gratitude. It was right there at your fingertips, it was throbbing softly in the palm of your hand, and you let it escape. Idiot.
*
As for the poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, Bumek Schuldenfrei, the Author does the sums and concludes that he must have passed away long since. Many years ago he had his own regular poetâs corner on the back page of the weekend supplement of the newspaper
Davar
, surrounded with a flowery border adorned in each corner with a sketch of a smiling mask. Or maybe it was sneering. The poems in
Rhyming Life and Death
, as the Author recalls, were not satirical or mordant, but generally addressed the problems of the day with good-natured if somewhat condescending amusement: absorption of immigrants, transit camps, austerity measures, the conquest of the desert, the draining of the Huleh swamp, the housing shortage, border incidents and raids by infiltrators, the corruption and bureaucracy that overshadowed the public life of the young State. He represented the younger generation, the muscular, suntanned native-born sabras, as outwardly tough but dedicated, morally responsible and wonderfully sensitive on the inside.
All the enemies of the Jewish people down the ages â the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Germans, the Arabs, the British, the priests, the effendis, the Bolsheviks,the Nazis, the innumerable anti-Semites that are spawned everywhere â were portrayed in
Rhyming Life and Death
as heartless villains whose world is filled with nothing but malice, hatred and
Schadenfreude
directed against us. The home-grown villains, such as the dissident Zionist organisations, the Communists, the detractors of the trade-union movement and the opponents of the organised Jewish community, appeared in Beit-Halachmiâs book as petty, narrow-minded people with twisted souls. He thoroughly abhorred those bohemians who aped the ways of Paris and Hollywood, and he had nothing but disgust for all those cynical, uprooted intellectuals who knew only how to pour scorn and sarcasm on everything, together with their scribbles about modern art, that amounted to no more than the emperorâs new clothes.
As for the Yemenites, animals, tillers of the soil and gentle children, for these he reserved verses radiant with paternal affection. He placed them on a pedestal, going into raptures over the purity of their innocence and the simplicity of their souls. But occasionally Tsefania Beit-Halachmiâs rhymed column was infused with a hint of something thatwas neither political nor ideological, a mysterious tinge of sorrow that had nothing whatever to do with his class consciousness or patriotic fervour, like those lines the Author had quoted at the reading:
Many a wise man lacks for sense,
Many a fool has a heart of gold,
Happiness often ends in tears,
But whatâs inside can never be told.
Sometimes he included a short epitaph for someone who was dead and forgotten except in the occasional thoughts of a child or grandchild, and even this memory was ephemeral because, with the death of the last person who remembered him, the subject of the poem would die a second and final death.
*
Once, the Author recalls, Beit-Halachmi published a piece under the heading âClearing out the leavenâ, about the tendency of all things gradually to fade, to become worn out, objects and loves, clothes and ideals, homes and feelings, everything becomes tattered and threadbare, and eventually turns to dust.
He made frequent use of the word âaloneâ, which on occasion he replaced with the rarer word âforlornâ.
Once upon a time, in the thirties and forties and even perhaps in the early fifties, the poet used to appear frequently on Friday evenings before a crowd of his fans in cultural centres, Health Fund sanatoria, trade-union gatherings or meetings of the Movement for Popular Education: he would read from his poems, accompanied by a lady pianist who was no longer in the first flush of youth or an
*
As for the poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, Bumek Schuldenfrei, the Author does the sums and concludes that he must have passed away long since. Many years ago he had his own regular poetâs corner on the back page of the weekend supplement of the newspaper
Davar
, surrounded with a flowery border adorned in each corner with a sketch of a smiling mask. Or maybe it was sneering. The poems in
Rhyming Life and Death
, as the Author recalls, were not satirical or mordant, but generally addressed the problems of the day with good-natured if somewhat condescending amusement: absorption of immigrants, transit camps, austerity measures, the conquest of the desert, the draining of the Huleh swamp, the housing shortage, border incidents and raids by infiltrators, the corruption and bureaucracy that overshadowed the public life of the young State. He represented the younger generation, the muscular, suntanned native-born sabras, as outwardly tough but dedicated, morally responsible and wonderfully sensitive on the inside.
All the enemies of the Jewish people down the ages â the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Germans, the Arabs, the British, the priests, the effendis, the Bolsheviks,the Nazis, the innumerable anti-Semites that are spawned everywhere â were portrayed in
Rhyming Life and Death
as heartless villains whose world is filled with nothing but malice, hatred and
Schadenfreude
directed against us. The home-grown villains, such as the dissident Zionist organisations, the Communists, the detractors of the trade-union movement and the opponents of the organised Jewish community, appeared in Beit-Halachmiâs book as petty, narrow-minded people with twisted souls. He thoroughly abhorred those bohemians who aped the ways of Paris and Hollywood, and he had nothing but disgust for all those cynical, uprooted intellectuals who knew only how to pour scorn and sarcasm on everything, together with their scribbles about modern art, that amounted to no more than the emperorâs new clothes.
As for the Yemenites, animals, tillers of the soil and gentle children, for these he reserved verses radiant with paternal affection. He placed them on a pedestal, going into raptures over the purity of their innocence and the simplicity of their souls. But occasionally Tsefania Beit-Halachmiâs rhymed column was infused with a hint of something thatwas neither political nor ideological, a mysterious tinge of sorrow that had nothing whatever to do with his class consciousness or patriotic fervour, like those lines the Author had quoted at the reading:
Many a wise man lacks for sense,
Many a fool has a heart of gold,
Happiness often ends in tears,
But whatâs inside can never be told.
Sometimes he included a short epitaph for someone who was dead and forgotten except in the occasional thoughts of a child or grandchild, and even this memory was ephemeral because, with the death of the last person who remembered him, the subject of the poem would die a second and final death.
*
Once, the Author recalls, Beit-Halachmi published a piece under the heading âClearing out the leavenâ, about the tendency of all things gradually to fade, to become worn out, objects and loves, clothes and ideals, homes and feelings, everything becomes tattered and threadbare, and eventually turns to dust.
He made frequent use of the word âaloneâ, which on occasion he replaced with the rarer word âforlornâ.
Once upon a time, in the thirties and forties and even perhaps in the early fifties, the poet used to appear frequently on Friday evenings before a crowd of his fans in cultural centres, Health Fund sanatoria, trade-union gatherings or meetings of the Movement for Popular Education: he would read from his poems, accompanied by a lady pianist who was no longer in the first flush of youth or an
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