You Who Cross My Path

by Erez Bitton, Tsipi Keller (Translator), Eli Hirsch (Introduction)

Overview

This first U.S. publication of Erez Bitton, one of Israel's most celebrated poets, recalls the fate of Moroccan Jewish culture with poems both evocative and pure. Considered the founding father of Mizrahi Israeli poetry, a major tradition in the history of Hebrew poetry, Bitton's bilingual collection dramatically expands the scope of biographical experience and memory, ultimately resurrecting a vanishing world and culture.

Preliminary Background Words

My mother my mother from a village of shrubs green of a different green.
From a bird's nest producing milk sweeter than sweet.
From a nightingale's cradle of a thousand Arabian nights.


My mother my mother who staved off evil with her middle fingers with beating her chest on behalf of all mothers.


My father my father who delved into worlds who sanctified the Sabbath with pure Araq who was most practiced in synagogue traditions.

And I—
having distanced myself deep into my heart would recite when all were asleep short Bach masses deep into my heart in Jewish-
Moroccan.

The 2015 recipient of the Israel Prize, Erez Bitton was born in 1942 to Moroccan parents in Oran, Algeria, and emigrated to Israel in 1948. Blinded by a stray hand grenade in Lod, he spent his childhood in Jerusalem's School for the Blind. He is considered the founding father of Mizrahi Israeli poetry in Israel—the first poet to take on the conflict between North African immigrants and the Ashkenazi society, and the first to use Judeo-Arabic dialect in his poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938160875
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	11/10/2015
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Erez Bitton: Born in 1942 to Moroccan parents in Oran, Algeria, Erez Bitton emigrated to Israel in 1948. Blinded by a stray hand grenade he found near his home in Lod, he spent the rest of his childhood in Jerusalem's School for the Blind. He received a B.A. in Social Work from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.A. in Psychology from Bar Ilan University. He wrote a weekly column for the Israeli daily Ma'ariv and worked as a social worker and as a psychologist. His first two books, A Moroccan Offering (1976) and The Book of Na'na (1979), established him as the founding father of Mizrahi poetry in Israel—the first poet to take on the conflict between North African immigrants and the Ashkenazi society, and the first to use Judeo-Arabic dialect in his poetry. The author of five poetry collections and a play, he has served as chairman of the Hebrew Writers Association, and is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Apyrion, which he founded in 1982. Among his awards are the Miriam Talpir Prize (1982), the Prime Minister's Prize (1988), the Yehuda Amichai Prize (2014), as well as the Bialik Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2014). His collection The Book of Na'na was published in French (Editions Saint Germain, 1981). Bitton lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, with his wife Rahel Calahorra, and is father to a son and a daughter.

Tsipi Keller was born in Prague, raised in Israel, and has been living in the U.S. since 1974. The author of nine books, she is the recipient of several literary awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, New York Foundation for the Arts fiction grants, and an Armand G. Erpf award from Columbia University. Her most recent translation collections are Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry (SUNY Press), and The Hymns of Job & Other Poems, a Lannan Translation Selection (BOA Editions). In addition to Erez Bitton's You Who Cross My Path (BOA Editions), her selected volume of Raquel Chalfi's poems, Reality Crumbs, will be published in 2015 (SUNY Press).

Eli Hirsch is a poet, editor, and literary critic. Born in Petach Tikva in 1962, he published his first poems in 1979, and holds a graduate degree in Philosophy from Tel Aviv University. He is the author of four volumes of poetry, and his most recent collection is Hanging Gardens of Tel Aviv (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2012). He has published numerous book reviews and essays, and, since 2007, writes a weekly column on poetry in the Literary Supplement of the daily Yediot Ahronot. He was Editor in Chief at Modan Publishing, and is currently (since 2003) the Literary Editor at Hargol Publishing House. Hirsch teaches Creative Writing in the Literature Department at Tel Aviv University.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: The Poetry of Erez Bitton

FROM Blindfolded Landscapes (2013)

Blindfolded Horses
The Dog and His Master
The Poem of the Cane
This Summer
For the Algerian Poet Rabah Belamri
To Say Desert
Treaty with the Elder Son
Late Learning
You Who Cross My Path
My Father Gave the Neighbors
Roll Call
Sights
When I Was a Child of Light
With the Kids
Hoarse Rababa
Your Eyes
More and More
Not to See Granada
Forgetting Something in You
You and I
Yesterday's Kiss
Families at the Jerusalem School for the Blind
Sketching the Future at the Jerusalem School for the Blind
Children at the Jerusalem School for the Blind
Becoming a Weaver
The Child Sitting in Corners at the School of the Blind
Voices
For Gvira
Mommy Wrap for Me
Yom Kippur at the School for the Blind
For Elisheva Kaplan
On Top of a Wall

FROM Timbisert, A Moroccan Bird – New and Selected Poems (2009)

A Broken Nightingale

A Broken Nightingale
Heart Valve
My Mother, Her Children Wouldn't Live
Lod Cemetery
At Sunset
On Winter Mornings
For Aharon ben Chmou
Ballad about a Town at Sunset
The Wail of Women
Lullaby in the Town of Oran
We Are Strangers
Spanish Song
Clipped Orange Trees
Poem at the Heart of Jerusalem
In the Sealed Rooms
Cesspits
Poem of 1991
Our Pains at Night

A Moroccan Offering

Preliminary Background Words
Zohra El Fassia
A Marginal Boy and a Social Worker
Elegies for ben Shushan
A Purchase on Dizengov
Moroccan Wedding
On the Earthquake in Agadir
Meeting

The Book of Na'na

The Love of Children in White Caftans
Uncle Yehuda Sharvit between Marrakesh and Draa
Summary of a Conversation
Mother Is Cajoling a Bird
Al-Keskas ul-Feran 1
Al-Keskas ul-Feran 2
At the Feet of the Women
Zaish
Sullika's Qasida

Intercontinental Bird

To Speak Within the Light
In Praise of the Dreamers of Jerusalem
To Speak of a City to its Face
My Mother Collects Down
Scaffolding

Addendum: Excerpts from Ana Min al-Maghrib [I'm from the Atlas Mountains]—Reading Erez Bitton's Poetry (Hakkibutz Hamehuchad, 2014)—nine essays, by scholars and poets, selected and edited by Ktzia Alon and Yochai Oppenheimer.

Acknowledgments
About Erez Bitton
About Tsipi Keller
About Eli Hirsch
Critical response to Erez Bitton's work
Index of titles and first lines

Editorial Reviews

WINNER OF THE 2015 ISRAEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A World Literature Today Nota Bene for 2016

"The concise yet emotional poems of Erez Bitton range from discussions of love and beauty to childhood, the poet’s blindness, and his identity as an Israeli of North African descent and the first poet to employ Judeo-Arabic dialect in his work. This bilingual edition includes work from two of his books, allowing an extensive entry to his world without sight but with profound observation."

—World Literature Today

"Erez Bitton takes in the world through uniquely sharp senses, and all that his exquisite senses absorb he transmits to us in a clear and precise language like a fine violin whose function is not to glorify the player but the music."

—Dahlia Ravikovitch

"One cannot overstate the importance of Erez Bitton's poetry. At least one of the reasons for this is self-evident: Bitton is the dominant figure in the creation and development of a new and significant tradition in the history of Hebrew poetry—the tradition of Israeli Mizrahi poetry. Many consider him the founding father of this tradition, which dramatically expanded the scope of the biographical experience and cultural memory and became a vital part in the formation of contemporary Hebrew poetry during the last few decades. . . . One is hard-pressed to name another Israeli poet who can claim such an achievement."

—Eli Hirsch

"It is near impossible to list the number of poets influenced by the poetry of Erez Bitton."

—Mois Ben Harash

"Erez Bitton is among the pioneers who have introduced the issue of identity in Hebrew poetry. His poetic language draws from the Hebrew of the city, the Hebrew of the outskirts, the Hebrew of the Bible and the Sources, as well as from the liturgical poetry of North Africa; he has also pioneered the inclusion of Jewish-Moroccan Arabic in his poems, right alongside the Hebrew. In his work, the experience of emigration and the clash of cultures attain both personal and universal dimensions, and his poems about blindness shed a light on intimate as well as social landscapes. He is the first to have given a rich and moving poetic expression to the 'other' and his culture."

—The Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize

"[Bitton's] poetry is not a subjective one, trapped in the private mythology of its creator. One gets the sense that behind each poem there are people, lives, pain and suffering that hold up the poem and endow it with depth and weight far greater than the weight of the poem as a poem."

—Amos Levitan

"Bitton's poetry may be defined in several ways, some of which, per force, appear contradictory: he is a great rebel within the tradition of contemporary Hebrew poetry, and he is also someone who has gone back to earlier traditions, precisely those that contemporary Hebrew poetry rebelled against. He is the founding father of a new poetic tradition, and is also the inheritor and practitioner of existing traditions. . . . He rebuilds the continuum of memory through family stories and the figures of his parents as an alternative to the dominant history that rejected them."

—Elmog Behar



WINNER OF THE 2015 ISRAEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A World Literature Today Nota Bene for 2016

"The concise yet emotional poems of Erez Bitton range from discussions of love and beauty to childhood, the poet’s blindness, and his identity as an Israeli of North African descent and the first poet to employ Judeo-Arabic dialect in his work. This bilingual edition includes work from two of his books, allowing an extensive entry to his world without sight but with profound observation."

—World Literature Today

"Erez Bitton takes in the world through uniquely sharp senses, and all that his exquisite senses absorb he transmits to us in a clear and precise language like a fine violin whose function is not to glorify the player but the music."

—Dahlia Ravikovitch

"One cannot overstate the importance of Erez Bitton's poetry. At least one of the reasons for this is self-evident: Bitton is the dominant figure in the creation and development of a new and significant tradition in the history of Hebrew poetry—the tradition of Israeli Mizrahi poetry. Many consider him the founding father of this tradition, which dramatically expanded the scope of the biographical experience and cultural memory and became a vital part in the formation of contemporary Hebrew poetry during the last few decades. . . . One is hard-pressed to name another Israeli poet who can claim such an achievement."

—Eli Hirsch

"It is near impossible to list the number of poets influenced by the poetry of Erez Bitton."

—Mois Ben Harash

"Erez Bitton is among the pioneers who have introduced the issue of identity in Hebrew poetry. His poetic language draws from the Hebrew of the city, the Hebrew of the outskirts, the Hebrew of the Bible and the Sources, as well as from the liturgical poetry of North Africa; he has also pioneered the inclusion of Jewish-Moroccan Arabic in his poems, right alongside the Hebrew. In his work, the experience of emigration and the clash of cultures attain both personal and universal dimensions, and his poems about blindness shed a light on intimate as well as social landscapes. He is the first to have given a rich and moving poetic expression to the 'other' and his culture."

—The Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize

"[Bitton's] poetry is not a subjective one, trapped in the private mythology of its creator. One gets the sense that behind each poem there are people, lives, pain and suffering that hold up the poem and endow it with depth and weight far greater than the weight of the poem as a poem."

—Amos Levitan

"Bitton's poetry may be defined in several ways, some of which, per force, appear contradictory: he is a great rebel within the tradition of contemporary Hebrew poetry, and he is also someone who has gone back to earlier traditions, precisely those that contemporary Hebrew poetry rebelled against. He is the founding father of a new poetic tradition, and is also the inheritor and practitioner of existing traditions. . . . He rebuilds the continuum of memory through family stories and the figures of his parents as an alternative to the dominant history that rejected them."

—Elmog Behar

From the Publisher