Confessions of a Frequent Flyer: America and Israel in the Work of Karen Alkalay-Gut

Abstract

America and Israel in the Work ofKaren Alkalay-Gut Confessions of a Frequent Flyer: America and Israel in the Work of Karen Alkalay-Gut Nikki Stiller Nikki Stiller is an Associate Professor ofEnglish at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The Forward. Midstream. Moment, Present Tense, and The New York Times. She is the author of several books, including a book ofpoetry, Notes ofa Jewish Nun (Merrick Cross-Cultural Communications, 1992), and Eve's Orphans: Mothers and Daughters in Medieval English Literature (Greenwood, 1980). 25 The poet Karen Alkalay-Gut, whose parents survived the Holocaust, was born in London, grew up in Rochester, New York, and now lives with her sabra husband and three children in Tel Aviv. An academic and a political activist as well as a poet, she stands at the intersection of three Jewish cultures: European, American, Israeli. Like many English-speaking immigrants to the Promised Land, however, her work travels between America, with its creature comforts and its emphasis upon the importance of individual rather than collective fulfillment, and Israel with its conflicting pieties and its compelling collective consciousness. Most ofher published work addresses multicultural ambivalences. Mechitza (part bilingual, Cross-Cultural Communications, 1986), for example, deals with the partition within orthodox Judaism, and within the believer's soul, separating woman from man, authority from experience, and so forth. A number of excellent poets living in Israel, indeed, Israelis writing in English, usually their mother tongue, extend the notion of modem marginality, edginess, mobility. The contributions of Richard Sherwin, an Orthodox intellectual, and Dennis Silk, an English-born iconoclast, speak the asides of the modem Hamlet-poet, in the scene but not quite of it. To engage or not engage in the ongoing mishigash, that is probably the question for the English-speaking, rather cosmopolitan Israeli intellectual. Such a conflict is probably irreconcilable for an Anglo-Saxonit, as Alkalay-Gut's most recent book in English, Ignorant Armies, reveals. This collection expresses the newcomer's emotional connection with, and alienation from, her adopted and adoptive country. The olah chadashah, or new immigrant, occupies a peculiar place in the Israeli hierarchy ofauthority--coveted, cosseted, offered tax-free toasters and condominiums, but also looked upon ironically, perhaps not truly respected. Not unlike American WASPs, people in Israel boast about how many dorat or generations their families have lived in Zion. 26 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 Several Alkalay-Gut poems reflect the wry skepticism that greets the cross-cultural Israeli, particularly the secular, English-speaking one. In "Return to Tel Aviv," the street cats, indigenous, hardy natives of cardboard boxes outside the makolet, the little grocery store, are unimpressed by her return: "So, you're back." Perhaps the olah does not feel she is entitled to speak? In "A Flat City, Tel Aviv," the English-speaking olim are spying on their neighbors from a penthouse belonging to one of them: We are intellectuals, immigrants, out of the gamesitting on the balcony taking measure ofothers....I But back in the United States, where she perhaps may feel that she has more of a right to express herself, she doubts having something to express. "English," she notes in "Living," is "for reading Shakespeare, writing of life." TItis very conflict may well define the poet and make her speak. In a poem entitled "Transportation," she is literally flying between the two nations, the two modes of thought and experience: There are always the ties ofresponsibilitytry to fly, you remember you owe something . to the earth. Now we are in a plane on that long, stuffy ride from New York emptying our wallets ofcredit cards to make room for identity folders, health clinic booklets, army releases, special permission passes for everything. (p. 30) The personal life, the life ofthe collective. In America the problem is too much privacy, no one knows and no one cares about your business. In Israel? Well, it's the other way around. Try to fmd time to write, time to speak or make love. The same sand that delights the lovers is the so~ce of contention, nationalist strife. In "Herzlia Beach: December, 1988," Alkalay-Gut writes: Ah...