Rachel Tzvia Back’s ‘On Ruins and Return’
The Forward carries a review of what promises to be a wonderful collection of poetry by Israeli-American poet, Rachel Tzvia Back. Though I studied for a PhD in Hebrew literature until 1983, I haven’t kept up with new developments in the field and her work is unfamiliar to me. But after reading this review I long to hear her give a reading and read more of her work:
Many of the poems in “On Ruins & Return” have strong political implications — razed homes and wells, ambulances stopped at roadblocks, Arab families forced to stand outside in the cold night as soldiers in jeeps search their village — but a political agenda does not dominate. Back’s images of near-daily Israeli trauma during the height of the intifada — “mangled/metal blood flesh/to be scraped off the street/collected in sandwich bags”(“On the Ruins of Palestine”), “burnt out bus carcasses” (“A Dream”) and “mothers watching/soldiers on their knees/sifting and searching for body parts/do not think of next worlds/they think only of/lost worlds” (“Soldiers on Their Knees in the Sand”) — are searing, and unforgettable. Back’s words stem from a place in the heart that does not distinguish Palestinian from Israeli, but rather weeps for lost limbs, marred bodies and drops of blood, regardless of nationality…
tags A-Poet-of-Israels-Pain-And-Its-Hope, israeli-occupation, jewish-forward, jewish-literature, poetry, rachel-tzvia-backThe collection’s finest, most chilling pieces, “A Fable and a Nursery Rhyme” and “Their Sons, My Sons,” are companion poems of sorts, the first inspired by a Palestinian bombing of a Jewish school bus, the latter written after an Israeli bomb fell on an Arab strawberry field. Whatever your political affiliations, both poems — with visceral scenes of Back’s three children searching for the body parts of three children their own ages, and an Arab mother gathering in a head scarf her sons’ flesh among strawberries — will grab you in the gut.
