“An Exile from the Sea with the Desert in His Mouth”: A Conversation with Iossif Ventura

Abstract

22 WLT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2016 photo : jean marie muggianu ( flickr . com / jmmuggianu ) B orn in Chania, Crete, in 1938, Iossif Ventura is a prominent Greek-Jewish poet and translator , a member of the Hellenic Authors’ Society, and the director of the electronic poetry magazine Poeticanet (www.poeticanet.com). His first volume of poetry, Υγρός κύκλος (Liquid circle), appeared in 1997 and his most recent volume , Το Παιχνίδι (The game), in 2015. Ventura is best known, however, for his two volumes of poetry about his experience and that of his fellow Cretan Jews during World War II. Ταναΐς (Tanaïs), which appeared in 2001, is named after the German ship carrying nine hundred prisoners—including the nearly three hundred Jews who comprised almost the entire Jewish population of the island—when it was sunk just offshore on June 9, 1944. Ventura revisited this theme again in Κυκλώνιο (Cyclone) of 2008, the title of which also references the Zyklon B gas the Nazis used on their victims in the extermination camps. The two volumes together were published in English translation in 2015 by Red Heifer Press under the title TANAIS: Kyklonio & Tanaïs. Two Poem Cycles Commemorating the Holocaust of the Jewish Community of Crete. Ventura currently resides in Athens. An Exile from the Sea with the Desert in His Mouth” A Conversation with Iossif Ventura by Adam J. Goldwyn Q&A Adam Goldwyn Iossif Ventura “ WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 23 Adam Goldwyn: Why did you decide in 2001 (when Tanaïs was first published) to tell the story of the Jews of Crete? And why did you revisit this theme in 2008? Iossif Ventura: For many years growing up in Athens, I tried to put barriers around my war memories and my experience as a hidden child to escape the feelings of depression and sadness they generated in me. When I started publishing my poems and when my second book was favorably received by critics, a friend of mine suggested I write a poem for the Jews of Crete. In reality what he proposed was to dig deeply within myself and retrieve all the well-hidden trauma that was engraved on my unconscious. I went to Chania and visited the house where I was born; I walked the streets of the old neighborhood near the Venetian port, which today is full of bars and restaurants , deprived of its Jewish population. I retrieved old photos, documents, and other things from my family. It was a very painful procedure, but I felt that I had a duty to the lost Jewish children. I felt that I had to talk for them, to tell their story, which is not well known even among other Jewish communities in Greece. Very few knew that the Germans forced all the Cretan Jews into the hold of a requisitioned commercial steamer named Tanaïs. Very few Greeks knew that this ship was torpedoed and sank along with its human cargo not far from the coast of the Greek island of Santorini . Very few knew that the loss of thοse people meant the end of old Jewish culture, which had endured for over two millennia and had given birth to great thinkers, philosophers , cabbalists, and poets. It may seem metaphysical, but writing these poems, I sometimes felt that my pen was guided by those lost children, that I was sharing their terror, their cries, their last moments in the hold of the Tanaïs. Though the book was very well received, I still had the feeling that something was missing, that I had not finished my poem. There were missing verses, missing feelings that had to be expressed. This is why I wrote Kyklonio. AG: In Tanaïs, you begin by listing the names and ages of the eighty-eight children who died when the ship sank, and then refer to the synagogue as an “orphaned tree.” Why did you choose this metaphor? IV: Today I have the sad distinction of being the only living Jewish male born in Crete. All that remains of the Jewish community of Crete is a very old synagogue—a Venetian building—that bears the Hebrew name Etz Hayyim, which means “tree of life.” This “tree of life” is orphaned now, as all its...