Hatshepsut supplies us with some interesting statistics.
posted by Imshin 10:42

Just because some people are technologically primitive doesn't mean that they are socially unsophisticated. Even the most well-meaning people seem to make that mistake, perhaps based on a naive romantic notion that a more simple style of living somehow makes people less complex and therefore better. Besides being incredibly patronizing, this is unwise.

Travelers to societies radically different from their own should always remember that what they see is just the outer surface, like the exterior of a house. Learning to understand a society properly, actually getting into the rooms of that house, requires one not only to live in it but to really invest oneself in it, and a ghetto of foreigners is not good enough, mind.

Bu then again, many people have this tendency to go all starry-eyed about going native. Maybe to really understand a society, a culture, one has to grow up in it.

Then again, I could be wrong.
posted by Imshin 09:29

More on Hannah Senesh
David Boxenhorn (Rishon Rishon) has details of just how they tortured Hannah Senesh, just in case you really feel you have to know.
posted by Imshin 22:22

An Endorsement
Riding home from work today, along the banks of the Yarkon River, I came to the conclusion that the Best ‘Life in Israel’ Blog is, regrettably not Not a Fish, nor any of my other friends on the list, but Anglosaxy.

I know I’m far too emotionally involved in what happens here to do a good job of describing life here. Ashley tells it like it is. Go vote for him.

And while we’re on the subject of doing a good job at describing life in Israel, I hope you’re keeping up with Lisa’s story. I’m finding it hard to read. Some of it touches painful places for me.
posted by Imshin 21:31

Not because 2
I was so unhappy about yesterday’s post that I obsessed about it all through my art class. My fellow students and teacher were very nice about it, although I must have been a real pain. I spent two days on that post and I’m still not satisfied with it. Everything I write seems to come out all wrong.

What used to get me with regard to Hannah Senesh was the old ‘what if’ question: the ‘what if they hadn’t sent her on that fool’s errand’ question; the ‘what if we lost a great poet or playwright’ question; the ‘what a waste’ question.

But that’s all just silly when you think about it. More likely than not, she would never have matured into a writer; more likely than not, she would never have even published any of her poems. I think she was the sort of person that, more likely than not, had she lived, would not have pursued the kind of life that would have made her well-known. She would have been one of those hundreds of thousands of Israelis who, in the early years, quietly and modestly went about building this country. In which case she would never have touched my life, not directly, anyway, not in a way I would have known about.

But she did touch my life and enrich it.

And I only ever heard of her because she was sent on that fool’s errand, and because she ‘didn’t talk’, and because she stood up to the Nazis the way she did.

(So much for being cynical about national heroes, as is fashionable these days.)

posted by Imshin 16:13

Not because
I woke up in the middle of the night, the night before last, and wrote two words on a piece of paper, in large, hardly-intelligible handwriting.

Hannah Senesh.

I don’t know why her name came to me in my sleep, or why it was so urgent for me to get the words down so I wouldn’t forget them till morning.

* * * *

About ten years ago, a fictional play was to be aired on Israeli television based on the story of the famous Kasztner trial. The play twisted historic facts by saying that Hannah Senesh (Szenes) had broken under SS interrogation and had turned in her friends, thus bringing about their capture by the Nazis and their eventual execution, and, of course, the failure of their mission. The whole country was up in arms.

If I remember correctly, Hannah Senesh’s family appealed to the High Court of Justice to try and prevent the play from being broadcast, claiming, if I am not mistaken, that it was libelous. They were turned down for reasons of freedom of speech or artistic license or something. The play was broadcast.

I have a guilty little confession. I couldn’t care less if Hannah Senesh ‘talked’ or not. And another: I could never understand what that parachuting mission in Europe was all about.

I should have had a blog back then, because all the time that the stormy public debate about this issue was going on, I wanted to shout out, I wanted to tell Hannah Senesh’s family how I felt. I wanted to say to them:

Don’t worry. It’s okay. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make her anything less.

(We know she didn’t talk, but even if she did, who could blame her? How could we expect her to withstand the sort of treatment the SS interrogators would have had no qualms at meting out to those with secrets. Just look at what they did to those guilty only of belonging to the wrong race. And she was both.)

Even if she did talk she was still a heroine. But she didn’t talk. And now we have this opportunity to look at just what that really means.

But don't you see that she was, and is, far more than how she died?

At least to me.

* * * *

Hannah Senesh was my most important role model when I was growing up. I felt, and still feel, very strongly about her.

She was my role model not because she didn’t break under the SS torture she went through before her execution; and not because she volunteered to parachute into Nazi-occupied Hungary, against all odds, in order to try and save Jews; and not because I loved the poems she wrote; and not because of her diary, in which she shared, with such youthful enthusiasm, her Zionism and her story of leaving her Hungarian home for a new life in Palestine; and not even because of that one particular little poem she wrote, so simple and lovely, expressing in just a few words her wonder at the precious beauty of the world and man's place in it, as she walked on the beach near Caesarea.

She wrote it just two years before she was shipped off to Europe never to return, never to know that it would become one of the best loved Israeli songs of all times, its wistful innocence an everlasting symbol of the devastation of the Holocaust.

These would have been reasons enough for my admiration of her, more than enough. Probably they should have been the reasons for my admiration of her. But I was a child. I had my own agenda. I didn't see her as the perfect heroine adorning the walls of the hall of fame of Zionism. All that stuff didn’t interest me in the least. Perhaps that is why the question of whether she talked or not hardly mattered to me.

In my eyes, she was a real person, an ordinary person, someone I could touch, and identify with. And that was her magic for me.

You’ll probably think I completely missed the point, and maybe I did. But I’m hoping you will be able to understand, for I was only a child - a little immigrant child who feared that she had lost one language without gaining another to take its place, and who felt as if she had become mute, no longer able to express herself in any language.

The thing that gave Hannah Senesh a special place in my heart, the thing that made me identify with her so much, was a seemingly insignificant biographical detail - insignificant perhaps when considering who she was and what she did, but not insignificant for me - that she started writing in Hebrew just six months after she came to live in Palestine, and in such beautiful Hebrew. This was an important lesson for me.

More than anyone or anything else at the time, she gave me hope. Now isn’t that ironic?

Hannah Senesh showed me, showed us all, in the way she lived her life, and, yes, in the way she went to her death, that if we care enough, if we have enough determination and dedication, we can do anything.

(I think Rinat reminds me of her a bit.)

àìé, ùìà éâîø ìòåìí äçåì åäéí øùøåù ùì äîéí áø÷ äùîééí úôìú äàãí çðä ñðù

Afterthought: Aren't these fine words from this underachiever? Well, there's hope yet.

John sent me these words of Hannah Senesh:

There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth
though they have long been extinct.
There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world
though they are no longer among the living.
These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark.
They light the way for mankind.

Little did she know.

Update: I have just one more thing to say about this subject.

posted by Imshin 17:11

Oh dear (again)



While I was hibernating the Jewish and Israeli Bloggies were taking form. I was sort of vaguely aware of this, but I was far too sleepy to participate in the festivities and assumed that no one had nominated me for anything anyway. This only seemed fair, seeing as I hadn't been writing anything.

Anyway, voting for the preliminary round, whatever that means, has commenced and it appears someone nice did nominate me and I’m up for two categories: Best Overall Blog (Group A), and Best Life in Israel Blog (Group B).

Competition is fierce and it’s a difficult choice because I really like most of the nominees, and I’m sure you do too. I’m not even sure if I will vote for me myself (just kidding, I already did – couldn’t help myself, isn’t that awful of me?). Anyway, head on over and vote for whoever.

And may the best Jews (or non-Jewish Israel supporters) win!

Thank you Dave, for all your hard work. The logo is great.

Important update: Dave tells me Zahava Bogner (AKA Mrs. Treppenwitz)designed the logo.

posted by Imshin 16:29

Sever Plotzker in this morning’s Yediot Aharonot (Hebrew link):

It was the soldiers of the 107th reconnaissance division of Red Army’s 60th Army, under the command of General Konayev, that at lunchtime of the 27th January 1945 passed through the gates of the complex of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps.

They found only about 7000 shells of human beings, the last survivors of what, for four years, had been the biggest wholesale death factory in history.

One million and two hundred thousand Jews were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau intersection, where they went through a selection which sent the great majority of them straight to the gas chambers – the contribution of German technology to mass extermination. Their bodies were cremated. The few who were found suitable for hard labor died of starvation, frost, torture and, eventually, in death marches.

* * * *

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi

* * * *

Only the sovereign state of the Jewish people,

continues Plotzker,

can insure us that ‘Auschwitz’ will not happen again. Only the existence of a strong State of Israel allows Jews to be masters of their destiny, of their future and the future of their children.

[...]

The State of Israel, and nothing else, is the answer to Auschwitz.

We shall not forget it.

(My translation)

I suggest you read the entire piece, if you can read Hebrew.
posted by Imshin 14:16

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