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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Noffey Haneffesh (Once She Was A Child)

Noffey Haneffesh 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 Amelie 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 - 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, Noffey Haneffesh (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.

Yesterday I spoke with the bride. Elfriede Jelinek.

In Hebrew, the recipient of a prize is its groom, or, as in Elfriede Jelinek's case - The Bride.



1.

Tel-Aviv, 8 October 2004

Elfriede. Her voice sounded close, in both senses.

She said, in a rather melancholy tone, "You see, Corinna, I told that I want to retire from public life - and now the Nobel prize...

"It's not so sad."

She laughed softly.



The sleepy pond, the pine trees, the round swing chair which hang in the living room, the grand piano on which she played for me and sang "glucklick ist wer vergibt, was doch nich zu andern ist..." - all this I can see now before my eyes as if not eight years have passed since our meeting back then in Austria.



2.

Vienna,August 26, 1996



Elfriede Jelinek suggested we meet at the Cafe Museum. Over the phone we gave each other identification marks. She said, "I'm tall and like every good Austrian woman, I have two blond braids bound on my head..."



I was staying with Eva, a retired journalist, through the recommendation of a mutual friend.



She's in her early fifties and keeps saying, "Everybody is already sick of hearing about the Holocaust."



3.

In January 1996 I found, in London, a book by Elfriede Jelinek. A few months later, on Holocaust Memorial Day, I saw written in an Israeli newspaper, in an article on Anti-Semitism In The World Today, that she, or one of her parents, was Jewish; that there had been attacks on her and that she had been threatened by anti-Semites; that she had immigrated to Germany.



I wrote to her, "I see that you are living in Vienna. I hope that the story about the attacks is fantasy as well."



She wrote back, on the margins of a street poster's offprint illustrated with the picture of a violin - on which was written:



"Lieben Sie... Jelinek... oder Kunst und Kultur?" - "Are you fond of... Jelinek... or of Art and Culture?"





I was astonished. Surely this is slander. The cultural organizations and institutions in Austria passed it over in silence, did not react?



4.

The large cafe was fairly crowded and Elfriede worked it out with the waiter to take us into the inner room.



We sat there next to one of the dark old wooden tables, at first by the windows, but Elfriede, who writes in a very strong voice, talked almost in whispers, and we moved further inside, far from the noises of the road and the street.



Half an hour later, at exactly five o'clock, came the waiter and drew the wooden doors wide open.



"At five they open this room for customers," said Elfriede calmly.

In Vienna order is order.



She said, "It's too noisy here. We'll go to my house."



5.

We took the underground from there to hers and her mother's house on the edge of the town. Elfriede, who was before a trip to her partner in Munich, went to put the food she had bought for her mother in the modest refrigerator. She left me in a small living room which had only a grand piano, a transparent chair hanging like a swing, a desk, and panoramic windows facing a large natural garden and a pond - not one of those manufactured models, but real water and vegetation touching it and in it.



No buses, no cars. Just the sound of birds busy preparing dinner.

I went out to the pond, tears gathering in my eyes as I was thinking,

At such a place one can be only happy.



6.

The dog clung to me and because I was worried that her heavy breathing would cover Elfriede's voice in the recording, I pushed her away a few times before Elfriede said - Not right the first time! - said gently,



"Push her aside softly, because she falls. Her rear legs have nothing to hold on to, her tights are impaired from birth. She's a poor thing."



7.

Elfriede has an uncle in Denver, Colorado, in the United States, with whom she corresponds. His father, Albert Felsenburg, was a journalist, a colleague of Herzel's they were both writing for the Neue Freie Press, and then, as Elfriede read to me from her uncle's letter,



"Then the pogroms stormed Russia and dad said, 'Theo, I read and hear such horrible things about what the Cossacks do to the Jews. Go to Russia and see if it's true.'



Herzel went and saw that it was even worse and he founded the Zionist movement. My father was among the first members."



9.

Albert Felsenburg was sent to the Dachau concentration camp on the first day the Germans came to Austria. He was handed over by his Christian fellow workers at the newspaper.



10.

She said, "The story with Herzel is a legend in our family. I think it is a true story. So that we have a share in the founding of the Zionist movement - which led to the founding of the state of Israel."



11.

Before the meeting, corresponding from Israel, I told her about "Noffey Haneffesh" - Soul Landscapes - the book I was working on.



I had no clue then to where this book will lead me.



In Vienna, I listened.

It got dark. One tape after the other I kept changing.



She said, in a tiredly tranquil voice,

"It's been ages since I've last spoken that much."

In the corridor, on my way out, she showed me the signs in the door left from the times her father - torn by guilt, or by an erased memory - would cut in it, as the door was kept locked so he won't wander out and get lost.



Now as then in my ears rings Elfriede's melodious voice, singing that famous line from The Feldermouse operetta by Johan Straus. 'Those are happy who forget what can't be changed.'"



A very popular song. Everybody knows and whistles it. Every year on New Year's Eve this operetta is shown on television. Even children can sing it.



"This is Happy Happy Austria," she had said then.



12.

I came back to Eva. In an adjunct room she had a pair of terribly noisy parrots. She covered their cage, closed the double doors, and the echo of their shrill voiced remained with us as the smell of burnt food, sinking into the rich carpets and sofas.



While Eva, standing at the oven burners kept repeating:

"Everybody is already sick of hearing about the Holocaust. It was more than fifty years ago! It's boring!"





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

read it in Hungarian; in Farsi; in Russian; in Polish;

Notes on Once She Was A Child

Instead of introduction, a few personal notes...



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. 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 town 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 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?













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

(c) Translated from the Hebrew by Michal Sapir

read this in Polish;in Hungarian; in Russian;

Lidia Jorge

A few months after I had returned from the first meetings in Paris in September 1995, as I was transcribing the conversation with the French poet Anne Portugal from the tape onto my computer, I heard her saying again how her name always surprised everyone, it was such a rare name in France.

I opened the Tel-Aviv telephone directory and found there alone some twenty Portugals, Portugalis, Portugueses, Portos.





Half a year later, in April 1996, in Lisbon, Lidia Jorge told me that in fact in Portugal everyone is a bit Jewish - almost in every family there was an element of the "New Christians". That is what they call the Jews who had been forced by the Inquisition to convert to Christianity, and that is also what they call their descendants to this day.



Lidia Jorge lives in a modern neighborhood which was built just after the Second World War. At four-thirty in the afternoon, still in broad daylight, a young woman who had helped me find the name on the doorbell asked me to hold the elevator for her till she picked up her post from the mailbox.

I assumed she was in a hurry, and waited.



Lidia, young looking, opened the door cautiously, and I followed her into a sun drenched living room. The smile, the comfortable clothes she was wearing and the soft coaches signaled warmth. She said, "I’m old-fashioned too. I believe a writer should be engaged in the world."



Before the trip I had read one of her stories, in English translation, "The Proof of the Birds".



In the story a man tries to count birds in order to prove the existence of God.

I told her that was exactly what I was doing - trying to count, the women writers...



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

excerpt from my introduction to Lisbon's chapter at "Once She Was a Child" (Noffey Haneffesh, HudnaPress 2002

Her Grandmother's Jesus

It's impossible to find on Amazon anything under Dannish Women Writers, and even less so any of Hanne Marie Svendsen's books. I did find, and plenty, under "Cultural Insularity".



If you have not read yet Hanne Marie Svendsen, read on:



"...Almost every day we used to visit my maternal great grandmother.



She was in bed for years, sick with leukemia and was always dressed in white... had a string attached to her bed so she could pick herself up.



I remember a picture of Jesus above her bed, a sentimental picture, with lambs. Whenever she looked at Jesus, I felt she didn't approve of him. She approved of Yehova, the God of the Old Testament, because he was strong, but I had the feeling she thought Jesus was much too soft.



The priest came to visit once a week and then he had cherry wine and little cookies.



In her youth she had been dancing but when she experienced this great religious "awakening", she became very pious.



The religious movement was around the eighteen-eighties. A very stern religious movement. They had to give up playing cards, dancing. Sex was a black cloud.



Living so dangerously, with the sea at their front door every day, they needed something secure, that stern, that rigid - just to survive.



Dancing was a sin, yes..."



My father and mother did not belong to this group at all..."



from Once She Was a Child, (Noffey Haneffesh/ Corinna, HudnaPress 2003) - a book on conversations with international women writers, on Childhood as the mythological Paradise.

The Good, The Bad, The Beautiful

ONCE SHE WAS A CHILD 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 Amelie Nothomb, reading by candle light 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 - 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 my 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.



Tel-Aviv, 12 January 2001

I am working on the conversation with Svetlana, and in my ears her melancholy voice keeps echoing, "Each moment we don't know, now, at this very second, "the blow" will come."



In a duet with my radio, here, now.

The day before yesterday they announced that Saddam Hussein had pledged not to attack Israel.

Yesterday came an Iraqi denial. "We were not exchanging messages with Israel."



The United States announced that it would not attack Iraq before the end of the Winter Olympics, on February 22; The United States will not attack before Parents' Day at the university of the Clintons' daughter, on March first, says the radio.



Svetlana arrived at Yaddo, an artist colony in Upstate New York, a few days before I left it.



In Israel I asked Victor, a friend who came several times especially from Jerusalem and translated word for word from the Russian of our conversation. When we finished, he said, "My wife had been the victim of an atomic accident, before she was even born."



November 25, 1998



Russia is helping Iran build atomic reactors. Back in February Victor had said:



"My wife was born in 1958. I found out about her problem right when we met, in the beginning of the Eighties. I found out that she was suffering from glandular enlargement. The symptoms of the disease were that she would get tired very quickly and have headaches. After a medical checkup, they suggested an operation to remove the gland. In the course of treating her, the doctors, who looked into her life history, said that most probably it was a result of the fact that her mother had been pregnant with her after an explosion which took place in 1957 near them, in a town which was then called Cheliabinsk 65, and today has a more civilian name, Sneginsk. The place is in the Ural Mountains. Northeast Russia.



"They built a center for nuclear research there, and that's where the explosion occurred.

"This town was fenced in and under strict guard, like Svetlana's.



"My wife wasn't living inside the military town but in a village a few dozens kilometers away.

"From the rumors I learned that radioactive water had gathered in containers above the allowed ceiling allowed, exploded and poured out into the area, and permeated into the lakes and rivers in the neighborhood. There were many lakes there, and streams and rivers.



"They didn't make any official announcement, but they evacuated all those who lived in a radius of five, ten kilometers. They built new villages for them and destroyed the old ones.



"The main problem, as I see it, is that this radiation spread in the water, through the streams and the lakes - because the lakes there are connected to each other, that's how nature is over there, a very beautiful area, lakes, thick forests...



"They lived in the village until she was fifteen - then her father got an appointment in the county town, managing the milk industry there.

"He told me that he'd even spoken with the members of the committee which had been set up to deal with the problem. They'd set up several committees there, a military one, a government one, and many senior officials came to the area - it was the first radioactive disaster in Russia on such a scale. In 1957.



"And even he didn't know exactly, they didn't know the real dangers. No one explained to people what radiation was, what it meant, what radiation absorption was.



"They didn't explain it to the inhabitants."



But all their food, the animals - -



"Exactly: cows, milk, grass, food for the cows - the whole environment there was highly contaminated, and is still contaminated today, as far as I know.



"Her father was responsible for the milk. I believe they inspected the milk secretly so that even he and the locals didn't know, it was known only to the scientists, who had been signed to secrecy, and to party members.



"The actual fact that there had been an explosion was known more or less the whole time, but they started writing about it intensively and openly only after Gurbachev came to power and the freedom of speech over there developed a little, and especially after the Chernobyl disaster.

"Chernobyl was in May 1986.



"After the Chernobyl disaster there was a great rise in awareness in Russia of the nuclear problem and many residents in many counties woke up and started looking around them, what's this atomic station over here and what's this factory over there, and what kind of material is being buried here.



"People started to open their eyes a little."



Svetlana Vasilievna Vasilenko

Yesterday I told you about 1962 and about the Caribbean Crisis.

I was six at the time.



There was a quarrel between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the atomic quarrel which could have resulted in the end of the world. Kennedy gave Khrushchev an ultimatum, to get the missiles out of Cuba within an allotted time.



And in our town, because it was a missile town, and it concerned all of us, our fathers and our mothers and us children - everyone really, at work, at home, in kindergarten, everyone was talking about it. Will there be war or not. Many officers used to come to our house, because we had a television set, and my mother was known for her hospitality, and they talked about these problems at the table. They sat around the table, and we children played next to them.



Then father disappeared. By then he had already been sleeping at the launching site. All the officers were sleeping there. It was already a state of emergency.

For a week we didn't know what was going on.



One day, when I was in kindergarten, they came to us and said, "Take the children to the steppe because the ultimatum is about to expire tonight and we can expect a 'blow'."

Michelle Grangaud

"...It's very heavy to carry a name.



When I was published for the first time I did consider adopting a pseudonym, but then I thought that after a while the name I would choose and like would still be a name, and I would be imprisoned in it.



So I decided I would keep my natural name.

I don't like it very much, it's not very nice.

It's the name I'd received.



And you, do you like your name?...