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The Israel Prize is just another magic in Nurit Zarchi's deep box

The writer's winning the Israel Prize is so obvious that it seems almost detached from reality.

You don't really need a government committee to recognize the eternity of her work, and her ability to direct her imagination to generations of children.

A living room colleague tries to decipher Zarchi's magic, and returns with a feline riddle

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• Nurit Zarchi

Living Room Fellow

Tuesday, 02 March 2021, 08:30

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This is not the Ministry of Education committee, this is the love that won her the award.

Nurit Zarchi (Photo: Roni Taharlev)

"This wonder, an eye did not see!" Shouted a large advertisement in the newspaper "Davar".

The film in question, "Gone with the Wind," will begin showing on Saturday night at the Eden Cinema in Jerusalem, almost two years after it was released in its homeland.

The date was October 22, 1941. The ad boasted that the film would be shown three times a day, with an interesting marketing clarification: "This film will not be shown anywhere else at regular prices, but after a full year."

To the children of the Netflix generation, this will sound strange.

One film is shown three times a day, and you can bet in advance that it will continue to be shown for at least a year.

Next to the large ad, in more modest and less prominent letters, reads politely: "A daughter was born to us and we called her name - Nurit."

The ad was signed by Esther and Israel Zarchi from Jerusalem.

The name "light" was dotted.

They probably had to pay extra for this choice.

It was a relatively new name.

Kind of Roman, Adele and Lenny of those days.

The parents punctuated the name not because there is another way to pronounce the name, but to give it respect.

At home she was called Nuna.

She will suck her love of language away, from the first moment.

This love made her write hundreds of songs and stories.

This love won her the Israel Prize yesterday, and rightly so.

It is interesting to come across this ad, in the 80th year of its publication.

The film "Gone with the Wind" entered the mythology of world cinema, but in the past year has encountered the wrath of liberal America that decided to make marks in it as was the custom of the time.

In contrast, Nurit Zarchi has become a relatively well-kept Israeli secret.

Some of the libraries have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Arabic and English.

Her book on the little elephant "Tintoro" has even been translated into a number of dialects in India and Pakistan.

But in essence, her writing is immersed in Israeliness, as Scarlett O'Hara's accent plays in our ears like the authentic southern sounds of the United States.

More on Walla!

The writer and poet Nurit Zarchi is the bride of the Israel Prize for Literature for the year 5771

To the full article

The authentic southern sounds of "Gone with the Wind" (Photo: GettyImages)

"When something bad happens to me,

for example, a blow or a stab,

then mother says:

" And what,

and soldiers are not injured in war? "

(" The Tiger Under the Bed ", Nurit Zarchi, 1976)

Nurit Zarchi writes for children. This is universal writing suitable for children in Bat Yam, Kibbutz Gan Shmuel or Bangladesh - but you can identify her childhood there. The loss of her father in Jerusalem, the collective life in the kibbutz, the late blossoming in Tel Aviv. Without apologizing and without rounding corners. Zarhi does not write to "young at heart", she does not think of her parents Her children are not pedagogical or ashamed - she bends her knees, looks deep into her eyes, and speaks to the children. This does not mean, God forbid, giving up the height of the combination, the richness of the language or the integrity of the rhymes. Zarhi's lies in its simplicity - she wrote without shame that she writes for children.

Jonathan Geffen opened his first book of songs, "Songs That You Love Especially", with a detailed explanation of his specific need for writing for children. The result was stunning, to say the least, but the commitment in the book was To a specific recipient, his newly orphaned little sister, Zarhi did not need traumas or explanations to

Lil her to the world of children, it was just her gift from God.

After her first book of songs, written entirely for adults, came her first book of songs for children, which included "A Woman in Watermelon," which Hava Alberstein performed to a genius melody by Shlomo Gronich a few years later on a masterful children's album, all about the purity of Zarhi's words, Slowly, slowly "(later renamed" Woman in Watermelon ").

"One woman, living in a big watermelon really

had two stools and a chair and a lamp

she cut her window and carving her living room

and hung a picture and put cupboard

and a cat to hunt rats is raising a corner

and suddenly ended the season"

( "Woman with a watermelon", LED Zarhy, 1967)

The children's book researcher, Professor Miri Baruch, identified Nurit Zarchi as one of the most prominent in shifting the emphasis in Israeli children's songs in the 1970s to the individual who is the child.

Zarhi claims that she was one of the first to formulate in the children's song blunt statements of the child towards his parents.

She did not have the glorification of "Jerusalem's Good Boy" that she knew from the children's songs of the beginning of the state.

"This is a child who demands rights, whose songs he is educated and has the ability to argue with his parents at their level," Prof. Baruch wrote in a 1998 article.

Zarhi does not try to like children.

She's not trying to teach them, and she's certainly not guilty of childbirth like a lot of frustrated writers who try their luck in the niche.

Zarhi's understanding of the world of children is perfect, she knows when children know they are being lied to, she knows that children know when they are arrogant and when they are treated with respect.

She writes with empathy and equality, as children deserve.

As everyone deserves.

As befits the dynamic world in which we live, its writing has changed over the generations, as have the children themselves.

Language remained rich but the unique language became a tool, not an end in itself.

Zarhi's more existential ideas and thoughts became part of the writing.

Existential and melancholy thoughts, even those about loneliness and old age have reached her books.

The children, for the avoidance of doubt, did not shy away from it, just as she knew it would happen.

"The dog I love the most is a cat,

my best friend is you"

("The Best", Nurit Zarchi, 1987)

An in-depth reading of her hundreds of children's books will lead to the recognition of familiar patterns.

Even if they have undergone a facelift over the years, they are always there today.

Between humor and ego there is a constant play between light and darkness.

There is a melancholy observation of femininity, which Zarhi finds in every corner of nature.

There is a lot of love, of the family type, of the romantic kind, and there are also a lot of dreams, a lot of kings and queens and also a lot of animals.

In fact, alongside the familiar niches of "writing for children" and "writing for adults," Zarhi has a whole kind of "writing for animals," or at least people who love them.

She could write from the eyes of a child who loses his dog (as in the song "Billy," performed by Hava Alberstein), and also from an intelligent analysis of canine behavior, after quietly observing a puppy seeking to stare at the only piece of light inside a dark house.

We will have to expand on her feline writing in a separate article, but in short it can be said that if cats could read, she would surely receive another award on their behalf.

She has worked in teaching and as a journalist, professions that require specialization in realism.

Her literary work is almost completely contrary to the press rules committed to truth.

Her enigmatic writing, which interweaves logic and magic that opposes realism almost aggressively, did not disappear even when she wrote for adults.

It's just hard to define.

This is not a fantasy, but neither is it a magical realism - it's something else, which does not try to compete with reality, but also refuses to align with the banality of routine.

"Once Bella went into a movie theater in the summer, in a summer uniform, and went out in the winter. Through the revolving door of the change of seasons, Jean Morrow, Alan Delon, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo invaded. "- the cars moved on the flooded roads like colorful toys, and in the jungles, she was safe, colorful parrots washed the dusty love coats, all because she went to a movie with a heart.

("The Sad and Ambitious Girls of the Province", Nurit Zarchi, 2007) The

year 2021 and nothing is obvious anymore.

No art, no hugs with family and not even kids laughing on Purim.

Nurit Zarhi's winning the Israel Prize is such an obvious thing that it seems almost detached from reality.

You don't really need a Ministry of Education committee to recognize the eternity of her work, and her ability to direct her imagination to new generations of children.

Just in the last year she has released a new book, they will probably read it even long after the current government is replaced, and the children of 2021 will already forget the strange period we all went with masks on our noses.

In one of her early poems, composed by Shlomo Gronich with proper theatricality, it is told of a street where clothes are walked, who look at the strange people swollen with pride and say to each other: "What? They are just a hanger, on which the clothes come out."

This is not condescension, this is certainly not a political statement - this is simply a suggestion for a new and wonderful perspective on routine.

Hangers awarded a prize to the hanger.

It's weird, like it's important, like it's boring, like it's fascinating, like it's worthy and like it's a cat.

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