The cover of the book "between continents" by Yonatan Berg/Afik publishing house
There are several ways or gates to get into the new, beautiful and exciting book by the writer and poet Yonatan Berg, "Between Continents" which was recently published by Afik. When I say 'several ways', I mean that you don't always have to enter through the main gate that the writer set for you. Sometimes you can take liberty and enter from the middle, and maybe even from the end, and make a sort of private journey between the pages of the book.
Officially and "fairly", I of course started with the first pages where Berg paved the path of yellow stones for the journeys he himself made, but I mean some moment when the book meets you in some inner place. Something hidden resonates within your soul as well.
In an impressive candor, Berg writes about halfway through the book (page 148, to be exact) that his "nature" sometimes tends toward despondency and self-pity, perhaps providing a possible key to some of the "movement" of his book. The dark, poor, despondent, dirty, powerless place - a kind of deep fear in which the soul rests, and from here, from the low and gloomy place, like Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, whose scroll of Lamentations fell from his hands, he sets out again and again on journeys all over the world, to try to rekindle by himself the The fire went out. In moments of hubris and conceit, you go out into the world as Prometheus, the Greek hero, to steal the spark from the gods and return the fire to the humans, and perhaps to yourself.
And perhaps it is possible to enter Berg's world, and perhaps also into your own world as a reader through another, personal and closer gate: on August 14, 1981, the day Jonathan Berg was born, I was in the heart of a forest, in the Poconos Mountains in Pennsylvania, about an hour's drive from the place where the festival took place 12 years before The big one at Woodstock. A local Jewish jazz musician, Vietnam Veteran, as it is customary to say, handed me a cigarette rolled with marijuana, at the Jewish summer camp where we stayed, I as a director and he as a musician (the song "Oklahoma", performed by the son of the well-known Jewish writer Haim Potak, was the peak of the joint creation ours) and that rolled cigarette ignited a terrible anxiety attack in me that lasted almost three hours and caused me to lock myself in the wooden shack where I lived.
I tell all this because Berg's book is full of travels that he took all over the world - you name it, as it is customary to say in English - in Manhattan, and within it in Harlem, in Peru, and in India, in Poland and in Germany, and in Paris. Quite a few trips that Berg makes are intertwined with drugs of all kinds - weed, and cocaine, and if enough, and opium, and many other hallucinogenic drugs that just the thought of them evokes in my stomach a vague anxiety. A memory of the Holy Bible and the severe panic that gripped me that summer in America, when at a distance of more than six thousand miles, in the Israeli settlement of Psagot, on the mountain opposite the Palestinian city of Ramallah, Yonatan Berg was born.
The reference is not to the type of writing known as "the author and me", but to the fact that such a travel book as Berg wrote in a strong, vivid and successful way, almost urges you to go on a sort of private journey of your own, also for me, that since that incident the terror of the world has fallen on me, and I tend to go out and immerse In it only after careful thought and planning.
Writer Yonatan Berg/Dina Guna
In between, as Berg writes candidly again (page 103), "the constant expectation of another, better place" passes through the book, which perhaps motivates the author to go out into the world again and again, since at the age of 16 he abandoned the high school where he studied and set out to find his way in the world. Also through the books he read: the well-known book "Journey" by Pinchas Sade, the travel books of the writer Dan Tselka and the books of Rabbi Kook. As mentioned, he does all this from a young age, already when he leaves his house and walks like Ehud Banai, just twenty years later, in the cold alleys of the old city, drunk from all the pungent smells down the perfume street.
From here, as in Borges' Garden of Forking Paths, you can continue in all kinds of directions and you can also stop along the way. You can get on Berg's frenzied roller coaster, and you can also sit in front of the window like the poet Dalia Rabikowitz (for the sake of fairness it should be noted that Berg also offers this option) - to see "winter and summer flipping between the blades of grass" (oh, how much movement there is in the short and beautiful line of Rabikowitz. A tremendous movement that perhaps no travel book could ever offer).
It is also possible to stop and linger a little longer in the town of Portbaueau, on the border between Spain and France, another place that Berg passes through in a storm - the place where the philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin ended his life, and where the beautiful monument built in his memory by the Israeli sculptor Danny Karvan is also located. It's a travel book, as mentioned, and you can get off at any stop, linger or start your own private journey.
More in Walla!
Hanoch Levin does not always stand the test of time but is always relevant to our reality: book review
To the full article
The literary critic Avraham Laban once wrote about Amos Oz, that every few years the same unresolved inner conflict would arise within him that would force him to sit down and write, to try to settle that inner storm that threatened like a fire to return and burn his soul. If I have a particular comment about Berg's book, it lies in the feeling that perhaps towards the end he is trying to calm, moderate and frame the same inner turmoil that pushes him again and again to go on his journeys.
He married, had two daughters. Something inside him may have reconciled and calmed down, while I may prefer him as in that moment when he went to swim in the Sea of Galilee (you can find a "Christian" motif here, but that is not the intention), with this feeling that "there is something on the other side", and if he just keeps walking or Swimming towards the lights in the distance he will end up in a completely different place. came out of the water to new land.
But here - maybe I as a reader now want to force and channel him towards my very private journey (and towards my anxieties), so it is good for the reader not to bind himself to the shackles of the critic's "gaze" either. Most of all, this successful book is an invitation to a journey.
hit the road the door is open.
"Between Continents" / Yonatan Berg. Afik Publishing. 249 pages.
More on the same topic:
Book review
Jonathan Berg