Why? I’ll tell you. The massacre of Israeli Jews and Muslims and their visitors destroyed many lives and shattered many hearts, including mine. That horror cannot be undone and will haunt us forever. It was halted within roughly 80 hours. The genocide inflicted on Gazans continues. The urbicide that has destroyed just short of 100% of Gaza’s densely built cityscape continues. These atrocities are in their third year now. There is no ceasefire, except in misstatements.

At this time, the effective eradication of an entire society can still be stopped. At this time, the world can still intervene on Gazans’ behalf. At this time, Gaza can still be rebuilt, reinhabited and rehabilitated by the society suffering this monstrous betrayal by the community of consequential global powers.

From MIXED CITY:

The Narrowest Category of Gazan Genocide Victims

Gazans killed by the time of our earliest encounter with Jaser, in November of 2025, approach seventy thousand. Those presumed dead push the estimates higher. Excavations will solidify the figures, eventually. 

Theoretically. By the time I write these words, it appears possible to me that the extensive disinterment and forensic labors required by this mass slaughter will be frustrated by the complex network of global contractors, vendors and developers profiting from Gaza’s decimation. 

The same venturesome alliance includes Old Testament literalists, selective readers of the ancient verses, infatuated, foremost, with the imperialist dreams of an unstable Iron Age patriarchy’s literate elite, and their foundational power grab, misogyny.

New Testament literalists of the same temper are poised to benefit from the disaster, too. Similarly, Qur’anic counterparts and corporate analogs. Mystical and capitalist zealots differ rhetorically, of course.

Each faction is as likely as the other to attribute its code to an authority of unassailable insight and infinite powers, promising the same gifts to His loyals. Each is as likely to align with the conversion of people into assets or hindrances.

Some of us gain our greatest value when our death toll nudges us toward extinction.

#

As people of this and that category dwindle and become a traffic of shocked exiles, from the profiteering outlook no atrocity has been committed. The eschatologist and oligarch and fascist enjoy a shared permutation of amnesia. The rewards eclipse all horrors. 

Those who will remember the horrors are imprinted with a lasting lesson: mercilessness can gain converts in throngs. Anyone can opt in.

You will do best to pick a mythology incorporating authenticity, recalling how terribly you’ve suffered actually, remembering how you’ve felt at your lowest, terrified, grief-stricken, outraged, agonized, helpless, moribund.

Be sure that the final chapter of your legend promises a transformative future, triumphal. The battered outcast rises to eternal dominance, let’s say.

Make that fantasy real. Guided by invulnerable loyalty to your dream of ascendance, you can do no wrong.

~~~~~

For now it is known that Gazan dead and injured and maimed or abducted or all of the above can be divided into two primary subgroups, combatants and civilians, the latter category overwhelming the first.

The narrowest category of Gazan genocide victims, as I group them, are those who visit my dreams. The first is a child who survives an Israeli airstrike with her lower face mangled.

#    

While I sleep, the injured child manifests unclearly, at first. A glowing orb is coming gradually into my view through utter darkness. I assume I’m watching the sun as it dawns.

Next I realize that the approaching celestial body is a face, disembodied but alive with expression, its features childish, girlish. And luminous, truly, as if she is a natural source of rosy light. 

Presently I’ll recognize the girl from a recent onscreen report and attribute the rosiness to her mangled face. Finally I wake up to my streaming tears and convulsive breaths. 

I can sob in relative silence. I won’t awaken my bedmate. 

In the report broadcasting this Gazan child’s predicament, she came across as eloquent even while speaking was difficult. She seemed soulful and bright. Her name is talismanic, like mine, but not the same.

~~~~~

A later dream casts me as a participant in a more typical scene. I am an urban pedestrian. I have always lived in cities. I rely often on walking. 

Once again I’m crossing over some otherwise impassable turf by means of a footbridge, a long one, as in that stretch of my childhood city, in the Israeli interior. Where you approach the industrial belt, westward, the hospital would be cut off by a busy thruway were it not accessible by a sizable footbridge.  

I beheld that footbridge often, twice daily as a teen. I was a youthful Israeli commuter looking out of a bus window, making my way to and from a regional trade school for traditional girls, located three cities away, on the Mediterranean coast.

I never crossed that footbridge, myself.

It follows that I cannot be crossing the Israeli footbridge. This is not my youthful past. I must be walking in my present.

I’m in Boston, presumably. Where the city is invaded by the liquid arms of the Atlantic, footbridges abound.

#

I’m in fine spirits, enjoying my typical uplift while marching through a pulsating city.

True that this passage is unpeopled, not unusual in Boston. Buzzy areas have their quiet season. Many a district is quiet continually. 

North American quietude pervades great swathes of my adult home city, yearlong. After all these decades, I am still spooked by this norm.

But not relentlessly. I can be peppy, like this.

I am looking forward to an encounter with familiars who await me at my destination, on the other side of a footbridge. I am training my eyes on the underlying view.

I see no inlet of the ocean. Instead, a vast crater, in which I take continued interest.

I regard a parcel of land primed for large-scale construction by extensive demolition. I am scanning the tonnage of rubble pushed to the edges.

The bridge is suspended at such height that I cannot immediately discern the faceless corpses embedded in the massive crater’s lumpy walls.

~~~~~

More recently, the genocide victim manifesting while I dream is a Gazan writer named Heba.

My dreaming mind has not yet manufactured a conception of Heba when her grieving husband takes a seat on our couch for the first time. I don’t even know her name when he joins us. I’ll learn it as his visit nears its culmination, some hours later.

But first we’ll relieve our Sunday lunch guest of the gift he brings his hosts, a tray of baklava. Next he’ll remove his shoes, resisting my assertion that he needn’t.

#

In the subsequent winter I’ll have begun to immerse in Heba’s poems, when a dream communicates my struggle to approach her work.

Again, only a fragmentary glimpse of the genocide victim. I can see the tops of her shoulders and her face in its fullness, vividly alive. 

Alive, in fact. A living Heba glares at me from a framed portrait, a black-and-white photograph hanging on an interior wall left standing in a Middle Eastern cityscape recalling my formative scene.

Except that this city is vestigial. A woman’s portrait persists in a ruined building. A pale hijab drapes her head, a dark garment her shoulders. 

My dreamtime self is afraid, either of her image or of this environment, or both. I manage a peek while rushing by. I am heading elsewhere. There is somewhere I must go.

#

In waking, I’ll realize that the dreamtime photo of Heba deviates considerably from actual photographic images of her I’ve studied, noticing how she smiles, in a manner suggesting that she trusts the cameraperson, or is happy in the company of the colleagues pictured with her.

At the time, no photographic record links her to a character like me, whom she cannot forgive, if I am to believe my dream.

#

The following spring, a Boston nonprofit will upload to its social media platform an image that associates me with Heba.

And that is Jaser beside me. Our height discrepancy is minimized while we perch in low chairs on a local stage. We are two shadowy figures dwarfed by our luminous background.

Projected onto an enormous screen behind us, the fragment of a poem Heba wrote, freshly translated into English. The narrator is a child suffering expulsion. She is disappointed by her fleeing elders. She thinks death would be better.

#

No conception of Heba will recur in my dreams in the immediate aftermath of our bilingual reading of her poems to one hundred and more area listeners in a venue across the river, in Cambridge. I will continue to wonder how she would feel about our progressing collegiality. 

The sustained immersion in her poems draws me closer to a person of profound sensitivity and deep insight into human relations. Perhaps she would know that I don’t seek or expect her forgiveness. I’m only doing something I’m equipped to do in this calamitous chapter.

I am approaching another woman shaped by my onetime home region, another writer. Unsurprisingly, we share some concerns and obsessions, outlooks and expectations, and some we don’t. She anticipated martyrdom.

She expected she might perish on that soil. She did not foresee the scale of the genocide, perhaps, but I think she was preparing her spirit for its ultimate exile. She was both reconciled to this fate and outraged, as I read her, resolutely hopeful, too.

~~~~~

The Diverse Community of Oct. 7 Massacre Victims

The October massacre was carried out by several thousand Gazan militants who infiltrated Israel’s southern borderland, massacring a thousand and some hundreds more of the people they encountered on that soil. Most people targeted were Israelis, but not all. Civilian fatalities included noncitizens, migrant farm hands, for example, and students of agriscience. 

Close to three hundred of the very same types of locals and their guests were taken hostage by the massacrers. Almost a hundred hostages would become fatalities, or were dead already when their remains were converted into bargaining chips.

The majority of Israeli massacre victims were noncombatants representing the diverse Jewry persisting for millennia on three continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe. A minority were Muslim, including the youngest, shot in utero. 

She died in the hospital where her laboring mother, a young Bedouin, was being rushed by the emerging baby’s father when the massacrers found them. The wounded newborn’s name is one I don’t forget, the same as mine.

She lived for a certain number of hours, I believe fourteen. My memory for numbers is spotty. I imagine that the newborn Naama was named by her parents before she died.

In both Arabic and Hebrew, Naama is an ancient name, talismanic, analogous to a protective, one-word prayer. In Arabic, as in Hebrew, this name relays parental hope.

#

An onscreen testimony by Naama’s young father was released soon after her death. I observed a heartbroken guy reporting that his wife is debilitated by their loss.

It is autumn again, two years later, when a Gazan survivor of the subsequent Israeli attack walks into my Boston home, having lost his wife and two of their four children to the high-tech genocide and urbicide that continues to shatter and bury or starve or violate otherwise every pattern of Gazan humanity.

Jaser’s elderly mother was killed by an Israeli airstrike, too, I am aware of that when he arrives. As we get to know him the list of his slain family members will continue, and continue.

~~~~~

A chimp is a smart and likable creature capable of truly gruesome extremes of violence when responding to a profound sense of threat.

A chimp’s violence can lean symbolic. When determined to obliterate the presence appalling him, he may eat off a face. He’ll rip off penises and testicles.

Only the last survivor of an unremitting chimpanzee conflict can discover that he is his own worst enemy and the bane of his species but, trust me. He will not arrive at these insights. The immature hominid inclined to shred his community cannot grasp that he is maiming and murdering his own.

Paradoxically or not, while governed by his overwhelming sense of threat, the furious chimp does not consider that he represents an endangered species. He has no access to this wisdom. He is able to forget, even, that he hurts his closest kin.

You are keeping in mind, of course, that this type of violence breaks out, most often, within established chimpanzee troops.

A troop is the chimp’s collective descriptor. Interestingly, the linguists who coin the collective name for a chimpanzee group are hominids like me. We emerge from one of the species related most closely to the chimp. The decision to center chimp militancy in their group characterization is ours. We attach the same descriptor to bonobos, to my knowledge unfairly. As it relates to the chimp this language holds up.

Consider the rampaging chimp who sustains the last pulse when the rampage has played out. By a miracle of nature, he experiences no regret. Lucky for him, he is a radicalized militant. He can envision only absolute victory attained by limitless violence.

He is an individual escaping extremes of distress by toggling to extremes of violence. He will remain violent to the distressing end, which is neither distressing to him, nor the end. He lives forever in the landscape he changed.

*******************************************************************************

Of a particular category, killed by a force claiming numerous lives. War, for example, massacres, a genocide.

Or a natural disaster, per some definitions. Notably the word halal in Hebrew can refer, also, to a framework that is not inevitably tragic. This word means space. The interior of a mouth is such a space, and of a room, of a cave. Likewise the space where few of us will venture, outer space. The same Hebrew word can refer to an emotional void caused by loss.

Interestingly, in an ancient Biblical usage, the Hebrew word halal relates to a conclusive spiritual degradation, an irremediable taint. It describes a priest’s son who does not inherit the priestly role. Because he is conceived by a transgressive coupling, this newborn boy won’t mature into a priest. He is voided from the community of men nearest to the Divine.

#

Words that sound identical in Arabic and Hebrew may diverge markedly in meaning. Languages evolving in one region since antiquity are characterized by the soundalike tendency. Naturally sister languages are pervaded by homophones, words of an identical sound and dissimilar meaning.

Soundalike words in Arabic and Hebrew can also mean exactly the same thing. Blood, for example, and hand. Dahm is dahm, and yahd, yahd. These are not homophones, they do not merely sound alike. They are one and the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some months before the recent tribute, early this autumn, the solemn father of these children has not yet walked into our home on a Sunday, gifting us a tray of baklava before he lunches with us. I do not know this is the season when I will enlist to bring to English translation the poems outliving their author, a woman about twelve years younger than I who will not reach my age. I have not yet spoken with the grieving husband of a Gazan poet killed in the first month of a versatile genocide still in progress now.

When I write what I’ll decide to excerpt after the tribute to Heba, I am working on a book of nonfiction entitled Mixed City, which concerns itself with hospitality in a time of social collapse. I am documenting, at that phase, the experience of hosting local friends during a genocidal chapter unfolding elsewhere.

Involving us all. Three of us at that dinner table are citizens of Israel, they Palestinian, I Jewish, and the fourth character is a lifelong New Englander.

From Mixed City

We were something like stupefied once they drove off after dinner, having accepted the bag of fresh haddock from our son’s latest saltwater haul.

On the one hand, what a relief. A sacrilege has been averted. Some rites may not be omitted. Some ethics are obligatory and the words articulating them are sacred. What must be said must be said at the compelling time.

I produced the relevant statement, I can’t remember the words. I called the present assault what it is, that I know, and my husband concurred. A lifelong New Englander considers himself implicated, too.

Twenty-one kinfolk cut down in the first week of the genocide, when does she tell us this, not right away.

Definitely this happens after we catch up over wine in the living room. We have transitioned to the bigger table when we acknowledge what we must. We have partaken of dinner. Evening has made way to night.

Initially they share the witnessing task. Then he falls mute while she perseveres. Each of the twenty-one relatives was his.

#

It is in an earlier movement of our dinner conversation that the subject of shattered hope comes up. This is when my dinner guests recall their response to an Israeli prime minister’s assassination. They cried for him. Each of them says this. We cried.

I say the same, in the singular. I cried. My husband was not dialed into the relevant geopolitics then. He is sad at present.

None of us idolize the would-be peacemaker, knowing his militarist record. The Israeli citizens among us will recall the corresponding rhetoric. We might rehear his distinctive voice. My dinner guests and I grew up under his Prime Ministership.

My conception of him reflected my circumstances and age. I thought him a much handsomer oldster than his leading opponent but a weird rhetorician, a droner.

His was the influential party that would never gain my parents’ vote, representing the agenda of the majority for whom socialism outranked religion. Religiously, my parents backed a party winning fewer seats, advancing the priorities of our societal niche, the religious nationalists.

What my dinner guests thought of this prime minister while they were maturing, I can guess. Another leader of the standard mold, an aging warrior, another man with the blood of their people on his hands.

And the dust of their ruins on his soles. Nevertheless it is possible they voted for him in adulthood. Certainly they believed in his change of heart. They believed we were advancing into a constructive chapter.

Next the evolving leader is gunned down.

#

A dinner guest of my generation who originates on my formative soil recalls to us his younger self. We did not know each other then.

At my table, he is the fellow empty nester who will duck under serener moments of our conversation to explore the qualities of whatever pickles are near him. As a young Palestinian citizen of Israel he sought out the coexistence movements of an encouraging era.

I didn’t. I was navigating my first decade of adulthood on an unfamiliar soil, the North American Midwest. I was seeking rapid and intense connections in the livelier corners of an inhibited city. I was bonding with young men inclined to undermine an intimate.

I missed the charismatic throngs peopling a corridor of smoggy cities across which I adventured toward womanhood on buses conveying me coastward and homeward.

I missed discolored stucco cladding, multilevel porches staffed with omnipresent busybodies, and flat tarred rooftops tangled with antennae, cluttered with water tanks and solar panels. I longed for an industrial city of the Israeli interior while remembering its distinctive miseries and terrors.

It was not my choice to emigrate. I was a minor at the time. My family’s relocation wasn’t defined as permanent.

I think that some of us knew that it was. I did. And I intuited the impetus that was never spelled out, relating to the damage done to a family member by what some pundits were calling our first war of choice.

As a Boston hostess of advanced middle age, I will face another child of Israel’s central urban district while his weathered face communicates pity for the young man he was, an individual who thought that he might thrive where he was born.

Evidently I would like to invite his optimism back. That must be why I mention to him the contemporary movement trying to rally a transformative horde. The purple shirt people, yes, he has heard of them.

And isn’t compelled, to judge by his tone and demeanor.

His wife hasn’t heard of them and is guardedly curious. A quick profile for her benefit.

#

In this monstrous chapter, Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel labor together to rebuild their living system as an actual democracy invested in every citizen and the whole region’s wellbeing.

I won’t hype the purple shirt agenda beyond this. I am disinclined to propagandize.

It does occur to me that I ought to demonstrate more hope. After all, hope is a defining attribute of mine. It is an instinct I can’t do without.

An inward experience, like a pilot light sustaining its glow in a dark oven, this useful flame requires fuel, which can run out. While fuel is plentiful, a damaged mechanism will produce an unreliable flame and toxic fumes.

#

My experience of hope does not translate into a propagandist urge, and the gazes connecting over dinner do not convey hope.

We all know what the sensible mindsets and compassionate souls inhering on our onetime home soil are up against. A colossal circus of lurid acts, diverse performances of peak fury and alarm and suffering.

Or the stoniest coldness and rigidity.

Another very risky emergency mode, a profound vacuity. An emptied character will keep you busy. This degree of automation can be seen as a disciplined practice, a transcendent faith, a superhuman confidence, a vengeful zeal.

How methodically we disconnect from ourselves. How fastidiously we demolish our humanity.

#

Possibly my dinner guests cannot believe that the purple shirt agenda is viable. Maybe they’re right. Conceivably, Palestinians and Jewish citizens of Israel are natural companions only in exile. Only once we are surviving and struggling or thriving elsewhere do we find in one another characters with whom we feel especially at home. Why, it is just as if we came into ourselves in the very same setting.

I think that the exilic figures sharing this experience ought to report on our finding to the people who persist in the increasingly violent home. We ought to share what we have learned with those still inflicting or enduring horrific abuses. Maybe they’ll take an interest in this survey: Four out of four people at one Boston table know that we are capable of a nurturant bond.

And a meshing perspective. Our dinner guests are people we have known since young parenthood. Shared scenes lodge in our memories, shared meals, shared spaces.

Shared learnings concerning the legends of authoritarian ancients. Systems governed by suppressive advantage. Patriarchy, for example. The more muscular anatomy runs the show.

The most volcanic temperaments determine our fates with myopic aggression, wedding us to their most overactive reflex, dominance.

One category of humanity inhibits the other. My chronicle excludes you. Some of us are legendary, some tangential.

Some expendable.

#

We have seen how the harmonious propensity of ordinary people is undermined continually by grabby opportunists and ravening mystics. Their motivations vary, and their tactics.

Some maneuvers are analogous. The destination is always the same. Though they might tell themselves another story, they promote themselves by destroying others. They really care only about what they see in the mirror.

As a species we prove too susceptible to insular tyrants. We ought to research and perpetuate the rarer condition, enduring resistance.

~~~~

Since I committed to bring to English translation the surviving poetry of a Gazan writer, her widower and I have been managing that project together. While advancing the work, we develop a friendship catalyzed by this man’s encounter with our son. Theirs is the original connection. They meet in the capital of the United States of America. A twenty-year-old undergrad approaches a DC campus speaker, a Gazan political analyst who survives a genocide.

The visiting speaker has taken up residence in Massachusetts, where the undergrad was born and raised. The Boston boy’s mother will extend to the newcomer an invitation to drop in for a meal. She is an author raised in the urban Israeli interior.

She is the product of a particular subset of her formative society. Her girlhood situated her in a consequential faction of mystical nationalists, a community defined by redemptive objectives and resilient traditions. Hospitality is a major value.

Her process of disaffiliation begins in kindergarten, sparked by a misuse of power not unique to her theopolitical context. A teacher relies on gratuitous dictates and an intimidatory style. Subsequent teachers prove nicer. An unreasonable tendency prevails.

In her advanced middle age she will live in a neighborhood of Boston adjacent to a huge park and a small hospital. One Sunday, a witness to Gaza’s destruction will walk into her house and sit down for an autumnal lunch.

A winter dinner will include his fourteen-year-old daughter. Next, a restaurant outing coaxing out also his high-school aged son.

Now I have met all who survive of the political analyst’s immediate family. They were six. They are three.

My family persists in our original intactness. We are three. Our only son graduated from a Boston public school some months prior to the interminable season of savagery reshaping his mother’s onetime home region. On his DC campus he encounters a Gazan political analyst, the widower of a poet, Heba. Some of Heba’s literary output survives.
#
As new partners in a literary translation project, the political analyst and I communicate now and again via our texting platform of choice. Not every exchange relates to literary translation. We might refer to a talk he will be leading soon or acknowledge it afterward. We might agonize about the New England winter.

And suggest that adaptation is possible. A Middle-Easterner’s shock at the North American winter can be mitigated.

To whatever degree. Repeated exposure will habituate the outraged nervous system in this climate, to some extent. Layering is critical, an effective hat essential, and suitable boots.

A good eye for black ice, invest in that too. Do not give up on the outdoors, however deserted and cold. Persist in the venturesome mode.

Sustain your original motion. Take significant walks, understanding that to the urban Middle Easterner the North American street can seem eerily inanimate, most so in winter. Seek the local life as it occurs.

Trace the telling sounds to unfamiliar birds. Respect the turkeys. Observe squirrel homemaking practices and chipmunk foraging norms.

Pray for an opossum sighting, cognizant of your new avenue to the miraculous. Your diasporic soil is home to a marsupial.

Pause on what is curious or informative or sublime. Fuel your native hope.
#
One evening I ping the political analyst with a texted inquiry about his backgammon skills. He responds that he prefers chess. In other words he does not share with my husband a gaming territory.

Sadder than that, the remembrance of perished loved ones that my mention of backgammon prompts from a grieving husband and father. His wife taught their eldest how to play backgammon. For some years that was their game. Eventually the boy switched to chess.

Ultimately the lad favors his father’s analytic game, in which happenstance has no say. As an eighteen-year-old he will perish alongside his mother when their home shatters over them. And over his three siblings, of whom two will survive, the middle children.

On the same occasion they lose a cousin too, and a maternal aunt. A later airstrike will wipe out a branch of their paternal relatives, their father’s sister and her children, a great uncle and his wife, their grandmother.
#
At this phase of our friendship with the political analyst, the character of his lastborn child has not yet surfaced. In a future gathering, the little one will rush into my dining room.

The morning sun is maximizing the blaze of our persimmon walls. The presence crashing a working breakfast is a toddler’s. He is responding to his father’s mention of chocolate.

A big-eyed tot barrels over on soft legs, alive with the keenest delight. Even in his earliest days he proves an ardency for chocolate. When he is eight he will be killed when his home shatters over him.

And over a cousin of the same age. The little boys were playmates, presumably. Conceivably they were together in their final moments. Both of their mothers were near.

Perhaps the poet is standing in her kitchen while her sister sits in the same room, at the table. With a cup of hot tea, minted, a plate of refreshments.

Alternatively, the poet is the seated figure. She is not in her kitchen. She is hunkered at her writing desk while her three older children busy themselves in other nooks of their apartment. What is the twelve-year-old up to? Sustaining some fascination. Her sixteen-year-old brother, the same, and the eldest, eighteen. At least one of them is staring at a smartphone.

The eight-year-old cousins are playing noisily on another level of the four-story building. The poet’s sister is keeping an eye on them.

Or else everyone is sleeping, except for the father. An early riser, he has crossed the street for coffees with the neighbor of a similar schedule. Do the hot beverages spill over their hands when an airstrike decimates the adjacent building, or are the cups secured by fingers palsied with horror?

Infinite domestic scenes, every one speculative. I know that both sisters perished alongside their eight-year-old sons, and the poet’s eldest. I am fairly certain that they shared a home address.

I don’t know that the two mothers slain in one airstrike shared an address. I haven’t asked the survivors.

I have dined with the two children rescued from the flaming ruins. I have sat in cognizance of these gentle teens’ emergence from rubble embedded with the corpses of loved ones.
#
In our earliest phase of acquaintance, the teen survivors manifest as likable young people. The girl’s anthropologic bent reminds me of my adolescent temper, which would solidify as a definitive trait. The older boy’s reticence is familiar, too. For me this attribute recedes, somewhat, with age. Possibly his wariness stems from his ordeal. As conceivably, it is a fundamental trait. Or both, a basic trait intensified by devastation. I don’t know.

I am disinclined to interview survivors of a genocide about their ordeal and its lasting effects. I do not solicit from survivors of a genocide the particulars of their nightmare and the intricacies of their loss.

My disinclination to interrogate the experience of genocide survivors can be reframed as an ethic. My post-religious soul persists in sensitivity to sacrilege. The entities most sacred to me are human and the forbiddance, this: Do not press devastated people into reportage.

A forbiddance I’ll undermine, of course. I mention backgammon.

I induce in a grieving husband and father a memory of the eldest mentored by his polymath mother. The poet was an architect and teacher, the founder of a university department focused on indigenous crafts, a textiles artisan, a koranic interpreter, a novelist. She trained her firstborn in an ancient game of strategy foiled and assisted by chance.
#
It is at a festive breakfast marking a milestone in our translation effort that I invite into my dining room the poet’s chocolate-loving toddler who will perish as a third-grader, alongside his polymath mother and the brother whose gaming tastes switch from backgammon to chess.

I call the youngest child over by referring to his living sister. She was the third of four siblings, now she is the younger of two. She has supped in my home.

She has dined with me at a local restaurant, reveling in the Persian grilling prowess as I do. In her absence I bring up a quality of hers that challenges my imagination. This girl refuses dessert in all settings. She is averse to sweets. Her father acknowledges the marvel. She rejected sweets even in babyhood.

He prompts a vision of my teenage dinner companion in feisty miniature. A diapered sprite rejects oversweetness. She must resist what impedes her exquisite engagement with a complicated world.

Relatedly, my child’s response to his first taste of birthday cake. Perched in a highchair, this big-eyed one-year-old tucks into a layered matter and is stunned. Thunderstruck, electrified, stilled.

In the next instant, released from awing revelation, acting on fantastic news, ecstatic. At this early age, my son does not yet dare to walk freehanded but he throws himself at shocking sweetness. Thereafter he hankers for sweets like most people.

The political analyst can relate. He adds that his littlest was always wild for chocolate.

A Gazan toddler races in. His father said chocolate.

There was no chocolate on hand. We were convening over breakfast. The offerings were savory, except for the minted fruit salad and the Persian carrot preserves and the amethyst and coral sweet potatoes gemming the golden frittata. The cubed radish in the vegetable salad, candy-pink, was not at all sweet.

A multicolored breakfast spread collaborates with the floral pattern of a cotton tablecloth.

Soon I will find out that the egg bake isn’t quite cooked in the middle. Disproportionately anguished, I shove it back in the oven.

The snowy Syrian cheese is greened with a paste of lemoned herbs and spices, an intense Moroccan condiment. The Lebanese pickles are more of a military green. The Armenian flatbreads are crusted with a rust-colored paste based on peppers. The chickpea and eggplant mashes and wholemeal pita contribute the hues of rock and sand.
#
We were marking a milestone. We were reviewing the first batch of poems translated from Arabic into English and emerging from our editing process. On this occasion the poet’s widower declares that the original poetic voice has been mediated adequately. He hears Heba in these renditions. We will bring her words to local ears in early summer.

We will welcome the public to consider the poems of an architect whose home shattered over her and her four children.

We have hired a Palestinian oudist and singer to prime the ears beforehand and accompany reflection afterwards. Following the poetry and music, we will offer light refreshments from a Palestinian bakery.

We had best provide some salty options for the poet’s living daughter, whose littlest brother takes part in the planning breakfast, arrested in anticipation. His father said chocolate.

There is no chocolate on offer.

This child won’t tantrum.
~~~~

A few words of introduction from the writer of these lines. My name is Naama. I respond most happily to pronunciations of my name originating in the Middle East. I want to hear every vowel. I am a Boston author raised in the urban Israeli interior, partnering presently with late Gazan architect, educator and author Heba Al-Madhoun’s surviving husband, Jaser, to bring her poetry to English-language readers. I initiated this project as a response to our dreadful present chapter, resisting its erasure while undertaking a measure of reparation.

I welcome your responses.

With Love,

Naama

“And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.”

— Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The political analyst’s first visit to my Boston home occurs on a bright day of autumn. When we have transitioned to the dining room, this lunch guest’s gaze is drawn to the east-facing window, an outlook showing him our backyard. A gigantic crab apple sheds its leaves, baring minuscule fruit.

We live on a margin of the city that an octogenarian neighbor liked to remember to us as a pastureland where cows roamed. Once a creek defined the northeastern border of our yard. In our day the concrete cap of a culvert suggests a watery vein. An outsized crab apple bears witness to the steady watering.

And the yews, which respond to the pattern of covert irrigation with a huddle of volunteers near the culvert’s plug. In autumn the yews are fruiting, too. The gelatinous arils remain discreet from the domestic view, nestled in the dense evergreen needles. Our guest fixates on what embeds beneath the trees, a manufactured element, a temporary shed.

He sees a cubic tent. He asks is that a סוכה.

A native speaker of Palestinian Arabic pronounces the Hebrew as I will. This accent evolves over the recent centuries in the area where he lived, in the region where his city was leveled, his family ravaged.

The ancient holiday has passed when a Gazan survivor prepares to lunch in our dining room, and glances out. The festive element persists in his view, a temporary shelter.

#

We do not part promptly from the autumnal holiday scene. My husband will dismantle our סוכה hastily as the first winter storm approaches.

While the political analyst spots our laggard סוכה it will occur to me that I ought to invite him in there. My impression, based on his attitude while questioning me, is that he has never been a guest in a סוכה. His aspect of discovery, the perked demeanor, as of a naturalist espying an elusive life form.

If you like, we can go into the סוכה after lunch, I should have said, perhaps. I didn’t.

I confirmed the analyst’s ID. Yes, a סוכה. I told him that the holiday had passed, we were no longer celebrating. We are just slow to dismantle our סוכה, historically.

I would not invite him into our סוכה. I wanted to and didn’t. My resistance proved stronger.

#

The snow is thick outside when I sit down to write about our first encounter. A pertinent fact of recent history asserts itself only now. Two autumns prior to that lunch with a guest who will recognize and name a Jewish tradition, the relevant holiday culminates with a massacre carried out by zealots and opportunists originating on his home turf, fellow Gazans. I wasn’t thinking about that atrocity when he spotted our סוכה.

In a later moment, our lunch guest will mention the massacre, articulating his revulsion. I didn’t prompt the condemnation. I don’t consider him responsible for the massacre. I consider him the survivor of a genocide, which I will deplore though he does not invite the gesture. And when he returns in winter accompanied by his teen daughter, I will acknowledge the obscene injustice she has suffered.

While facing the teen prior to dinner I express my regret and outrage as ineptly as ever. No words will do. Nevertheless I seem to have gained a bettered fluency in this demanding rite. Temperamentally I’m stepping into a familiar role. I am a mother addressing a child with considerable urgency.

I am asserting a young person’s worth. What has happened to her is an inexcusable wrong.

The child remains silent. Her father mediates, thanking me for her.

A final sequence of sounds from me before I shut up, reining in my emotion. The last thing this girl needs in her immediate space is a worked-up Israeli.

She didn’t strike me as discomfited. She was smiling, mutely.

Every child’s signals differ.

#

While her father gazed at our סוכה in autumn, I foresaw a scene that I would not facilitate. A man who has witnessed his society’s destruction stands in my סוכה when its condition is wretched.

The interior of our סוכה is not at its best when the temporary shelter has been allowed to overstay the weeklong fest. This year I had relied primarily on plant cuttings to swag the ceiling with the requisite charm. The leafy glory can’t last forever.

Plantlife deteriorating overhead is a demoralizing sight, to my taste. The sage in particular becomes pathetic and it is my dominant medium, I have so much of this hardy perennial.

Two sage bushes erupt with new leaves every spring in my garden, where they will prevail into early winter in a gritty bed where no other herb thrives.

When in flower, the sage becomes busy with insects, a traffic of creepers and flyers transforming the system. Bees are a primary subset, a diverse crowd. Our neighborhood is home to bees of amazingly variable size and unalike skins. Their thoraxes and abdomens range from hairy to gemlike to striped.

While the political analyst prepares to sit at our table and spots a סוכה, the ruffly sage flowers have gone to seed. The insect presence is subtler.

The arthropod considering sage leaves edible is rare in my garden. The damage is minimal. As the leafing season concludes, the sage bushes maintain their shape where my lunch guest can’t see them, against the wall affixed with the window allowing him the backyard view.

#

I traversed the grassy territory he is surveying repeatedly while prettying our סוכה. The lifelong girl had come alive with adult clippers in hand. From my shelter to my herb patch, again and again. More sage more sage more sage. The massive bushes aren’t thinned though I trim them with increasing abandon.

I had begun the task listlessly. My spirit falters in appalling days. In the recent seasons I am crippled routinely by despair. The harvesting of sage induces a livelier mode.

The beautifying of a flimsy sanctuary uplifts the soul to modest heights. I transformed the gappy ceiling of a temporary shelter into a thicket of sage. The visuals were good, the scent overwhelming. Never before had I sourced this herb for application outside our kitchen. I was realizing an unprecedented vision.

As if by an irresistible spell I am launched at my sages with a pair of clippers. Next to lop from the forsythia shrubs some purpled branches for dark contrast.

The last brave flowers of anise hyssop add a petaline cheer. Their minty whiff cannot compete with the terpenic musk of the dominant herb, sage, mainly sage. I have so much of this resilient stuff.

Naturally our yearly bumper crop should gain the major presence in a primordial Middle Eastern harvest fest.

#

For years our סוכה interior reflected another aesthetic. I am the sort of mother who will let her baby’s interests cue the סוכה decor, her toddler design it.

My growing boy innovates as he will, and handpicks annually whatever chintz catches his eye at the nearest Judaica shop, whatever makes him happy. I override without qualms my own ornamental tastes, prioritizing the childish joy I associate with this festival. Like the Israeli girl his mother was, the Boston boy will thrill in an autumnal rite of cubic tent-pitching that prefaces a week of outdoor eating.

Our child has matured and fledged. Earlier this autumn he flew in for a visit and sat in our סוכה for a meal before traveling back to his collegiate turf. During the brief homecoming he mentions a guest speaker he heard on campus, a political analyst, a Gazan survivor, a father relocated recently to Massachusetts with his two surviving children. Next I’ll listen to a public radio interview in which he relays some of his story. His slain wife was a writer. I resolve to ask about her work.

In a subsequent week the political analyst prepares to sit down for his lunch and observes our backyard, asking is that a סוכה.

#

His pronunciation of the word is like mine. The look on his face, unmistakable. A boyish gladness in discovery. This guy is the same age as my kid brother.

He is a man about halfway through his forties, whose resting expression communicates shock, a demeanor I recognize. It occurs in my family. I am cognizant of his recent ordeal and devastating losses.

I was so glad to see his vibrant attribute when he responded to our holiday tent. I would not let him into a degraded shelter.

The prolific sage is not robust once it is cut and suspended from an outdoor shelter’s permeable ceiling weeklong and longer. Twice that and still. The gray-green leaves bespeak decay like no other leaf in there. The sage is defeated.

The fact is that the sage while it’s disintegrating looks awful, blighted. It is a disgrace. The once-sculptural leaves have collapsed, their venous intricacies drained of what firms them.

The ashen hue is ghastly. This fungus-colored matter dangles like the flaccid ears of carrion. A wealth of sage has become the picture of death.

#

I felt ungracious. I discerned a scholarly guest’s piqued interest, which I could have satisfied with the natural next gesture. We would go out after lunch and approach the סוכה.

He ducks inside and shelters under masses of dead sage. I would not actualize this scene.

I would not guide into that dismal space a man who bore witness as his home shattered over his family.

This happens two Octobers earlier. He has just crossed the street to speak with a neighbor. In the aftermath of that airstrike, he is the fresh widower of a slain architect and poet. He is a bereaved father, a bereaved uncle.

Soon he will lose his mother in another airstrike. He is unaware of this eventuality as he traverses a disintegrating landscape with his two surviving children, for whom he seeks medical treatment and refuge. Ultimately they make it to New England, where he has just recounted to me and my husband some of their trials.

Privately I pledged that, if the political analyst persists in our area next autumn, I’ll invite him into our סוכה while the holiday is in effect.

Not impossible that he’ll decline the opportunity. I cannot be certain that he would want to take his meal in a סוכה even while the interior is charming. Not every guest enjoys the traditional involvement in the holiday of temporary shelters.

#

Consider the houseguest who establishes in recent years a routine of October overnight stays that introduce this churchgoer to the Jewish sheltering holiday. He does not demand the repeated adventure. Not every son of the Northeast is immune to cold weather.

In his most recent stay, an energetic morning person reports again to our dining room where my husband calls his attention to the rear window, indicating the סוכה.

An atypical mien transforms a gregarious visitor, unreadability. An unusual comment coincides, none. He sits down at the set table.

The morning meal progresses indoors, a pleasure as always. This houseguest is a stimulating conversationalist, searching and insightful, involving, aspirational. It seemed to me that we had made the right call in sparing him the chilly breakfast he layered up for last year. The New England season isn’t what the Levantine ancients originating the fresh-air tradition had in mind.

The nippy Boston morning wasn’t the main factor driving our decision to breakfast indoors. A demanding conversation impended that morning, overdue. A secure domestic space is more conducive to a reckoning as sensitive as this.

We were determined to contend with a grave wrong that involves us all. Our houseguest was not the culprit, nor his hosts. The damage is done by our forebears.

This guest emerges from my husband’s past. Their late mothers were troubled friends.

#

In a time after their only sons have fledged, two Northeastern women click and sustain the bond once one has divorced and the other is widowed. They should have been watching that toddler when he drowned. They should have kept him out of harm’s way, or they ought not to have assumed the caring role.

Toddling around an uncovered backyard pool, a child falls in and cannot be found. A sludge of autumn leaves coats the water’s surface, rendering its depths a dark tea.

We had never talked about this tragedy with our annual houseguest. He and my husband weren’t in touch at the time of the drowning. They were young professionals pursuing their careers in separate states, bonding with life companions. Back in their original home state, their mothers maintained a friendship sparked while their sons were in college.

On a few occasions the undergraduates’ home visits intersected. They enjoyed each other’s company. They would not actively pursue a friendship, until the digital realm reacquainted them in their chapter as fathers to young men.

Through many seasons I know the widow’s son only as a character my husband will reference now and again with evident warmth. One year the man materializes as our annual houseguest. In fact he’s a likable guy.

We assumed that he was painfully aware of the maternal failure. Did he know we knew? And what did he know that we didn’t, and what could we tell him that might fill a gap in his record?

For some years I petitioned my husband for candor. He was too daunted. The remembered horror played a part, and the enduring sorrow, the indissoluble shame.

I persevered. To exclude from mutual remembrance a child lost by the matriarchs connecting us struck me as a sacrilege. Notably I have been post-religious since my preadolescence.

I latch to values that persuade me, for example an engagement with the actual facts of our existence.

To develop an easy rapport with a recurrent houseguest while declining to touch on the abysmal family episode we happen to share felt existentially dangerous to me. I could not ignore my screeching premonitions.

I can restate those in pragmatic terms. The avoidance of a shared reality habituates us in a disorientation we cannot afford. The performance of ignorance derails our native intelligence.

An apparent indifference to our story’s dishonorable moments disrupts the group conscience. And what is conscience, if not the sensible steward whose grip on the present is firmed by honest hindsight and loving forethought.

My husband comes around in the autumn after his mother’s passing.

#

In one way that breakfast conversation went as I expected. Our houseguest considered his mother the only accountable party, not the case. True that the toddler was in her care. Plausible that she was drinking. Similarly, her hostess, likely toking, too.

The tragedy would not have happened in the backyard of a rightminded homeowner. This was a failure of alertness to a vulnerable presence and before that it was a failure of responsible swimming pool maintenance.

While our houseguest recalled the incident, I experienced his mother’s irremediable torment. His reference to that, succinct, was vivid.

I couldn’t find him, she keens.

Because of the foliage sludge.

The intensity of his gaze when we interpose this fact in his account suggests a man revising a conception. He thought she had been drinking. Plausible. Likewise her hostess. Certainly the water was opaque. Is the stymied lifeguard redeemed somewhat? In my opinion, yes.

The responsible party who admits failure is redeemed by comparison to the responsible party who doesn’t. The response we witnessed was denial.

A refusal to engage with the tragedy, an insistence on acting like it had never happened. A perfect resistance to hearing about, invoking, describing, considering and learning from a fateful lapse of judgment. The matter of a child’s death was handled by property insurance. The pool was maintained professionally thereafter. The owner urged us often to jump into the sapphire waters. We wouldn’t. We declined a rite that would habituate us in amnesia.

We would not clear our memories of a drowned child mechanically. The mere suggestion of that exercise made our skins crawl and our throats constrict with nausea. The child’s death was not our doing but our consciences remained stricken. We were unwilling to override that function, evidently.

When we are the parents of a newborn boy, his paternal grandmother will disappear for a time, her response to an ultimatum posed by the new father. My husband demanded that his mother receive treatment for her increasingly destructive relational style. It was her naked competition at the naming ceremony that compelled the sanction.

Her theatrical late entrance delays the stalled ceremony, her campaign for pity aims to reroute the emotion. Her flippant references to our swaddled infant chill us.

She responds to the intervention by threatening us. Initially she assumes the law is on her side and that the child will be delivered to her by some official procedure involving the interstate railroad. Soon she is saying that she has never wanted to be a grandmother.

She sold her property and left New England, relocating to another coast with the eerie lover who would drain her of her house sale proceeds.

She would come back within a year or so and find a cheap rental, reconcile with her son and try to bond with her grandson. Soon she would argue against our supervision and demand that we leave our little boy with her. We could not entertain that notion. Her disconnected attribute remained conspicuous.

#

During the recent autumn holiday my husband and I are fresh empty nesters implementing a new practice. We undertake to superannuate an obscurantist legacy. Our leveling with a guest elicits from him a disclosure as honest and sad. Both sons trace the maternal impairment to their formative years. They share the experience of being forgotten and stranded.

While he sits at our table, our annual guest traces his history of forsakenness even farther back, an outlook he communicates when he pulls out his smartphone. He scrolls through his photos and shows us the sepia image of an ancestor posing for his portrait.

The photographer of another century aimed his lens at a man whose seriousness resembles our houseguest’s. This smartphone owner can tell us something about his forebear that the formal portrait doesn’t. The ankles of this elegant patriarch were circled with ropy scars, keloids remembering a hardware typical of the American slave trade.

It is our houseguest who defines the issue we’re engaging as abandonment, and I think that I’m the one who throws in a term I consider synonymous, in this context, betrayal.

We are talking about what circulates through our synapses like killer weather even as we relocate and attempt to start over in a safer location. We are talking about a condition we hope to resolve. Naturally I’ll pause on the dissociative reflex as it is expressed in the history of Israelis and Palestinians.

Our ancestries survive their chronic shocks by means of an emergency mode subverting the consciousness in pivotal moments. When reality proves unbearable, they swerve to another dimension. The very pattern of engagement that saves them subverts our chance for some stability, and drags down hapless nonparticipants.

So long as our houseguest can sit, we try to metabolize this theme. He is on a tightish schedule, precluding the exhaustive study. We will not attain, on the occasion of this breakfast, the conclusive synthesis and resultant protocol that will free us, at last, from our miscoding.

#

My husband has a clue about the history contributing to his mother’s challenges. As a girl of five or so, she loses her father suddenly when he is admitted to a psych ward. He will resurface. He is the parent she’ll idolize even as he cheats on her mother. Lifelong she’ll opine that her mother deserved the betrayals because she was mean to her husband. After my mother-in-law’s death we are caught up with a family rumor according to which her childhood troubles were compounded by violence. While the daughter of the psychiatric inpatient is sheltering with better-off relatives, she suffers from a cousin an abuse of some category.

Her erratic fathering can be related, in turn, to the father’s childhood misery. He lost his mother to an influenza pandemic. As we understand that episode today, it was how the childish bereavement was handled by elders that programmed into the young brain a pattern of disintegration.

A child of five or so learns that his mother is dead when he is included in an unexplained stroll that stops at a graveyard. That is your mother, the boy is told about an object being lowered into the ground and covered with dirt.

Next, his architect father will vanish indefinitely, returning after a year or so with a new wife who despises the son of her husband’s previous spouse.

#

An annual houseguest drives off after breakfast. Soon his hosts will leave their home too.

A Boston wife and husband embark on a long urban hike, their intent restorative.

The reality of the shared trek proves tougher. Only in retrospect will the couple of advanced middle age recognize that, while walking from one city to another, they had toggled into the conditions of imperiled juveniles.

The American boy parented by shrill adversaries is sluggish and preverbal, slack-faced. He might as well be walking alone through a dreary hallway at the end of which he will be punished by his tense homelife’s lurid collapse.

Or else this boy is just glued to a television screen in an exhausting household. At any rate he has disconnected from his basic social unit and immediate surroundings. Crossing the Boston city line southwestward, he is confused by an Israeli adolescent asking him to pick up the pace. This girl is fleet and hypervigilant.

She is breaking away from a devoutly ritualist household, a transition she feels as an intensified routine of urban locomotion. Her clandestine exit from religion is being expedited by her daily commute through an intercity corridor of the Israeli interior, connecting her to a regional trade school by the Mediterranean coast, where she runs with a new peer pack of vestigially religious girls, a crowd much worldlier than she.

But in some ways they seem to her too reconciled to a bad contract. Her private terrors will be given vent, now and again, by pressured vocalizations articulating an extreme distrust of established communal dynamics.

Suddenly I realize I am navigating a series of sleepy American cities with an open-eyed somnambulist. My companion has succumbed to shock. I entreat him to come to. He approximates reengagement. By the next day I’ve shut down, too. We’re both defeated, for a while.

We did not have the right equipment for that hike. We did not know how to address the deficit. I have to believe that the stubborn reflection will help us.

#

Later that autumn, a genocide survivor will pause in our front room for a cycle of prayer, turning his back to the windows nearest him, which show the streetside view. These days our living room faces a construction site. An elephantine house approaches completion.

A plastic-sided structure of exceptional hugeness replaces the much smaller home of our late octogenarian neighbor, while conserving its texture. The lifelong bachelor persisted in the plastic-sided incarnation of the house where he was born. In the first years of his final decade we become his neighbors while he continues to share his childhood home with his octogenarian sister, a lifelong spinster.

He was a retired teacher, genial and loud. He liked to talk to my son, to whom he would gift an illuminable globe displaying an outdated world map. He held his pants up with a belt distinguished by an NRA buckle. He promoted tough measures against neighborhood speeders. Shoot their tires out. He never actually did that.

His death was witnessed by a hired carer. He was the last surviving resident of a longtime family house torn down recently.

While the neighborhood changes, a lunch guest pauses to pray in our living room, orienting toward our backyard, which he can’t yet see.

We told the political analyst where the sun rises each morning. Soon he will join us at the dining room table where he’ll partake of brothy beans piled with chopped parsley, over which he and his hostess spoon a rich condiment based on sesame paste, whereas the American host applies the same sauce to his vegetable salad.

Our lunch guest seems to savor, too, the pumpkin bake seasoned liberally with onion and sage.

#

It was not a pumpkin bake, exactly. The foundational gourd was butternut squash. I told him pumpkin, a private rhetorical choice, as swift as instinct.

I reached for the English word I was sure he would know. A newcomer cannot go through a Massachusetts autumn without acquiring the English word for pumpkin. Butternut squash might not come up.

I could not endure our meal delayed by an English lesson, I am not an academic type. I want to see my lunchers lunching. Indeed the word I chose resolved his hesitance instantly. Patently this guy likes pumpkin.

And butternut squash, a close cousin. If I recall correctly, he would help himself to seconds of the bake. It came out well if I may say so myself. An improvisational cook does not take her successes for granted.

A language lesson does ensue while he enjoys this stuff. He is the teacher. He says, We call this ejjeh.

I call it pashtida. An ancient rabbinical word reapplied in modern Hebrew, this moniker consolidates a versatile culinary genre recurring among diasporic Jewries, the egg-bound vegetable bake.

The Persian speaker would call it a kuku. The Italianate, frittata, a rendition skewing the balance to favor the eggs. My mother advantaged the vegetable content and called it a kugel.

She perpetuated the associated Yiddish sensibility. I loved her cinnamony version centering a coral-colored tuber, sweet potato. As a little one I valued the dessert-grade mouthful intervening early in a holiday or Sabbath meal. As an adult I’ll revisit that pleasure while revising the flavor profile. A Bostonian cook pleases the palate she developed while growing up in the Middle East.

A political analyst who sits at our table seems to appreciate this take. I go rather heavy on the sage.

~~~~~

by Naama Goldstein

(This essay is the second in a series of literary reflections prompted by the endeavor to bring to English translation the poetry of Heba Al-Madhoun, a Gazan writer, architect, educator and mother killed by an Israeli airstrike in Oct. of ‘23. Partnering in this cross-disciplinary project is Heba’s bereaved husband, AbuMousa, Middle East Institute Senior Fellow.)

I’ve been entrusted to translate a Gazan poet’s manuscript, which I can’t read. I speak almost no Arabic and can’t decipher a single letter. I was not taught the Arabic alphabet at any stage of my Israeli schooling, elementary, middle or high.

It is the poet’s widower who entrusts me with her work. When I meet him, I am under the impression that he aspires to translate his late wife’s writing himself. A public radio story about him mentions this hope. While he sits in my Boston living room I ask after the translation. He has retired the effort for now. Understandable, I tell him.

Literary translation is profoundly demanding work, even for the skilled professional. The poet’s widower is not a literary translator. He is a political analyst.

He is the survivor of cataclysmic violence, the father of four of whom two survive. His hands are full with the demands of the ameliorative chapter he endeavors to seed in the United States.

His wife was at home when an Israeli airstrike buried her under the ruins with their children. He had just crossed the street to speak with a neighbor.

Two of his children will be rescued. In my home he will refer to certain injuries and their complications.

The poet died alongside her eldest and youngest. Eighteen and eight, ages I’ve done my best to mother, too.

#

Initially the survivor sits on our sofa, inclined to relate right away the most crushing elements of his recent history. Our elderly cat is entranced by his voice.

The animal has settled very near the survivor’s socked foot. Occasionally the pink nose assesses while the jade eyes squint. A narrowed cat eye signals trust.

A guest inspiring these behaviors sometimes will respond with a solicitous word, a glance or petting that will invite the next feline gesture, a paw on the foot. Ultimately the ginger rescue’s appetite for friendship can be misread as aggression. The insistent touch involves claws.

Today the cat elects restraint while a survivor holds forth. Soon we will transition to the dining room and eat.

#

This speaker’s vocal powers were nulled for some weeks after his mother was killed in the aftermath of his wife’s death alongside two of their children. I heard this testimony in the radio interview. In my home it is retold by the guest facing us. I have seen that expression before. I recognize shock.

Active horror fuels our peaceful dialogue, during which we establish a lively rapport. Our experiences differ but our outlooks align. Themes that compel me as a writer, the political analyst explores in a pragmatic field. We share a preoccupation with leaders disconnected from their obligation to living people.

We articulate our cognizance of authority figures unconcerned with our welfare, more attached to delusion and greed.

While inducing mayhem they’re pilfering our assets and misshaping our spirits. They involve us in bottomless suffering and incessant panic. The more tolerable renditions of these crisis modes are ecstatic loyalty and conscienceless rage.

After the visit my husband will dream that Boston has been flattened.

#

I sent the survivor a message. I offered to help with the translation effort. He accepted my offer. That is not to be taken for granted. I am not the most reasonable assignee to this project. I can’t read a word of Arabic.

In my childhood and youth I am the enrollee of a certain Israeli public school subset. My basic education habituates me in segregation by sex.

My curriculum includes an indoctrination in an ancient faith. We hold divine the literatures of Iron Age visionaries. We trust in the decryption by medieval exegetes.

In one way my religious schoolmates and I are no different from the irreligious majority of Israeli public school cohorts. We are taught Arabic ineffectively.

In the late elementary grades we’re assigned Arabic textbooks printed in Hebrew. Our illiteracy in Arabic characters thus resolved, we recite transliterated skits in class.

I remember a line to this day, a scrap of dialogue from a restaurant scene. The customer requests a cup of carrot juice.

Notably that line is seared into my brain because my performance was halted by an angry teacher. I was overexcited by the new classroom routine, drama units acted out in a fresh language. I was a shy girl starving for creative outlets. As an Arabic-language actor I toggled from anxious to hammy. Next, ashamed.

Oddly or not the line about carrot juice wasn’t mine. I played the waiter, whom I portrayed as a panicky wreck. I grabbed the class broom as a prop. Summoned to serve while sweeping, I drop the long-handled cleaning implement on the concrete-and-stone amalgam tiles, causing a resounding clatter. I don’t recall the waiter’s lines.

I retain without a residue of shame the melody of an Arabic song included in our textbook, and a fragment of verse. We were singing about olives. The narrator asks Ya Rabi to bless an olive tree. With olives, presumably. Ya Rabi does not mean you rabbi. Ya Rabi is an appeal to God.

In subsequent grades Arabic becomes an elective. But whether you choose Arabic or another option, typically you will not attain literacy in your secondary language. The average student’s sense of inutility has something to do with this. Where will I apply this language, a student wonders.

When will I speak it, to whom? A typical Israeli student’s sense of inutility as it relates to Arabic could have been resolved, theoretically, by a field trip component. Students living in mixed cities are situated ideally for an educational routine of this category.

I didn’t live in a mixed city. Nevertheless the implementation was feasible. My Israeli hometown like any was proximate to Arabic-speaking communities.

#

Entrusted with a late Gazan poet’s work, in time I will deliver the manuscript to the qualified literary translator I’ll track down with a local literature professor’s assistance. First I’ll consider asking a convenient Arabic speaker to read over the verses and give me the gist.

I decide against that. I don’t want to set up anyone to refuse the task. I can imagine refusing it. For example the friends who have lost to the destruction of Gaza twenty-one family members might find the immersion in a slain Gazan’s verses painful.

While figuring out what to do, I subject excerpts of the poetry to translation by artificial intelligence. The translations simulated by this system bury the original poetry in ungainly analogs and, as I’ll discover later, random invention. Nevertheless I encounter a relatable spirit. This writer greets the morning from an exiled outlook.

#

She envisions a legendary city she can’t reach, an urbanity she populates with fantastical beings. Avians of an unstated species, they are not like any birds I ever saw in Jerusalem. She endows them with an impossible color.

This poet is going for a touch of magic, my initial assumption. As a lyrical writer will traditionally, Heba Al-Madhoun injects a line of verse about Jerusalem with extraordinary color and a sense of the uncanny. Odds are that a Gazan poet of her generation has never set foot in the Holy City, categorically banned.

I was a girl growing up downland. Jerusalem was accessible by an hourlong bus ride. Green birds in Jerusalem, imagine. This poet waxes psychedelic.

No, she doesn’t. A competing idea prompts the research proving that green birds in Jerusalem are a solid reality.

#

A Gazan poet picturing green birds in Jerusalem is not being inventive. She is describing her region’s changing biosphere. Feral parakeets invade Jerusalem, two varieties so far.

The freeborn heirs of escapees, their dauntless ancestors will soar among them for a time, the original fugitive pets. It does not take long for paired parakeets to establish a flock in a temperate clime.

Champions of native and sojourning songbirds bear witness sadly. The emancipated captives can no longer be controlled, per expert opinion.

I am certain I absorbed this ecologic update in a recent season of life. The knowledge receded. I forgot about the parakeets.

I reverted to memories of the Jerusalem I visited routinely in my formative days. Most of my time there was spent in the tower block neighborhood where my stringently pious relatives lived, a locality inhabited by birds of modest plumages, feathers emulating earth and rock. And shadow. Consider the white-spectacled bulbul, gray transitioning to black.

But in flight or attack this little songbird flashes a distractive signal, a fluorescent yellow undertail.

#

When the translator sends me a first batch of translations, he includes the introductory poem situating green birds in Jerusalem. It is actually quite plausible that Heba Al-Madhoun intended that these birds be read as mythic.

After all, their voices draw the listener into a legend restoring the city to unspoiled beauty. The legend that the birds promote is made of tales centering a value often trumpeted while undercut, love.

#

According to her bereaved husband, Heba Al-Madhoun did not like for her picture to be taken. In the low-resolution digital image he has shared with me, she is draped in the garb of a devout Muslim woman, a white hijab and a black abaya. She is seated on a cushioned bench, smiling in the company of people whom her husband identifies as colleagues at a writers’ event. They’re smiling too.

Was her camera shyness an expression of devoutness? Among Muslims as among Jews, a devout adherent may eschew the picture-taking on religious grounds. Her widower recounts that she would allow a photo to be taken if she was with students or colleagues. The mindful reader will discover the same spirit in her writing. Hers is a voice of ardent faith and independent judgement.

#

Her widower describes her as a bold internal critic. Heba spoke out against the routinization of violence by the literalist theocrats running the show where she lived. Naturally she suffered threats. Unsurprising that the poem launching her collection prompts a redefinition of exile and homeland. She repositions these concepts as conditions of the heart.

Concerning the green birds she involves in the same meditation, if they refer to feral parakeets, that meaning is secondary. More importantly, to Muslim readers the green birds are vessels for the souls of martyrs. That is their role in sacred text.

In a modern-day Gazan’s poem their function is consolatory. Green birds are a comforting vision evoked by a poet whose own biography proves that martyrdom need not be sought. A Gazan mother is selected while going about her business at home, her two sons alongside her, the eldest and youngest.

The two middle children will survive, a boy and a girl. In the next poem their mother goes on to lambaste the glorification of martyrdom, which she ties to its commodification.

#

Online portraits of the literary translator we’ve contracted show him wearing a white turban and a white jalabiya, his aspect sober. He does not translate the poems as the Large Language Model did. He refers to Jerusalem by another name.

Al-Quds, an Arabic geonym, expressive of the city’s holiness. Knowledge I picked up while growing up in that region, maybe in Arabic class though I could have inferred it myself. The words for holiness in Arabic and Hebrew are closely related, sharing a common ancestry.

But will the meaning be lost on anglophone readers? Most will be unfamiliar with the standard name referencing Jerusalem in the region where the city persists. Something to address with the poet’s family. Certainly now is not the time to involve the translator, whose work must proceed in peace.

~~~~~

https://tinyurl.com/TranslateHeba