Contributing Editor ~ Helen Bar-Lev, IL

 

 

Interview With Judy Labensohn, IL Q. WHERE WERE YOU BORN? A. I was born in the United States. Q. HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN IN ISRAEL? A. I first came to Israel in 1966 during the summer between my junior and senior year at the University of Michigan to collect chicken eggs at Kibbutz Ginosar. I fell in love with the Kinneret and wanted to quit school, but I was afraid of my father, so completed my BA in American Culture. I planned to return to Israel for a year of study within the framework of the Hebrew University One-Year Program, but the Six Days War broke out. May ’67 was an anxious month. If Israel had lost the war, I would have gone to Johns Hopkins for a PhD in American history. Fortunately, Israel won and I’ve been in Israel since August 1, 1967. Q. WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION? A. I prefer to relate to jobs rather than “profession.” I served as the first English secretary to Ruth Cheshin at the Jerusalem Foundation in 1968. In that position I learned how to write good letters to Lord Rothschild and Isaiah Berlin. But I sought more out of life, so earned a Bachelor of Social Work degree in a one-year retraining course for new immigrants at Hebrew University School of Social Work. I became a psychiatric social worker at a Jerusalem mental health clinic. But I never stayed in one job for more than seven years. Shpilkes is the word my grandmother would have used to describe me. Once I mastered something, I moved on. The next job was motherhood. It didn’t pay very well and I never actually mastered it in real time, though now I am quite good with two-year olds. I translated, wrote a personal essay column, worked as a community worker in a Reform synagogue, created life cycle events at Neot Kedumim, the Biblical Landscape Reserve near Modi’in and then decided to study writing, which I had been doing all along anyway. I earned an MFA in creative nonfiction in a low-residency program at Goucher College and then an MA in fiction at Bar-Ilan University. Now I administer the program at Bar-Ilan, The Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing, and teach creative writing elsewhere. I suppose this makes me an administrator and a teacher, professions for which I have no formal training. Jean Kadmon was the first and only person who told me I was a poet. That was in 1973. Q. HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WRITING POETRY? A. Arbor Day in 1954 prompted me to write my first poem. Red Cross Day prompted the second. I had a good ear for rhythm and abab rhyme schemes. Miss Neustadt, my third grade teacher, appreciated my efforts and hung my poems on the bulletin board in the hall. A poem hung in the hall goes a long way for a child with no self-esteem, or whatever they called what I didn’t have back then. In the sixth grade I wrote the class graduation song to the tune of “Jingle Jangle” and in seventh grade I wrote the junior high pep song. I didn’t like to read books, but I did like to read short poems that rhymed and I loved The Lucky Strike Hit Parade on American TV in the 1950’s. Nobody, except the school librarian and maybe my nursery school teacher, read me a book. I was more of a dreamer than a reader. So, I went from two poems to two songs to a few dry years and then “thoughts” in a cheap plastic notebook at fifteen. What prompted my poems in adolescence were clouds, loneliness and homework assignments. I loved Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson, but was afraid to even want to be a poet because women poets were lonely, unmarried, crazy and suicidal. Also, “poet” was not an option at the high school Career Day. I wrote many poems in college and in my twenties, less in my thirties and forties, a few in my fifties and sixties. I do not call myself a poet, though poetry was my first love, as it enabled me to express what I could not express in any other way. It kept a channel open to my inner swamp. My most famous poem, “Applelore” was inspired by Paradise Lost when I was twenty. Q. DO YOU BELONG TO ANY WRITING GROUPS? A. I never belonged to a writing group. I always wrote on my own and never asked anyone for help. I do not recommend this and I have great admiration for people who ask others for feedback and find good mentors. I wish I had been wise enough to find a mentor when I was an isolated writer in Jerusalem. I think some of my motivation to teach writing is to give to others what I couldn’t find for myself. (Once in the 1970’s a woman whose name escapes me gave a one-time three-hour writing class at Beit Agron. I took that. Once in the 1980’s a graduate from the Iowa MFA Program taught at Hebrew U. for a semester. I took that. Once in the 1990’s I went to Wales for a week of workshop with Elaine Feinstein. Heaven on Earth.) I loved to read “how to write” books, which made me realize I was interested in pedagogy as well as writing. Today, teaching and mentoring give me either more or as much pleasure as writing. When I teach I love seeing writers’ stories and essays develop from one draft to the next until they win a contest. I’m a good reader and I always encourage the writers in my groups to go deeper, focus, dare and cut. I get excited by the good writing my students produce. Their success is my success. Q. WHAT INSPIRES YOUR POETRY? A. What inspires my poetry is reading good poems by people who have studied the craft and know what they are doing. Q. WHICH FORM DO YOU PREFER? A. I used to need strict structure in terms of rhyme scheme and rhythm, but now I need free verse. Q. FAVOURITE POETS? A. In high school I loved Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. Later I loved W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. I liked Psalms and Proverbs, Adrienne Rich, May Swenson, Rilke. Today I have no favorite poet. I have always liked popular music. Q. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN PUBLISHED? A. After the bulletin board at Ludlow School my poems appeared in Generation (U. of Michigan), Analecta, Response, Pudding, Shdemot, Conservative Judaism, Forum, Arc, More of Our Lives, and All of Our Lives. “Applelore” was anthologized in a college reader called Headway: A Thematic Reader in 1970, unbeknownst to me until a friend in Detroit who teaches English sent me a copy. It appears on the same page with Thomas Merton and Robert Herrick. My claim to fame. Q. WHERE DO YOU LIVE? A. For the past six years I have lived .7 kilometers outside Jerusalem in Moshav Beit Zayit. Leaving Jerusalem after thirty-eight years was so traumatic I wrote a story collection called Bethlehem Road. I still love Bak’a, the neighborhood where I lived, like I used to love the Kinneret, but I can live without them. It took me many years to realize what an enormous loss is involved in making aliyah. Nobody talks about this loss because we all have a little man from the Jewish Agency sitting on our shoulder telling us to keep quiet. But once we shake him off we realize the enormity of the loss of language, family, context, libraries, bookstores and readers. We live in exile from our mother tongue. The sweetness in this exile is to luxuriate in the center of our history, at home with our people. Yet, the loss is palpable, especially when one looks back and answers questions such as these on the Sketchbook Questionnaire.   Poems of Judy Labensohn, IL   Veteran   My downstairs neighbor ceded an eye for the State. Each month he gets a check. Lately, his wife's been asking for whiskey, then telling stories. He's not pleased. After a scotch on the rocks, 1948 loses its glory, becomes a maze of sad mistakes. She says his glass eye hurts so he stays in bed all day but can't sleep. Blood pressure surges to shrapnel locked in his head– black seeds that make rooms explode. He tries to digest what crashed then, each scrap remembered half through bloodshot half through glass.     Grandma   I leapt over mother to dwell in you: smudged apron, lonely old Jew, playing gin rummy with a nine-year-old girl on Saturday nights. We made a couple: I knew the language, you read time; I kissed the boys, you watched from behind twisted columns in the dining room like a witch. Later we played Fish 'till I won and forgot we were the only ones home, left behind with the panicked fish in their bowl. Today, my arms flap like blintzes, my corns hurt (Storm coming). I sit at windows and watch. Your Atlantic crossing I uncrossed to dwell in our roots. Grandma, wait for me at the screen door in your blue apron and the smell of stuffed peppers. I'll bring curlers and your quilt stitched with those purple ducks tattered, yet still trying to break out of the frame.     House Call   On the first day of National Brotherhood Week 1951, the rabbi came to the house to say Your baby brother died. It was quote a great time to think of helping men toward a firmer bond of brotherhood. unquote Snow melted from the rabbi's galoshes into the carpet. His wool scarf and fur hat lifted like dead weight to expose a bald head. Above the sofa where He sat hung an Iowa farm so a halo of corn hair sprung from His head. When He said Your baby brother died, I believed. God would not lie on a house call. He holds my hands. His hands— Ivory Snow. I keep these divine hands in mine, but He has things to do. Repeat after me He says and chants Psalm 23. Oil drips from somebody's head. He rises, puts on His black boots black scarf and hat says Good-bye. Daddy says Stop! when I start to cry. My thumb stuck in the valley of the shadow of death forever. Next day Grandma moved in. We never visited my brother's grave because there wasn't which was OK considering the weather. Berkowitz-Kumin did the cremation but it doesn’t matter when you’re five years seven months and thirteen days old. Due to advances in the 1940's and '50's ours was a model American home: The maid mangled. TV silenced the living room. Nylons covered Mommy’s legs. (We wore Mother/Daughter Dresses so no one could tell us apart.) Daddy bowled. Mommy became Pres. of the PTA. We celebrated Fourth of July and one Thanksgiving before the pie a new brother sang “God Bless America.” It takes sixty years to grasp who died that day. Among the dead one stood in the kitchen when America marked quote February!... the month filled with great dates and names…the month of which we hear the praises sung to George and Abe and Tom; to the four chaplains who chanted prayers in different tongues as they plunged beneath the waves on the fighting Dorchester… unquote Her apron froze at the stainless sink, hands reaching only for soap. Oh, she could say Pass the butter, please but when in 1963 she finally cried (not for the vegetable boy buried inside me) but the green felt feathered hat consumed by flames at the neighborhood beauty shop.   Write In Israel is the website of writer, teacher and mentor Judy Labensohn.     Judy Labensohn, Coordinator Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University http://english.biu.ac.il/creative-writing Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1471764703&ref=ts Blog:  http://writingfromisrael.blogspot.com/