Haaretz on "Sodot" (A Minyan of Lovers)

Beside the road I saw two kittens. One jumped between the cars and managed to reach the other side of the road. His brother remained on the traffic island, hurt, his hind legs paralyzed, and was trying courageously to reach a safe place, dragging himself on his front legs.

I stopped the car in the middle of the road. Horns hooted, it was raining, I was late for an important meeting - but the sight of that kitten was wounding my heart.

There are such moments: The world stops its rush for a second, you feel almost suffocated, the stomach hurts. Naked nerves. a sudden need to touch, face pain, feel.

Those are the moments Corinna relays. The heroines of her book, Anna and Siwar, live on the naked nerve, where love and pain interchange continuously:

"What happens to one who continually embraces an iceberg? Whose heart will be first to melt? There is always this longing, call it a yearning." (page 241)

Corinna writes from both inside the body and the body itself - in a way which is so physical and emotion laden that it is hard to believe she's using the language we all know. There is total symbiosis between the writing and the feeling. Corinna creates a kingdom where there is no room for the governing of syntax rules. Most of her sentences are simply coming into being, are present on her own terms. The dialogues are uttered some from her mouth, some from her head, in a whirlpool in which times, speakers, and subjects intermingle, creating words and sentences written with the rhythm of poetry:

"Salim is calling from the village,/and Andrei/ who'd asked,/'It's not hard on you, don't you miss sex?'/'The alternative is much better?'/'Once one man has caused you harm and you punish all men?' asks the interviewer in the newspaper the woman that was victim of rape and has written a book. She's not answering and goes back to her home where she sleeps with a revolver under the mattress." (page 157)

In the same way in which she sheds the rules of prose and mixes them with the association-laden poetic form - Corinna also refuses to accept completely the rules of State and Religion, replacing them with her own morals.

Anna, the heroine, standing before the Rabbis at the divorce ritual, refuses to cover her rebelious shoulders with the offered rag and puts on her own scarf. She's the one sending away the husband and she expresses this not in words but in what is unsaid:

"A man and a woman are splitting apart, they have been together for many years and now must be weaned of so many habits, like when you remove a bunion and it grows right back...
...he says, 'OK, I'll find myself some dump to live in.';
This time she no longer says, 'Stay.';
Puts on a red skirt and appears before three male judges in the religious court. They stand with grave faces behind a tall bench.
'You-are-hereby-permitted-to-any-man.';
None of them laid a warm hand on her belly to feel the foetus move.
Imposing themselves as permit-givers out of their territory.
In hers." (page 156)

Anna, in a feminine dress, is sexual, attractive, independent and tempting.
Mimmicking men's ways, she counts the males who come to her bed upon her divorce. She's the mother who struggles to protect the son imprisoned in the military cell, attempting to translate his naivety as stemming from hers, to hold on to the similarity between them; trying to give love, warmth and tenderness to the whole world except her own self, which she's not really hugging.

"Dorn, now I know why you looked at me the way a loving, indulged child looks at his mother when I gave you a midnight snack at home. Johanna would stand in front of the refrigerator, protecting it with her body so the children wouldn't take food for their friends. She was frigid. Now she'ss a vegetable. If I had stayed, that would have been my fate too." (page 204)

It's not spelled out if those are the words said to him or that have never been uttered. It's not even important from her point of view since the intensity of her feelings covers all. Her thoughts tear her from deep inside and like water seep to all avalable spaces.

Her fights against laws, her silences, her secrets and decisions, have left her with no room of her own. She stands exposed, withdrawn and above all - exhausted, left with the unsaid and silenced sayings, with thoughts which, if only uttered, might have helped create a bridge between her and the world instead of pain and exposed nerves shrinking away from closeness while longing for it.

"Revelation", the last chapter, is Siwar's journal pages. Yet it is not only the revelation of Reality before Siwar's eyes (her observations of her husband's betrayal, her dependance upon him as a man, father and home, her obedience to society's rules).

The journal is also Anna's revelation, as much as it is Corinna's Manifest on loneliness. A manifest on the inability to reach out and touch, not only a man but also the mother; on pain and oblivion and the shattered option of salvation.

Because, who are we realy saving. when we save a kitten? Are we saving it or is the act pointing to our own self?

"At night when the baby's asleep and Salim's at his meetings, when a hidden pain wells up despite my tiredness, I turn to you, my notebook. The rest of the time, it is I, not you, who am abandoned. I have become a married woman and a mother, like my mother. Not grieving over what my mother did to me any more, but wondering when I get lonely what it was that that man did to her. When I was young I refused to see her when she asked for a meeting. I was thinking while the social worker's muffled blows struck home, isn't it enough that she and her lover murdered her old husband? Who will punish her for her other murder, for the murder of me?

There is a point midway between forgetting and knowledge. I am destined to circle round it, unable to forget, disabled by memory."

(c) all Hebrew rights, except to the quotations: Gal Karniel, Haaretz Book Review, 21.1.03
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

DORON

The son changed too. When she hugged him, he hung his hands dryly at his sides, unlike once, "when you were three years old you said that I was the most beautiful one in the world."

"I can't be responsible for everything I blurted out at the age of three," he bent over to rummage in his mother's suitcases and pulled out the record of Tristan and Isolde. "And by the way, just so you won't make any mistake, the poster's mine. I'll take it out of here tomorrow."

Went off to close himself in his room with the music.

While she was away, he slept in her bed and hung on the wall a big poster of the statue of David. At the sight of the silky skin and the tender line of the knee, she wanted to touch it, but reined herself in. The testicles were levels with her lips, and the organ seemed sound asleep, restrained. A slight whimper, like the warning signal of an approaching train, suddenly burst out of her, followed immediately by many freight cars of thoughts: Why did I go there. Why not to Greece, for a rest. I could have lain in the sun with some warm Nikos. She stood between the closet and the suitcase and put the clothes away in slow motion as if each garment were a memory that had to be shaken out and arranged so as not to cause damage.

Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav

"As Befits Worthy Writing"

"Sodot", by Corinna - a writer who grants us her first name - is a most intriguing book. It turns out that "Sodot" is her third book, with the first one published almost thirty years ago.



Yet the interest in Corinna does not conclude only in her identity. On the contrary, Sodot is an interesting book, different and indeed worthy.



The first encounter is with Corinna's unique language. I assume the reader won't grasp this uniqueness at first, since the book is written in everyday Hebrew, much alive and for sure familiar.



The wholeness of the book is evasive. You need to read several tens of pages in order to understand what Corinna's language is doing to you.



With a most straightforward Hebrew, seemingly simple, in short sentences, quite often devoid of asides, additions or reservations, Corinna succeeds to reach the reader's heart and set before his eyes a viable reality and a well-defined statement.



The style serves Corinna throughout the book. Actually it is the sole constant. "Sodot" is a most modern novel, built of fragments, sketches and stories, with constant shifts in the story's angle and in the narrator's perception.



The concise language that reigns throughout the book enables Corinna to move from the general to the particular, from the large picture to the marginal detail, from the objective drama to the subjective hue. Her success is quite impressive and she succeeds in mastering this sharp tool throughout the book.



"Sodot" tells the stories of people in Israel as of late, of the national events in which they are entangled, of their personal circumstances that are not always entirely tied up to time and place, politics or "the situation", although they are never entirely freed from them. The narrator - who undergoes no small changes by the time we reach the end of the book - serves as a prism to all she encounters, people, places, stories.



Corinna knowingly creates distance and yet grants it clear visibility. She's leading the narrator within the multifaceted Israeli material, yet looks at it always from the outside as well. She stands apart from the narrator she creates and that one keeps herself well apart from each person, place and situation she does meet with.



The book emanates a dreamy quality that envelops the reader. The restraint, the irony, the spark that is aware of itself and well hiding, all these make the reading in Corinna's book an unique and direct encounter, as befits a worthy literature.



© Ioram Melzer

Literature & Books, Ma'ariv 18.10.02



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

translated from the Hebrew by Michal Sapir.

Ioram Melzer is a much respected Israeli writer, literary critic, and translator.

read this in Russian;in Hungarian;

Pink Pages

Excerpt from "Sodot" (A Minyan of Lovers)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ronen was watching television wrapped around my lap. Suddenly he said,

"A wall should be built around them."

"Around who?"

The child was silent, as if he had revealed knowledge we are not mature enough to grasp, as if shaming his elders. After the screening of the concluding ceremony he asked, Have they already finished the murder?

Instead of asking if the Olympic Games had finished.

He raced around the apartment shouting, "Kozo Okamuto".

"Kozo Okamuto was a murderer. He doesn't live with us anymore, right?"

"He received punishment."

"Mother, I remembered my dream. I will tell you and you will write."

"Yes."

"A ship sinks. The lifeguard too. But his pole (tower) is in the middle of the sea. You and father are running fast in the water. I am fighting with a soldier. That's it. I've got a suggestion. Copy all my dreams from the pages into a notebook."

"A notebook of dreams?"

"Yes. And we'll also make a notebook of life."

"How?"

"Like God does now on the Day of Atonement. I'll tell you and you will write:

Itzik is not yet dead

Einat died

Yossi is wounded

My cousin Yossie is not yet wounded and is not yet dead

I am not dead

You are not dead

Father is not dead

Yonit is not dead

That's it

When someone gets wounded we will cross him out and when he recovers we will write him in again."



***************************************

Translated from the Hebrew by Michal Sapir

(c) 2003 All rights reserved to Corinna Hasofferett



Sodot (HudnaPress, September 2003), my third book of literary fiction was published in Israel and awaits publication elsewhere.

~~~~~~~~~~~

read it in Hungarian; in Polish;

A Butterfly and Phantoms

I've been walking around today and yesterday with a feeling that that was it, Orna has died. I would come into the house from the garden and Raoul would say, "You had a phone call."



A minute under the drug she said, "What have I done, why did I agree to change rooms." She made an effort so that I, who knew about clothes, would understand: "Imagine, Anna, that you went to the store to buy a dress, and were pleased, and came home and the dress was narrow, and short, and didn't fit you."



"You can still go to the store and exchange the dress, Orna. Right?"



She tried to smile and nod. I think she stopped eating in order to die. To come back home from her, it's not easy. In the doorway Raoul moves shoulder and body to avoid contact.



Tonight, I sat on a chair in the dark, clenched the glass in my hand and threw it down. I too can break, not just you. He jumps up: What happened? And back to sleep. I gathered the splinters with the broom. Raoul lifted his head from the pillow and said, "You alreadyswept today whatareyoudoing gotosleep -broken?" (At noon the boss had decided to fire the assistant and he, Raoul, asked permission to tell her himself first, so she wouldn't get hurt). In the street the sky was filled with lightning. Later it became quiet. The rain came down and chilled my eyes. Maybe there'll be a miracle. A miracle can always still happen. The nurses in the hospice nodded their heads, "Yes, a miracle can always still happen."



Raoul still wants my body. Withdraws as if hating himself for having given in to hunger. I massaged her face with oil, the jaw bones, the neck, and she, like a baby, was glad to be touched, calmed down a little. The blue eyes looked as if sunken inside black tires that someone would soon set fire to in protest. A few months ago she came to me to help her sew a dress, looked at the garden and laughed, "All this you are growing? Eggplants as well? And tomatoes?"



I showed her the Cosmos, Zinnias, Celosia.

Perhaps you want me to write down what it is I am trying to learn from the plants: To see that there is a cycle in nature. Did you know that a hedgehog is born without any thorns?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Excerpt from "Sodot" (A Minyan of Lovers)

Secrets

I was asked why had I set a Jewish mother in the first chapter of Sodot and an Arab mother at the ending.

The question never occured to me. I do not sit at the table with a math copybook and a ruler, to definitely organize the chapters as in the army.

And for me both Anna and Siwar are not only mothers, their motherhood is part of their womanhood.

Revelation (Siwar's journal) belongs to the Epilogue, is the Epilogue, is a novel on its own.

And Anna, well, she's the beginning, as the first word in the Bible reads, In the Beginning.

Two women, and worlds apart. Two women and to the discerning eye, just one.

Secrets.

Land of Mulberry and Cherries

I told him whose daughter I was, and he called out the names of my grandmother and grandfather, their five children, and my mother and her brothers.

He knew them all.

There are people who are known for generations, like local plants that aren't uprooted.



In Tel Aviv, I went into the bank without my ID, and the teller called over my head to her colleague at another window. In a mole on her chin, three white hairs trembled when she turned her double chin away from me to her.



"This one, it's not the first time, I know her by now. She's not who she says she is. Don't take any check from her."



What didn't I do to find someone who knew me. I walked barefoot in the sand in summer. And I ate prickly pears, the favorite fruit of donkeys, purgative, full of thorns, not like cherries and mulberries.

Intifada

A Cyclopean eye blinking on the answering machine:



This is Shlomi speaking. I'm in your son's unit. You can call me at my parents' house, I'll be there later tonight. Call us, we have a message for you.

Call me, this is Shlomi. This is a second message. Call me.



Pressing on switches, mechanically, with efficiency borrowed from the world of actions. Light and soul focused on the telephone. Leafing through the diary, to find the father's home phone number.



"Yes, I know. I let Robin take care of it. They told her not to make a big stir. Alright, alright, I'll come to the lawyer's."



She punches the pillow like a face; he knew and didn't tell her and she hasn't been told all day. Quickly, she washes the tears off her face, to focus on the actions.

The telephone rings.



"Robin. I want to come to the meeting with the lawyer."

Why such force, as if pushing a foot in through an open door.



From the taxi the street seems full of noisy carefree people, whole families, rushing to get to the shops before closing time. Head leaning forward, like someone swimming with a child on her back, she answers the driver, who wants to know who he's got in his car, this job is always such a danger, who doesn't come into this car, drugs, criminals, whores, I could write a book. And this one, what's the matter with her. Running out of the taxi, disappearing into a stairwell. On drugs?



The lawyer Mr. Fields sees a woman with uncombed hair, burning blue eyes, a body carrying a sign, Mined Area. The woman slides her hand over the counter's polished wooden surface: A new office? Nice carpets.

Yes, after a long service. Know the system well. Still have fresh connections, can exchange informal opinions, leap over the hurdles of military bureaucracy. I can call a friend in the middle of the night, and ask for something. I would be answered. You don't know why he was arrested? We've just spoken to somebody from his unit. They picked him up at a demonstration, because he was wearing his army boots."



Yes, they picked him up at a demonstration because he left his army boots on, she says in the same voice with which she used to recount how when he was two years old he once spread cinnamon on the new upholstery when she was speaking on the phone for too long, and how she hugged him for his cleverness and innocence.



"Not a wise thing to do," the lawyer puts on a judicial robe.

Ah, if we always acted with wisdom, we wouldn't need lawyers.

*

Excerpt from Sodot (A Minyan of Lovers)

Ioram Melzer on Sodot

As Befits Worthy Writing © Ioram Melzer Literature & Books, Ma'ariv 18.10.02 Sodot, by Corinna - a writer who grants us her first name - is a most intriguing book. It turns out that Sodot is her third book, with the first one published almost thirty years ago. Yet the interest in Corinna does not conclude only in her identity. On the contrary, Sodot is an interesting book, different and indeed worthy. The first encounter is with Corinna's unique language. I assume the reader won't grasp this uniqueness at first, since the book is written in everyday Hebrew, much alive and for sure familiar. The wholeness of the book is evasive. You need to read several tens of pages in order to understand what Corinna's language is doing to you. With a most straightforward Hebrew, seemingly simple, in short sentences, quite often devoid of asides, additions or reservations, Corinna succeeds to reach the reader's heart and set before his eyes a viable reality and a well-defined statement. The style serves Corinna throughout the book. Actually it is the sole constant. Sodot is a most modern novel, built of fragments, sketches and stories, with constant shifts in the story's angle and in the narrator's perception. The concise language that reigns throughout the book enables Corinna to move from the general to the particular, from the large picture to the marginal detail, from the objective drama to the subjective hue. Her success is quite impressive and she succeeds in mastering this sharp tool throughout the book. Sodot tells the stories of people in Israel as of late, of the national events in which they are entangled, of their personal circumstances that are not always entirely tied up to time and place, politics or "the situation", although they are never entirely freed from them. The narrator - who undergoes no small changes by the time we reach the end of the book - serves as a prism to all she encounters, people, places, stories. Corinna knowingly creates distance and yet grants it clear visibility. She's leading the narrator within the multifaceted Israeli material, yet looks at it always from the outside as well. She stands apart from the narrator she creates and that one keeps herself well apart from each person, place and situation she does meet with. The book emanates a dreamy quality that envelops the reader. The restraint, the irony, the spark that is aware of itself and well hiding, all these make the reading in Corinna's book an unique and direct encounter, as befits a worthy literature. What Readers Have Written About Corinna's Work "On Once She Was A Child" "Your writing is captivating and a pleasure to read." Marcia Gilespie, Editor-in-Chief, Ms Magazine "Very engaging and unique." Andrea MacPherson & Chris Labonte, Editors, Prism International On Sodot (A Minyan of Lovers) "I decidedly respect both your writing and the choice of your subjects (such as in 'Intifada'). You have 'a head of your own' in this uniform reality." A.B. Yehoshua "I think you deserve even better than this review. Moshik and I read Sodot aloud to each other and enjoyed it very much. There is a subtle irony in your presentation of the story and we really appreciate the style and content." Ilana Machover, London On Pink Pages "Corinna, You have a fresh and vital talent, the right style, and an original way of looking at things. I very much enjoyed your book." A.B. Yehoshua, novelist "Corinna has a concise, but sensual language, not elevated, believable, yet not familiar. People do not write like that here... Out of the trivia of a woman' s life, stories unfold where it is difficult to differentiate between the face of the soul and the events of the world." Hadashot, Literature Section "For me, these stories, with all the restrained strength of their clear and gentle understatement, became a capsule filled with sadness, beauty and optimism. Suddenly it was obvious to me that there is no simple and known answer waiting around the corner; rather the opposite: more and more questions arise." Kol Yerushalayim. Arts and Culture Supplement "Only after finishing the book does the reader begin to understand that each chapter renders time differently... several cross-sections of time, some overlapping, like a giant kaleidoscope that alters its appearance with the viewer and the angle of vision." Yedioth Ahronoth "Fragile and ephemeral situations of closeness. .are described as well as growing distance that ends in divorce, relations with one's lover, and even random flirtations. The stories progress with sensitivity to women in general who are victims in situations where ties with others and with reality are tenuous; women who dream and for whom reality is difficult." Haaretz. Literature Section "Corinna succeeds in depicting the despair and pain of a woman who undergoes an abortion and tries to make sense of her family and friends. Most interesting are the interactions between a Jewish and an Arab family exchanging visits, their hostility in the background. All the stories reveal acute perception, psychological depth and accurate descriptions." Prof. Hanoch Guy, Chair, Hebrew Department, Temple University On Some Answer "This book is a literary gem... The work is set in the stunning events of the Six-Day War, but it was written before the October 1973 hostilities. Still in the turbulent realities, the book retains much of the radiance of the heroine, Hagit, despite being 'boxed in by life'." Hebrew Abstracts, The National Association of Professors of Hebrew, University of Louisville "Corinna, a new name in Hebrew literature, has so far published two stories, both marked by the refinement of the writing." Massa Literary Supplement, Davar About Revelation "The mystical atmosphere, poetic rhythm. and sentence structure and divisions create a special tension and bring the novella 'Revelation' to story-telling perfection." Aricha Prize Jury "It's been a long time since a writen word had moved me so deeply. I feel I've met with unique beauty. I would like to know more about the writer. She is indeed a revelation herself. Until now I saw in Agnon's Tehilla a model of good modern writing. But I think Corinna in Revelation has surpassed it." Kesster Jushka, Haifa TRANSLATOR'S NOTE / Michal Sapir As Walter Benjamin puts it in 'The task of the Translator, "all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages." As such, translation is very much concerned with the friction of foreignness and with the possibility of alleviating it through the act of communication. Much of Corinna's work inhabits borderlines and points of mediation; her stories are about exiles, immigrants and ambassadors, who talk with each other through telephones, photographs and films. Corinna herself, in a sense, always already writes in translation. She emigrated in 1947 from Romania to what was, under British rule, called Palestine, and Hebrew is not her native language. And so, throughout the book, the project of writing itself serves Corinna, and her protagonist Anna, as a tool for overcoming alienation from Self and the Other. Nevertheless, a profound doubt as to the possibility of mediation hovers above PINK PAGES. Corinna's borderline habitat often fills up with frustration and sadness, since the effort to connect can easily result, on the contrary, in a reinforcement of the wall. Reading PINK PAGES again after having lived outside of Israel for the last seven years, I was struck by the extent to which the Israeli existence described in it was informed by bereavement and grief. Time seems to always begin and end in death, starting, in the Diaspora, with an old world in ruin and continuing, in Israel, to be punctuated by the relentless periodicity of war. If the writing of the self is also a diving into the sources of memory, then Anna, the book's protagonist, who in the course of PINK PAGES goes back to trace a Jewish past in Europe, encounters on this path the ultimate Other: the dead. Time here becomes, as it were, an obstacle in the way of translation; its passage traces immigration, displacement, forgetfulness, misunderstanding, loss of touch. It produces silence. But at the same time I was struck by the courage and affirmation emanating from these stories. Anna's defiance takes shape in the act of writing itself, in the sheer audacity of attempting translation. And if time is depicted in the stories as a falling into change, discrepancy, and contingency, then it is also portrayed as producing the very borderline habitat, the very gap in which translation itself is able to take place. In the illuminated space opened up by PINK PAGES there is room enough for brave words to reverberate. Michal Sapir is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University.
11/12/02 Launching Corinna's ongoing weblog journals Read my weblog at: timeintelaviv.blogspot.com 11/02 Launching the corinna-hasofferett.com Web site 09/02 "Sodot" (A Minyan of Lovers) is published in the original Hebrew. 09/02 Reading: From ONCE SHE WAS A CHILD at the British Association of Slavic and E. European Studies, Oxford, UK
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