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The king of tongues spoke in a foreign accent Israel today

2021-11-23T18:04:46.888Z


Yotam Reuveni, who died at the age of 71, was, as he wrote, "a man who belongs to immigration," wrote in the stream of consciousness and never succeeded in stabilizing himself in a literary place worthy of him.


When Yotam Reuveni, who passed away this week, described his birth in Romania 71 years ago at the beginning of his autobiography, he wrote: "I was a twin."

To him, the pattern of the split had been imprinted on him since his birth.

It is not only the split of one who eventually became an immigrant in Israel, and moved all his life between the periphery and the center, between acceptance and exclusion, but also a more fundamental and fundamental split for his writing: the split between the experiencing self and the narrator,

"One side of me ... listened with great vigilance and recorded as quickly as possible everything that was said around him in the room," he writes ironically about his birth moments.

Reuveni was born Jean Riven in the Romanian village of Iasi in 1949. After being orphaned by his mother, who died of cancer at the age of 8, he moved with his father and two older brothers to his father's hometown in eastern Romania. A few years later, in 1964, when the gates began to open for immigration from Romania, the family immigrated to Israel and settled in Ashdod. On arriving in Ashdod, he later wrote in the book "Jean Riven's Autobiography": "I did not understand what I would understand only in fifty years: we arrived, we really arrived, and it's final. Like Mother's death. In a flashlight. "

In many interviews, he talked about his arrival in Israel at the age of 14, and the difficulty of expressing himself in Hebrew, which made him stupid in the eyes of the locals, and gave rise to his determination to "conquer" Hebrew and speak it better than the Sabras themselves.

"The king of tongues made me speak Hebrew without any foreign accent," he writes in his autobiography, "I realized I came to this place just to express it."

The move was completed when you changed his name a few years later, which allowed him to tie his fate to the fate of this place: "I looked at that name then, and he sounded to me, after the fact, like one of the Maccabees ... I was happy";

Now, he said, he could say: "This is my country, this is me, involved in the land as a soul in a body."

Airport is waiting for the plane

Reuveni's first book, "For the Hallucination," considered pioneering and groundbreaking in Israeli gay literature, was published in 1978 by Now. In the book's opening story, "Hypotheses about the Death of Pierre Paolo Pasolini," the narrator traces boys and soldiers across Central Station, and the wandering is not only a search for sexual opportunities but also a wandering between "I" options, including "ani" of his past, Of his childhood, and of unfulfilled life possibilities. This search for possibilities of me, inside and outside, a search that is both real (and mini) and symbolic:


"Now you are full of all manic stay, joining what could exist, write and remember them, all together ... [and] report - Exact or approximate - on each of them, if this report is made in reasonable language, may be sold as literature, may pass to another trader on his own, wrestling at this hour - Saturday morning - in a situation similar to yours:It is a deserted airport waiting for some plane to land on it. "

After his works were rejected by local publishers, Reuben founded in 2000 his own publishing house, Nimrod, in which he published dozens of books by him, as well as a long line of books he translated from the best of Western classics, including Frost, Jeanne Jeanne , Alberto Moravia, Knut Hamson and Mircea Eliade.

"He played himself, and only sometimes there was another actor or actress by his side," Gabriel Moked says of Reuveni's home theater. "It was a good theater. There were no more than four or six people in the audience. But there was also a buffet, he made sure of that."

At the age of 64, after 35 years in Tel Aviv, Reuveni returned to Ashdod, from where he continued to write about immigration and the possibility of returning.

"An immigrant, I learned the hard way, is a person who belongs to immigration. He will never come, and he will dream all his life of an impossible return," he wrote in his autobiography.

It is an immigration that becomes in my eyes an addiction, an inalienable element of the soul, and it already deviates from the real fact of the transition from country to country, from culture to culture: ").

Tragic Chronicle

Just as Reuveni himself moves between Tel Aviv and Ashdod, his work also moves between acceptance and marginalization, between recognition and exclusion. "For the Hallucination" was praised by critics and writers (including Dan Meron and Pinchas Sadeh) and became a mythological milestone in the LGBT community in Israel (in 2015 he was chosen among the 40 most influential in the history of the community in Israel). Later in life he won awards, and in recent years Haaretz's poetry critic, who also describes the retreat to the peripheral, the lonely and the rejected.

Moked testifies that he was the first to recognize Reuben's talent.

"I published his stories in the magazine 'Now', and then his first book. I think it's a mistake to call him a poet and a writer; his main innovation was in fiction, as a prose writer, in both gay and non-gay stories. His talent was not only channeled into the subject of others. "He wrote sensitive and beautiful stories in the style of the stream of consciousness, which continue the tradition of Uri Nissan Gensin and S. Yizhar, and also of Israel Barama, who died at a young age."

Yiftach Aloni, publisher of Afik, who published Reuveni's latest books, describes the book "Jean Riven's Autobiography": "I immediately wanted to publish it.

It was such a poetic book to me.

It was much longer, and had to be greatly shortened.

The encounter with him touched my heart very much.

"I think of Reuveni as a writer who has a voice and his chronicle was tragic, of a writer who somehow failed to stabilize himself in the literary place he deserves."

"My heart aches that I have not had time to publish it in his life. It will see light in the coming months."

Yiftach Aloni // Photo: Yehoshua Yosef,

Aloni agrees that "Reuveni felt that he did not get the place he deserved, and that made him very depressed. Maybe this is the way of literature today, that it rises and falls from the stage in a rather random way."

He said, "Yotam deserved more than that. We as a country with a strong economy can afford to pay more attention and compassion to our cultural people. I have his manuscript left, which I promised him to publish, and it was repeatedly rejected because of the corona and other circumstances. He was already "I am very ill, and my heart aches that I did not keep my promise and did not have time to publish it in his lifetime. It will be published in the coming months."


Yotam Reubeni


there is not Clom Mlbd Hadisot Ao Hhstaot


Hzat Sbh I


Mhgr aged Sla Motr upon Ctr Hmhgr


would like Ao anger Tzric spell Dbr


upon Mh.

Hnh, I Mstir Fni Bidim


Cmo Bmshk with Tinok Barish,


I Nalm Lgmri Mbhinto


with Cl Mh Sis Bi - with indifference


and Hstaot and Tzrc Mtrf put in


Sain Clom.

There is not even anyone.

Obviously there is no square.


There is no permanent and no migration, the


road itself does not exist.

She's just


something solid under her


walking and running more and more desperate.


More and more on a moving film.

From "In the City of Immigration" (Am Oved, 2019)

Source: israelhayom

All news articles on 2021-11-23

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