences a series of physical and mental falls in an attempt to get out the demon that may have entered him, and in the process becomes familiar with the life of the earth: the life of the earth not only in the sense of a life that is close to the crops of the earth and its physicality, including the worms that live in it and animate it, but also in the sense of the worlds The lower ones, which are controlled by demons, spells and Kabbalistic verses.

"Anxiety is the basis," says Yakir, "and with Natan this basis turns out to be a physical thing. It's something I know - the apparent disconnection, the feeling that the body is attacking you and you don't know where, the feeling that you're about to fall, the physicality that suddenly speaks as if out of nowhere - these are worlds I've been through ".

And with that, Yakir does not want to mark a clear connection between what she went through and what she wrote in the novel, also out of a principled reservation from the accepted requirement for writers to reveal in interviews, as part of the sales promotion of their books, the autobiographical basis of what they wrote about.

"In the place where I am today as a writer, what interests me is precisely the distance I manage to create from myself. I am interested in inventing. This book is far from being enlightened. So to write it, and then to promote it, to come and present it as an act of enlightenment - it seems to me a stupid thing Absolutely. Obviously it's all me, who else could it be? But to say 'I wrote this way because this happened to me' would be incorrect, even if it's clear that the invention is based on memory. I'm not ready to disrupt the role of invention in my writing to fit the terms they currently have Very fashionable, of 'my elbow hurt and that's why I wrote'".

"Loneliness is salvation"

Another point of similarity between her and Natan, which she happily talks about, is her physical approach in recent years to the land and the landscapes of the north of the country.

In fact, even though Shikir lives in the center, the book was written mainly in the north.

"Uzi (her partner, the painter Uzi Katsav; KD) is from Kfar Blum, and we are hospitalized there a lot.

We had many wonderful moments there, and slowly this space began to seep into me, to really wound me.

I remember that in the first years, before there were children, I would come with Uzi and count the minutes until returning to Tel Aviv.

And today I don't want to go back at all.

There is nothing like this feeling, that you go outside and are on earth.

I may have discovered it through the children, there is nothing better than little children, naked, running on the ground, with the sun and the shadow.

Today I can get excited about a tree."

"A writer wants to reach an audience, to be read. I didn't write it to stay in Migdal Shen. It's true that while writing I'm not talking to the audience, I'm talking to the sky - but in the end I'm writing to meet"

The book was written, she says, mainly during these family vacations, in the landscapes of Kfar Blum - and not in her home.

She would wait for these vacations especially to use them for writing: "I would go to the lobby of the 'Pastoral' hotel, sit on the couch, put on the sound of a forest in my headphones, and write."

And with that, the settlement of Kadita, where the novel takes place, a distance of about 30 kilometers from Kfar Blum, was delayed in arriving.

"In the end I went there to see what I was writing about. But I have to say, I was gripped by fear. I was afraid to walk around there."

Why?


"Perhaps I was afraid to confront the landscape with the imagination. I stopped the car, went up the steps of Rabbi Tarpon's grave, there was no one there, and I ran away. I am very alone when I write - solitude which is wonderful for me, which is salvation - and maybe that is why outside of writing it is difficult for me To be alone. When it's true aloneness, where I'm really not protected, and not aloneness that I create for the sake of writing - things become threatening."

What did you imagine could happen to you there in Kadita?


"Horror, really horrible. It was appropriate that if I was writing about Kadita I should at least sleep there for the night, and I couldn't, it seemed really dangerous to me. Maybe I managed to scare myself. I'm not brave in these places, I'm only brave in the literature I write."

A musical moment

Yakir, born in 1977, is the scion of a literary family: her grandfather, Yaakov Yakir, was a Yiddish writer who immigrated to Israel with her father and died in 1980, and her father's sister was a Russian children's author who died in Russia of cancer at a very young age.

Although her parents immigrated to Israel in the 1970s shortly before she was born, the atmosphere at home was Israeli: her parents did read children's books in Russian to the children, but spoke Hebrew to them.

"There was no seclusion with them in classical Russian. There was a lot of interest and openness towards Hebrew from the first moment, and I credit it to them. The price of this is that I don't speak Russian. Russian is my most painful place. I was left with a very limited Russian. That's why I only translated works for children ".

Already as a child, Yakir began writing and publishing poems and stories, and over the years she has won much critical acclaim and awards, but she recognizes the antagonism that her idiosyncratic writing style sometimes arouses in literary critics.

"Today it is of less interest to me, my action is very clear to me," she says.

A broken, undefined space.

Rabbi Tarpon's grave in Kadita, where the novel takes place // Photo: Gil Eliyahu/Gini,

How did it happen that the review no longer interests you?


"I expect a conversation, and I don't feel that it is taking place. I feel that the space has greatly diminished in terms of its forms of speech and in terms of expectations from books, and I enter into understood categories that I do not cooperate with. Many times critics speak on behalf of the reader, and I think there is nothing condescending about that, to decide Who is the reader and what will he want to read. The assumption that there is one reader and he knows what he wants is unfounded and contradicts the art world, which is not a consumer world. An unsatisfied customer in the art world is a wonderful thing, it is a proper and desirable thing. It should move him, bring him to action An act of resistance and outrage in art is no less good than applause and bravo.

"Art does not work according to the consumerist logic that if you bought the product - you succeeded, and if you didn't buy the product - you didn't, and the highest value is money. The economy entered literature in a very violent way, through the bookstores, and now it has migrated to the last poor place left for literature, which is the criticism."

Do you feel that the review has changed its standards?


"I feel a change in standards that is sickening, which is cooperation with the system, instead of opposing it. I'm not here to shut up those who want to criticize me, but if the idea is that literature aims to entertain the reader, I don't belong to that category, I'm not an entertainer" .

They will answer you that the expectation is for literature to communicate with the reader emotionally, to get close to him in order to influence him.


"I think this book is very communicative. There are all kinds of forms of communication. Anyone who is willing to give up the immediate in favor of other forms of communication will benefit from wonderful communication. Communication is a broad thing. It's as if we were to meet a person with a table of predetermined expectations, and mark if he meet our expectations or not. The whole idea of ​​literature is the unexpected encounter. The harm in such criticism, which is aligned with consumer standards, is that it causes many people who I think could be interested in my book to give up in advance, and not only my book but other books as well - I am not alone in this campaign, there are other writers."

Who do you see in this campaign by your side?


"Of course, Oded Volkstein, who is also the editor of the book, Michal Ben Naftali, Sami Bardugo, Shimon Adaf, Dror Borstein, Lilach Nathanel, Eli Rauner - these are votes that are measured in the way we talked about. There is a gap between the fact that the book can receive awards, etc., and the audience , that he may not meet him, and mark him as something high and inaccessible."

Is it important to you to reach people?


"A writer ultimately wants to reach an audience, wants to be read. I didn't write it to stay in Migdal Shen. It's true that while writing I'm not talking to the audience, I'm talking to the sky - but in the end I write to meet. This is not narcissistic masturbation. And so this moment of publishing the book is difficult: I don't know how the book will be received, and I know I can't be otherwise."

I want to tell you that I had a struggle with the book, it took me a while to adjust to its language.

Not because it is "high", but because there are places that annoyed me, that I read as manneristic or obscure.

But it changed as I read, and slowly I felt that the text was becoming a rhythm, an almost physical experience.


"I think that in meaningful literature it is always the experience. It's like jumping into a pool, into very cold water. You are not guaranteed to get used to the temperature of the water - there is no door that opens 'Welcome.' No, I have to get used to your temperature, you have to get used to my temperature. Can You may leave. But if you stay, you will experience worlds, I promise. Or not, but I really try. If I don't find the right musical moment, as Kanz called it, I don't start writing. In this book, specifically, it was important to me that there also be a story . It stood in front of my eyes. The previous books were more atmospheric books, a process of mental-consciousness, and this is where the story was important to me."

What happened that the story became important?


"I don't know. Maybe I'm looking for something different from what I've been doing until now - as it was important for me to get out of Tel Aviv."

Why Lakdita?


"The first time I wrote the name, I still didn't know why. Maybe I chose it because it sounded like a transliteration of an ancient Hebrew name. The name came to me before the place. Only after I wrote it did I go to Google, and I saw that it's good, because it's true - I work in reverse. I loved that Kadita is a broken, undefined space, whose borders are unclear and its legal status is unclear. And I loved that it has a rare connection between fanatical vegans and Hasidic Breslav - Rabbi Tarpon's grave is within Kadita itself. Kadita marks for me the connection between the work of the earth and the work of the heavens. It's a place where you can settle in the ground, and it also allows you to conduct yourself in the mystical space of the sky, and I think in some place Natan is trying to connect them."

You pay respect to your associations.


"Yes. It's very important for me to go on a journey without knowing where I'm going to end up, things have to be revealed to me. I feel like it's like a theater curtain slowly opening. In writing, I follow the unconscious, and it must be real, completely material. It's not "Aware that I give it shape."

It is very clear from reading that you do not follow a paved path, that your writing is not disciplined.


"It wouldn't interest me otherwise. I won't write if I know where I'm going. I'm not the type of writer who prepares notes, diaries, lists."

I thought about the fact that Nathan does not have a father in the book - perhaps it is related to your attempt to impose an associative regime on the book, in that the book builds a pre-Oedipal space, in which there is no father figure?


"It may be that I have to kill my father in order to write. You know, at the age of 14 I wrote a story, called it 'Four Seasons' and published it in the '77 newspaper'. In this story I killed my father. So maybe this is the price, that I have to kill my father in order to To write. In many of my books the father is gone, or disintegrated. There was a moment when I suddenly noticed that Nathan had no father, and then I said, 'Leave it, you don't need to forcefully write him if he's gone, that's probably the story.'" 

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Source: israelhayom

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