Once she was a child (Noffey Haneffesh: Soul Landscapes)

Soul Landscapes tells the universal story of childhood in times of upheaval, as conveyed by some of the most extraordinary international woman writers. Done mostly on location, these intimate encounters mirror a rainbow of human existence shaped by injustice, turmoil and struggle, and still victorious: six year-old Russian Svetlana Vasilenko awaiting death while caught between the Powers dueling with nuclear bombs; the little Italian child Dacia Maraini starved in a Japanese concentration camp; twelve-year-old. Belgian Am?lie Nothomb, reading by candlelight in a Bangladeshi lepers' house; five-year-old Leena Lander living in the Finnish prison for delinquent boys where her father worked as a supervisor, contemplating in fear and horror her sexually mangled doll found thrown in the forest; eight-year-old Palestinian Anissa Darwish torn by war from the Malkha village of her sweet childhood and the author herself - Corinna Hasofferett, born in Tecuci, Romania - all and each of the writers in this book map the way to survival and hope.
They ask us also to take a second look at our own life, and, well informed, to make sure the right decisions are taken in all that concerns this precious little world.

As a literary form, ONCE SHE WAS A CHILD is a hybrid: it owns the genes of literary fiction, with its attention to language, ambiguities and symbols, carved out by the author's mostly invisible questions, and editing; and it carries the genes of narrative nonfiction as those are real life stories of real, and most impressive persons, showing how gloriously they've survived Evil. Glimpses from The Past, of childhood recollections, set, like pearls on a string, with the author's journal as the connecting thread or background. The reader is invited to absorb. At the end of the book s/he'll discover in a separate section, as an addendum, how far they've reached in The Present.

HudnaPress. Hebrew Publication Date: Spring 2003
Rights information can be obtained at: hudnapress (at) gmail (dot) com

Excerpt:

In the Beginning

When my children were little we were standing one day at the bus stop. It was very hot, August. Suddenly, across from us, two children, suddenly one of them cried to his friend: 'You Arab!'

I looked at my children startled. The younger was then three, the same age I was when I came out of kindergarten and they threw stones at us and cried, 'Jidans, go away to Palestine!' Children I'd played with the day before.

I wanted my children to know that 'Arab' was the name of a people, not a curse.

So I made contact through friends of some friends with members of the Arab intelligentsia who lived in a village in the Galilee and we visited them, they visited us, a contact was made. Mahmud and Lutfia Diab, from Tamra, two hours from Tel Aviv. That was in 1970.

Three years later Lutfia's younger sister, Amal, married her teacher, Munir Diab. And Munir began in those years to manage there the first Arabic community center. So in 1975 the idea occurred to me to arrange a meeting between educated youths from Tamra and from a neighboring Jewish settlement with Jewish and Arabic artists. Munir loved the idea and thanks to him it really happened. We had meetings and conversations with Aharon Meged, Anton Shamas, A. B. Yehoshua. Once every two weeks. One time in Tamra and one time in Shlomi. Finally we had an evening of theater improvisation with the late Peter Fry. He came several times and prepared them.

From the start I'd limited my involvement in that for only half a year. I would come there every two weeks. Shlomi is located eight hundred meters, half a mile, from the Lebanese border. At that time terrorists murdered at night a mother and her two year old daughter, in Dovev. And still people came to the meetings and participated. Very willingly. But in one of the meetings, in Shlomi, someone said, 'Fine. Only you are returning to Tel Aviv and we are staying here not knowing what terrorist will roll upon us at night from the mountain.'

In my apartment in Tel Aviv we lived at the time five people in a space of four hundred and twenty square feet. No room of my own, there wasn't even a bedroom.

Then I thought, if there was a place to which artists would come for a stay of some weeks or months so they can be free to create, then both the artists and the community would benefit. It would answer to the needs.

I returned to Tel Aviv and began telling all kinds of people and organizations, that that was what they had to do. Some said, How come, and some would say, 'Why not, do it.' In those days the world was divided for me into dreamers, and doers. Two separate groups. Me, do? I come up with ideas, and they should do. But all the time it still bothered, burned in my bones. In 1984 I suddenly got up and said, 'I am acting to found such a place.' Now I understand that in that moment I turned from a child citizen into an adult citizen. Very difficult. You need to go to the world, and bow down. It's impossible without money.

Within all these hardships, in Europe as well as in the United States, I would go into bookstores, to find solace. And I would think, So many books, So many woman writers! Who are they?

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"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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