The Stones of Lifta by Marc Kaminsky

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Stones of Lifta by Marc Kaminsky Marc Jampole (bio) the stones of lifta Marc Kaminsky Dos Madres Press www.dosmadres.com/shop/the-stones-of-lifta-by-marc-kaminsky 77 Pages; Print; $17.00 "Hineni" (or "Hinani") is the heartfelt song the cantor sings before he begins leading the recitation of the Amidah—typically the longest prayer in Jewish services—on Yom Kippur. The cantor sings that although he is praying on behalf of all those present, only he should be blamed when he fails to do it right, not the entire community. The prayer starts with the Hebrew, "Hineni," which means "Here I am," the very words Moses utters when the Jewish god appears before him in the desert. For both the cantor and Moses, "Here I am" announces a willingness to take action to propitiate the deity on behalf of the community. Thus, when Marc Kaminsky uses the phrase "Unworthy as I am …" to begin "Hinani," the first poem in his latest poetry collection, The Stones of Lifta, he signals, at least to knowledgeable Jews, that these poems will deal with a communal guilt that he feels unworthy to assuage or explain away. And in fact, we could conceive of the entire collection as an attempt to expiate the communal guilt of Israelis and all Jews regarding the violence perpetrated against Palestinians since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. The Lifta of the title was a Palestinian village on the outskirts of Jerusalem with distinctive stone houses that never held more than about 2,250 inhabitants. During the 1947–48 civil war in Palestine, Arab leaders asked Lifta's residents to abandon the village; some did and some of these came back. Arabs fought several battles with Jewish forces at the site before every Palestinian finally abandoned Lifta. Later Lifta housed Jewish refugees. After the war many Jewish families settled there, but all left at the end of the 1960s. The Israeli government then briefly used parts of the village as a drug rehabilitation clinic and a high school. In 2017 the last Jewish residents left Lifta, and the village, decrepit stone structures and all, was declared an Israeli nature preserve. In these poems—all about Lifta, its inhabitants and its history—Kaminsky [End Page 125] presents the views of a wide range of nuanced voices, mostly Palestinian, but also of Israelis and American Jews. We read—and feel—the full range of emotions and rationales expressed by peoples of both nations fighting over one territory. Various Palestinian voices mourn the loss of land and people, offer justifications of terrorism, swear defiance against torture and economic mistreatment, evoke nostalgia for a past life, or express hatred of Jews. The Jewish voices in these poems reference the Holocaust as a justification for claiming the land, evoke the threats to the state of Israel and Israeli Jewish lives posed by the Arab world, and remind the reader of the Jews' ancient claims to the land. "First Cousins," for example, is an argument between two first cousins, one Israeli, one an American Jew (who likely is supposed to be the author). At Lifta, the American cousin expresses deep sympathy for the Palestinians, which the Israeli cousin mocks with: And you come wheeling in your baggageof opinions, stuffed with unearnedcompassion for victims of the Nakba. and Aren't you just anotherself-hating Jew? Note that "Nakba" is what the Arab world calls the mass migration that occurred in 1948 when 700,000 Arab residents of the territory under control of the Israelis either fled or were expelled from their homes. By the end of "First Cousins," the American cousin recognizes that deep inside himself lurks a blood-thirsty nature that would have responded to the Palestinian presence and threat with exactly the same violence as Jewish settlers did and Israelis have done: And I see Lifta is the only gatethrough which I could have come to Jerusalemto face the rage and perplexity of contending with youand the horror of encountering the murderous tribesman in myself. A number of the other poems, including "Constellations of Lifta" and "The Coffee House at...