Boredom Poem by gershon hepner

Boredom’s a corrosive force
from which aggression may escape,
not only fighting wars, of course,
when it can even lead to rape,
but in the course of lives we lead
in peaceful homes where, when we’re bored,
we think there is a greater need
for pens than sharpness of the sword
that’s their alternative. Yet when
there’s nothing that should make us burn
in houses where our boredom wallows
aggression sometime may return
to roost with us, just like the swallows
that fly in March each year to breed
in Capistrano. Similes
like this, and boredom, may mislead,
yet we who lack the expertise
to understand how swallows find
their way to Capistrano lack
the expertise to leave behind,
when bored, aggression, and attack
for no good reason those we love,
and those we don’t, a fortiori;
just like a swallow to a dove
is boredom to memento mori.

Inspired by David Myer’s review of Khirbet Khizeh by by Smilansky Yizhar, translated by Nicholas de Lange and Y. Dweck (“Victory and Sorrow, ” TNR, October 22,2008) . I was particularly interested in the review because in 1957 I studied some short stories by Agnon with Yizhar in a Hebrew Seminar organized by Levi Gertner. This was an eye-opening experience for me, following which I started to read Agnon and translated a number of his short stories, which I published in my medical school’s journal, The St. Mary’s Hospital Gazette: Myers writes:
The short history of Hebrew as a modern language has yielded, over the course of little more than a century, an impressively long list of literary masters-the early twentieth-century Brenner and Bialik; the mid-century Nobel laureate Agnon; and the renowned contemporaries Amichai, Oz, Yehoshua, and Grossman. Much less known outside Israel, but certainly one of the most significant figures in the Hebrew literary canon, is Yizhar Smilansky, who wrote under the transposed pen name S. Yizhar, and died in Israel two years ago. Stylistically, Yizhar was a quiet revolutionary, expanding the register of literary Hebrew through a modern style that attended to the cadences and the phrasings of the Bible. With a sharp eye for physical description, Yizhar artfully lavished words upon the landscape of his land. He slowly unfolded its forbidding beauty in Faulknerian sentences that morphed into stream-of-consciousness paragraphs, whose hypnotic rhythm was periodically jolted by sharp ruptures in the plot. And thematically he was a stealthy provocateur, alternately planting bravado and self-doubt, insouciance and moral indignation, in his protagonists-ambivalent characters who both upheld and undermined the Zionist narrative of noble struggle for the ancient Jewish homeland. This iconoclastic side notwithstanding, Yizhar came to be known by many contemporaries and critics as the quintessential writer of his generation-the so-called Palmach Generation (named after the Haganah strike force that played a leading role in the Jewish fight for Palestine in 1948) . A good part of this reputation is owed to the summa summarum of Yizhar's literary career, a sprawling 1,100-page novel about the war of 1948 called Yeme Ziklag, or The Days of Ziklag, which appeared in 1958. The novel depicted in exhaustive detail the activities and the emotions of a group of young Israeli soldiers engaged in a weeklong battle in 1948. The decidedly unheroic account of the soldiers leads one to wonder whether Yizhar really belongs to the Palmach Generation. As the literary scholar Dan Miron has observed, he was born five to ten years before other members of this generation, and he did not share in the euphoric spirit of triumph and redemption that accompanied the Jewish victory in 1948. Nowhere is this lack of euphoria, this unexpected dourness of historical vision, clearer than in a novella that Yizhar wrote in 1949, a year after the war in which he participated as an intelligence officer. Khirbet Khizeh was published along with a much briefer short story, 'Ha-Shavui, ' or 'The Prisoner, ' which tells of an army unit's capture and mistreatment of an innocent Arab shepherd; but it was Khirbet Khizeh that became a cause celebre in Israel. Thousands of copies were sold, and reviews and discussions of the novella swirled in the Israeli press for months, even years. What stood at the center of this remarkable work-and what provoked so much controversy in its day-was Yizhar's portrayal of an Israeli army unit called upon to stake out, occupy, and then expel the residents of a fictional Palestinian Arab town called Khirbet Khizeh, which had been vanquished in the war. Yizhar's typically languid pacing, whereby the unit is beset by boredom and puerile squabbles as it aimlessly wanders the countryside awaiting orders, is undone by the brutality and indifference of the Israeli soldiers as they expel the Arab residents from the village.

10/23/08