Two Poems
At my death
I will weep for your anguish that I died.
Before my death I say,
with all tenderness I say,
that if you could weep only a little,
like the doe
I once saw shed a tear or two
and then quit the place of its weeping
and climb to a distant crag
to see the world beyond tears –
If you could—
then I too would find a great stillness
like a river becalmed between its banks
flowing going to my fate.
If I meet you
my allusions will not be
like fine birds with delicate wings.
They will be like murky words
whose darkly secret depths
will hurt you with pain.
Happy is he who hurts this night
in your honor.
How many have fallen
in their fields
in battles raging for serenity.
Poems also
fall in battles—
they break apart from their rhymes
like women from their jewels.
They are silent
until there comes one like you.
Until you come.
—translated by Leon Wieseltier
To read a review of a new documentary on Avraham Halfi, click here.
Suggested Reading
I, Terrorist
Whither the great anti-American novel?
In Brief, Winter 2011
Judaism and Americanism, Young Tel Aviv, Psalms in the Arctic, Haym Solomon, and Funnyman

Spiritual Survival
In 1960, the novelist Vasily Grossman wrote to then-premier Nikita Khrushchev with an unusual intention. He wished, he wrote, to “candidly share my thoughts” with the most powerful man in a country that often murdered bearers of candor.

Sitting with Shylock on Yom Kippur
The poet Heinrich Heine imagined the merchant of Venice attending Neilah, the final service of Yom Kippur, but I find him earlier in the day, at Mincha, and we are listening together to the story of another Jew among Gentiles, bitter at being compelled to show mercy.
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