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.

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