Where did the question words go?

The poem KEN LATZIPOR (A Nest For the Bird) performed by Noga

Children literature, like any literature, is a mirror that clearly reflects social and cultural transformations. Looking at Israeli children literature one can see a substantial reduction of issues: While Bialik's Poems and Songs for Children contains poems about nature – such as A Nest for the Bird (KEN LATZIPOR), game songs, lullabies – such as Lay Down, My Toddler, character songs, experience songs and poems of Jewish tradition and folklore – such as For Shabbat, in the children songs of Yehonatan Gefen, Hagit Benziman and Yehuda Atlas it is difficult to find "sun", "wind" and "trees" and if one finds such objects they are all subjected to the condition of child,  the hero of the song.

If the old songs can be defined as describing "how the world looks to the child", the songs these days can be defined as describing how the child, showing off his personality and wishing to sketch his self-portrait, appears in the world. Hence the change in the status of objects such as "games", "toys" or "aunts" and "uncles". In post-modern children songs they all serve the same goal – exposing fundamental features and typical situations of the child's consciousness.

The language and the style of songs for children have changed as well. While in Bialik's songs there are Aramaic phrases and flowery phrases like "hush lest thou awake" (HAS PEN TA'IR), in songs today the language has been lowered as if it strives to a complete identification with the natural language of children: simple and often incorrect.

In current children literature personification and animation – meaning, ascribing human attributes and skills to figures of still objects, plants and animals – are very rare. The question words "what", "who" and "where", which Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky and Ya'akov Fichman frequently used for dramatization – disappeared, replaced by the abundant "why" word – either as a rhetorical question in the framework of a "personal confession" by the child speaker or in order to expose the parents' weaknesses.

In classic children songs there is an emphasis on pathos and drama and  on the child's confusion in front of the world. In post-modern songs the child is presented as smart, knowledgeable, confident and as one who allows himself or herself to criticize the elderly. The topics of post-modern songs are daily life, not top of world affairs, and such matters are "natural" to be commented by a child's opinion.

In The Fleece Festival (HAG HAGEZ) by Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir's from the 30's, we read: "In Tel-Yoseph everyone is glad" – so the emphasis is on the whole, the collective. Children poems nowadays emphasize individualism and difference.

In Miriam Yalan-Shteklis' Michael and Alone (LEVADI) from the late 50s' - there is no God and nature. There are only dolls and bears, lifeless and without a response. Alienation. The poetess has already lost faith in God, but still there is a searching for other people to conduct life together.

Later, the inner spiritual mantel content of Man is going lost and he is willingly enslaved to the sensory stimuli. There is no real conversation. Everyone listens to himself or herself or trying to enforce his or her opinion. So are, for example, the songs by Ayin Hillel (Hillel Omer) about a talk between two girls, in which each of them relates only to herself at that moment, without communication, and the song expressing the certainty of each part of clothing hanging on the clothesline to dry that just for him the sun is shining.

An extreme example of this shift in children literature is the song Lights Out (KIBUY OROT) by Moshe Oren:

Some people sleep
with butt to the wall,
some sleep with face,
and some can not decide
and constantly change phase.

Seeing the glasses through rose-coloured glasses

Young children who need glasses are sometimes ashamed to wear them in their kindergarten. The kindergarten teacher Limor Shlomi has a method to overcome this embarrassment: Glasses Party.
 
At the Glasses Party conducted by Limor all the kindergarten children participate in activities of movement and creation, and thus strengthen the confidence of the bespectacled child.

For example, to let the children see how well the celebrating child sees with his or her glasses, Limor puts them all in a circle around the child: They throw him or her a ball, he or she catches it and throws it to them again and again. If the child is sporty, Limor gives the other kids more than one ball to throw at him, so he or she should respond and return the balls quickly.

Other activity in the Glasses Party is creating "glasses" by all the children from small metal rings and pipe cleaners: They wrap around each ring a pipe cleaner and connect the two rings by a small piece of pipe cleaner. Then - all the kids wear their "glasses".

The Glasses Party guest of honor is an optician, who conducts a vision test for all the children, and usually find among them some new candidates for a future Glasses Party...

Not every line suggests a hint

The Israeli government has lately issued bills bearing the images of four poets. One of the four is Nathan Alterman

Night by night (Layla layla) by Nathan Alterman and Mordechay Ze'ira

Nathan Alterman, Israel national poet – who was a playwright, journalist and translator as well - is mostly known for his weekly poetic column The Seventh Column in the daily newspaper Davar, which was published from 1943 till 1965. Before publishing this column Alterman was the paper's translator of Reuters news, a job which made him revive into Hebrew the speeches of Winston Churchill.

The Seventh Column was an outcome of a period in which a certain Jewish audience in Israel reached a maximal solidarity with the nationwide. Alterman was a prayer leader, who frequently utters his mission in the first person plural, as if feeling that his work should not be esoteric, spread out from life.

photo: Kfar Saba Municipal Museum

After giving the name Shalom to the first Israeli luxury ship, he refused to partake in its maiden voyage. Although being an integral part of the Israeli elite, he acted toward its favors as a "vegetarian" and did not take even a tiny bit of a cherry on top of a whipped cream in an embassy cocktail.

But his refusal to take gifts and to exploit bypass roads of the bureaucratic labyrinth ceased when it the matter involved his beloved daughter, Tirza, the vulnerable soul to whom he wrote the poem Safeguard  your soul. When it came to his daughter, he sent urgent messages to the military authorities and to those responsible for casting, making them acknowledge the daughter's desperate fragility.

Alterman's fondness for the working people was for him as a conscience relief, since his spiritual occupation might have endangered one of arrogance and detachment. When he went home drunk, at dawn, and saw a worker going to his work, he would call his companions: "Go in order, a man is going to work". "Everyone needs a shoeshine boy", he once said, "but only few need poems".

Ars Poetica engaged him a great deal:

Not every line suggests a hint,
the city is a city.
the street – a street,
the light is light,
the dark is clear as the sun.
 

Just like Sigmund Freud who once said to his psychiatrists audience, looking curiously at his cigar as if it was a significant phallic hint: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".

Rest is Come to the Weary, by Nathan Alterman and Daniel Sambursky

Alterman did not help much to his interpreters, the maximum attention he gave them was a bit of derision: "If I had known your interpretations before I wrote my poems", he said, "it could be helpful. If you do not understand it does not matter, as long as you feel".

Although being a Tel-Avivian in his soul, no one remembered him visiting the beach or sitting exposed to sunlight. Someone said about him: "So humbling as it reaches arrogance". His daughter, Tirza Atar, once said: "That was closure, terribly loneliness in the heart, unconditional by a thing".

He did not allow his beloved daughter Tirza to publish her poems until she was 18, and when she finally did so, many of them were influenced by him, many were devoted to him and many aspired to him. Some would say that if her father would stay alive near by and continue to beg her "Safeguard your soul, Safeguard your life" – Tirza might not have taken leave of life.

A Ballad for a Woman (Balada Le'isha) by Tirza Atar and Moshe Wilensky

Jurka Chapters

"Zviya shook her 600 kilograms very cheerfully for the unexpected freedom, while we asked to know why and what for" (fields of kibbutz Dan, 1949; photo: Upper Galilee Documentation Center)

 

In the second half of the 20th century the anthropological research and the historical study went through a parallel shift: When the unknown and exotic tribes like the Samoan one among which Margaret Mead had done her career became lesser and lesser, anthropologists began to investigate "sub-cultures" in their nearby Western societies, such as the Israeli kibbutz or of the Israeli ultra-orthodox Jewish groups; While historians abandoned their preoccupation with great events like wars, conquests and migration waves, and started to examine daily lives: How the slaves in ancient Rome had eaten, how the monks in medieval Spain had slept, and how babies had been treated in Germany of the 18th century.

The book Jurka Chapters gives us a glimpse of daily life of the low-middle class Jewry in Budapest at the eve of Second World War: "At the table one sits on high stool. Chairs with arms are considered luxury. Dishes and cutlery are washed in a bowl called Weidling, by a simple rug and a laundry soap. In the kitchen one makes laundry as well, in large wooden laundry tubs, and one hangs the laundry to dry on wires stretched high up in the kitchen... In the kitchen one also does homework, or has non-significant conversations with daily guests. The apartment's most important institution: a tap of running water - is reigning on all".

The author, Jurka Klein, who adopted in Israel the Hebrew name Moshe Eytam, is one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of anonymous Holocaust survivors who published and still publish their memories, most modestly, usually in formats of austerity. Some of these books not only provide fascinating pieces of information about the daily war of survival practiced by Jews whose dear ones and friends disappear around, but also an unusual philosophical perspective and even literary intensity. Such is Jurka Chapters - although not a real literary work, it has the spark that could have make it so under the hand of a talented editor and under the auspice of a well established publishing house.

An example of the way famous national events hide behind small and personal occurrences in such books, is one of Eytam's experiences after immigrating to Israel in the framework of Youth Aliyah and settling in kibbutz Dan: "On one early morning milking there came into the dairy barn the kibbutz's security man. He asked frantically to free one cow and expel her from the barn, to let her romp outside… Zviya (The cow's name, which means in Hebrew... a female deer) shook her 600 kilograms very cheerfully for the unexpected freedom, while we asked to know why and what for. It turned out that the Syrians caught in their territory an Israeli intelligence squad... Our government is trying to return the squad through the United Nations, claiming that they have chased after escaped cows. The attempt was unsuccessful. Uri Ilan of kibbutz Giv'at-Shmuel, who was among the trapped, was tortured to death. He was returned without a soul in his nose, just a note hidden between his toes: "I haven't betrayed"!