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