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Tell me a childhood secret Israel today

2023-02-11T13:15:43.089Z


Bela Alexandrov and Gregory Gordon immigrated to Israel from opposite ends of the former USSR • However, these two books of poetry are not at all colored by immigration and childhood experiences


In the age of confessional poetry, many debut books are written as a kind of revelation of the poet's life story, from his childhood onwards.

One could think that such are the debut books of Bela Alexandrov ("Smile Number 8") and Gregory Gordon ("Tornado Approaching the House"), which have been published in recent months, but with both of them this is not exactly the case.

From the description on the back of the books it is clear that the two poets immigrated to Israel from opposite ends of the former Soviet Union (Alexandrov, born in 1984, from Latvia, and Gordon, born in 1995, from Uzbekistan), and probably arrived in Israel as children. Both books open in a similar way, with a sequence of several autobiographical poems, which describe the The poet's childhood and the difficult family life.

Both of them are in the midst of a cleaning - "I have a good time. .



In the opening poems, both describe their childhood under the shadow of a violent father, who also hurt their mother - in Alexandrov's attitude to the father is described in a cycle of visceral upheaval poems that opens like this: "My fear is red in color / scattered with a stain of my mother's blood / on the kitchen floor, / dripping from the floor of the house," I have to do it. The man, embodied / the violent heredity that may suddenly break out like an earthquake?"

Later in the cycle, it becomes clear that Alexandrov's father returned to Riga and was murdered by his new lover, and another poem in Gordon's book, which we will come to later, reveals that his father committed suicide in front of his eyes.

The openings of the two books, there are similarities between the painful biographies they present, touch on the difficulties of the children of immigrants/immigrants from the USSR. This exposure is connected to the cultural movement of "Generation 1.5", led by characters from the same generation (and Alexandrov among them) - the children who arrived in waves The rise of the 90's and grown up in the meantime - who bravely tell, by themselves and with their voice, the story of their coming of age and stop hiding and being ashamed (Alex Riff in poetry, Eric Eber in Spoken-Word and others).

However, these two books of poetry are not entirely colored by immigration and childhood experiences, so the similarity between them also ended when they were opened.

Alexandrov's book, which won the Bernstein Prize for poetry, becomes a poetic diary, describing the illness of the poet's mother and the stay by her side in the hospital, and it is concluded with farewell poems.

From the exciting book, a figure of an impressive and strong mother is depicted, who at some point reversed the roles and her daughter became her caregiver - physically and mentally.


On the other hand, Gordon's book continues in all kinds of directions, some of them less good, but at the center of it is a great and strong division called "Abravanal", which describes his days as a patient in the psychiatric hospital.

Both poets have a declarative poem in their books in which they explain to whom they are writing, and perhaps they clarify the essential difference between the books.

Gordon writes in the poem "A letter to the lonely" (the most beautiful poem in the book, which seems to be a tribute to the poem "Letter to the Children" by Eli Eliyahu, the editor of the book): "I write to the lonely - / to those who perish between the lines / and to those who fall between the chairs, / to those whose voices are regretted. // I am writing alone - / to a child who sees where his father / tears the veins, / and still remembers the sight of blood."

On the other hand, Alexandrov describes that her poems have one and only one recipient - the mother: "To whom am I writing? / If to you, why in Hebrew? // Because Hebrew is the language of my soul. / Only she will know how to tell the story of the pain of the daughter / the dead."

Bela Alexandrov / smile number 8;

Editor: Anat Levin.

Pardes, 66 pp.


Gregory Gordon / Tornado approaches the house;

Editor: Eli Eliyahu.

Journal 77, 63 p.

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Source: israelhayom

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