Tweet

Share
 

Whenever Yosefa Raz gives a poetry reading, the feedback she gets is always the same: People tell her that "Security Check at Allenby Bridge" made the strongest impression.

Based on her experiences stationed at the bridge that straddles the West Bank and Jordan, as a border guard in the Israel Defense Forces, the poem begins:

I took an old man's nail clippers
safety pins
chocolates.
I tore wrappers off birthday presents
that were never meant for me.
Shook out a thin, quiet woman's underwear.

Raz wrote that poem when she was just 19. But in its original incarnation, she used the future tense — not realizing that in so doing, she was distancing herself from her actions. It was only when she began studying poetry that a classmate — a lapsed Catholic, told her it would be more effective written in the past.

"This is a confession," she told Raz. "You have to confess, to own up to what you did."

That, said Raz, "was a really powerful moment of teaching me why I came to America to study writing, to learn that kind of thing, to look at things in a different way."

Raz, 29, who now lives in Oakland and teaches poetry and writing throughout the Bay Area, will be reading from her new book, "In Exchange for a Homeland" at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center on Thursday, Oct. 14.

The collection is about conflict in a variety of spheres, mostly family and society.

Raz was born in Beersheva, the daughter of two American immigrants to Israel. Her parents are social workers, and chose to settle in Netivot, a development town, where they worked with mostly Moroccan immigrants. Both sets of grandparents later followed the family to Israel.

Raz spent grades three through six in Rockville, Md., while her mother served as an Israeli emissary, and "English really stuck." She considers English her mother tongue; and while her Hebrew is fluent, she does not read it for pleasure.

Raz came to California at age 23, to attend U.C. Davis. She has been here ever since. Raz, who has dual citizenship, doesn't know whether she'll ultimately stay here or go back to Israel. She moved here, though, not only because she wanted to attend a creative program in English, but because she shared a widely held perception among writers that they cannot write about their homeland until they live elsewhere.

"I had to leave it to write about it or see it in a different way," she said. "It's also about family. I have this intense, dramatic family, and to get space from them, I had to come here. Not to get away from them, but, in a way, to search for them, since this is where they're from."

When Raz tells of her intense, dramatic family, she doesn't exaggerate. She has a background that few others share: Her father is gay, but he and her mother are still married. And not only that, her father is the biological father

of two children of a lesbian couple. He babysits them once a week.

While children whose parents come out later in life never have an easy time of it, Raz's situation is different yet, since her parents remain married.

"My parents have made their peace with it, and my mother accepts it," she said. "They've figured out how to have an unconventional marriage, where they're accepting of each other. After 25 years of struggling, they're at a stage where they're best friends. A part of me writing this book was making peace with them about that."

Raz — who partially supports herself as a Jewish educator and b'nai mitzvah tutor — considers herself part of a new generation of Israeli writers, for whom a belief in Zionism isn't taken for granted. She considers herself neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist, but post-Zionist.

"I don't necessarily think that we [Jews] don't belong [in Israel], but coming in and saying that it is our right to be here, and whatever else is happening on the ground is just details — because we have this amazing, spiritual, historical truth — that's a scary ideology because we tend to overlook what's really happening in people's lives."

Raz gave the example of her grandparents, who made aliyah in the 1950s, but had an extremely difficult time of it because of food shortages.

"As a poet, I think the way that I take that is, I want to look at the ways that Zionism shaped our stories and the way we tell stories. I want to figure out how to tell the same stories, but to be more critical of Zionism, or that it's not a given."




Yosefa Raz will read from "In Exchange for a Homeland" at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 14, at the Berkeley Richmond JCC, 1414 Walnut St., Berkeley. Information: (510) 848-0237 ext. 10.

"In Exchange for a Homeland" by Yosefa Raz (79 pages, Swan Scythe Press, $14).

most popular rss feeds