Bagdad Haifa Berlin

 
 

Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin

Gedichte

40 Selected Poems

Mati Shemoelof
AphorismA Verlag, Berlin, 2019
Bilingual Hebrew–German edition
89 pages
ISBN 978-3-86575-076-1

Translated from Hebrew into German by Jan Kühne
Arabic translation by Nael Eltoukhy
Afterword by Jan Kühne

Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin brings together 40 poems from Mati Shemoelof’s Hebrew poetry books and presents them for the first time in German translation. The bilingual edition places the original Hebrew poems alongside Jan Kühne’s German translations, creating a dialogue between the language in which the poems were written and the language of Shemoelof’s new life in Berlin.

The three cities in the title mark three connected but very different worlds: Bagdad, the city from which Shemoelof’s Iraqi-Jewish family came; Haifa, where he was born and grew up; and Berlin, where he has lived since 2013 as a Hebrew-language writer.

The book brings these places together through questions of migration, memory, Mizrahi and Arab-Jewish identity, Jewish history, belonging and language. The poems move between family memories and contemporary political realities, between Israel and Germany, and between the experience of home and the experience of being a stranger.

Rather than presenting identity as something fixed, Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin shows it as something formed through movement. The three cities are not simply geographical locations. They become different layers of memory and belonging, carried by the poet from one language and country into another.

From Mizrahi poet to "Juden Dichtar"

Jan Kühne’s extensive afterword places Shemoelof’s poetry within the history of multilingual Jewish writing.

Kühne describes an important transformation: in Israel, Shemoelof emerged as a Mizrahi poet, exploring his family memories of Baghdad and developing a poetic voice that challenged the dominance of Ashkenazi cultural narratives. In Berlin, this identity begins to shift.

Kühne writes about Shemoelof becoming a "juden dichtar" — a deliberately hybrid expression combining German and Hebrew. The phrase appears in the poem ish bin juden dichtar, one of the most striking examples in the book of Shemoelof’s multilingual experimentation.

The poem is written primarily in German but remains deeply marked by Hebrew. Its title itself creates a collision between languages: German grammar and Hebrew letters, Jewish identity and German language, past and present.

Kühne describes this as an attempt to create a form of "German Hebrew" or "Hebrew German" — a language that does not simply translate one language into another but allows the two to exist inside each other.

A language between Hebrew, Arabic and German

Language is one of the central subjects of the collection.

Kühne connects Shemoelof’s work to the German-Jewish poet Ludwig Strauss, who once asked in Hebrew:

"Where is the language in which I can say everything that is inside me?"

Strauss described his two languages as the two lips of his heart. For Shemoelof, however, the linguistic constellation is different: Hebrew is his writing language, Arabic belongs to the Iraqi-Jewish family history he inherited, and German is the language of his life in Berlin.

This produces a particularly complex form of multilingual identity. Shemoelof does not simply move from Hebrew into German. Arabic, Hebrew and German remain present simultaneously, even when one of them is absent from the poem.

In the poem "Work", for example, foreign languages appear inside Hebrew as competitors and companions. In another poem, the Arabic word shams — "sun" — enters the Hebrew poem and opens a connection to the Arabic language that the poet inherited but never fully possessed. Kühne reads this as a form of linguistic and cultural reorientation.

Baghdad

Baghdad represents the family history behind Shemoelof’s writing.

As a poet from an Iraqi-Jewish family, Shemoelof returns repeatedly to the world that existed before his family’s migration to Israel. Baghdad is therefore not simply a place of origin. It is a space of memory, absence and inherited identity.

The collection explores the consequences of the disappearance of much of the Arab-Jewish cultural world and the complicated relationship between Jewish and Arab identities after the establishment of Israel.

This history is not presented as a simple nostalgia for a lost homeland. Instead, it becomes part of a larger question: what forms of Jewish identity become possible when Jewish history is understood not only through Europe, but also through the Arab and Middle Eastern worlds?

Haifa

Haifa is the city of Shemoelof’s childhood and the central Israeli location in the book’s geography.

Between the family history of Baghdad and the later experience of Berlin, Haifa represents the place where these histories became Israeli.

The city is connected to questions of class, Mizrahi identity, family, childhood and the social realities of Israel. The movement from Haifa to Berlin therefore does not erase the Israeli past. It creates a distance from which that past can be reconsidered.

The three places in the title consequently form a movement rather than a simple chronology:

Baghdad → Haifa → Berlin

But the poems continually move back and forth between them.

Berlin

Berlin becomes the place where Shemoelof’s identities begin to overlap in unexpected ways.

The Israeli Mizrahi poet enters a German city carrying Hebrew, Iraqi-Jewish family memories and the history of Israel. At the same time, he encounters German language and German-Jewish history.

This encounter produces new questions about Jewish identity in Germany after the Holocaust, about migration from Israel to Germany, and about what it means for an Arab-Jewish Israeli poet to begin writing in relation to German culture.

In the poem ish bin juden dichtar, Shemoelof brings the history and trauma of European Jewry into his poetry for the first time in this particular form. Kühne notes that earlier poems had already addressed the Iraqi-Jewish exodus and the Palestinian Nakba; in Berlin, the Shoah and German-Jewish history become another layer of his poetic landscape.

"Lover of Two Continents"

The collection includes the poem "Lover of Two Continents", written in Berlin.

The poem captures the experience of belonging to more than one place while feeling completely at home in none of them. The speaker describes himself as:

"מְאַהֵב שֶׁל שְׁתֵּי יַבָּשׁוֹת"

"A lover of two continents."

The phrase became one of the key images through which Shemoelof’s Berlin period has been understood: not as a clean break with Israel, but as a new existence between places, languages and histories.

A Mizrahi alternative in Hebrew poetry

Shemoelof’s poetry emerged from the Mizrahi cultural and political movement in Israel.

His work challenges the assumption that Hebrew literature must be understood primarily through a European or Ashkenazi cultural framework. The Mizrahi poetic voice brings Arabic-Jewish history, Middle Eastern memory, class and marginalization into the center of Hebrew literary culture.

Kühne describes Mizrahi poets as creating a poetic alternative to Israeli cultural dominance — what Shemoelof has called a "third way of poetry", beyond the canonical poles represented by Homer and Bialik.

Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin carries this Mizrahi perspective into Germany.

The book therefore does not simply introduce a Hebrew poet to German readers. It also brings a different Jewish history into the German literary landscape: a Jewish history shaped by Baghdad, Haifa and the Arab world as much as by Europe.

Selected poems and themes

The collection includes poems dealing with:

  • Baghdad and Iraqi-Jewish family memory

  • Haifa and childhood

  • Berlin and migration

  • Mizrahi identity

  • Arab-Jewish identity

  • Hebrew, German and Arabic

  • Jewish identity in contemporary Germany

  • the Shoah and European Jewish history

  • the Nakba and the disappearance of Arab-Jewish culture

  • exile and belonging

  • family and memory

  • political violence and social inequality

  • love, loneliness and the body

  • multilingual writing and translation

Critical and academic response

The collection has received attention in both literary and academic contexts.

Jan Kühne’s essay "Vom Misrachipoet zum juden dichtar: Mati Shemoelof setzt über", published in Jalta. Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart, examines Shemoelof’s transition from Mizrahi poet in Israel to a multilingual Jewish poet in Berlin. The essay focuses particularly on translation, multilingualism and the linguistic experiments of ish bin juden dichtar.

The Jüdischer Salon am Grindel described the collection as an exploration of the cultural, political and literary connections and ruptures between the Iraqi origins of Shemoelof’s family, his Israeli birthplace and his chosen home in Germany. The organization also emphasized the book’s importance as an encounter with contemporary Hebrew poetry and Israeli diasporic literature.

The book was also presented at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2019 under the title "Poems. Texts between Baghdad, Haifa and Berlin."

Readings and presentations

The book has been presented in literary events in Germany, including readings and conversations at Jewish cultural institutions and universities.

In November 2019, Shemoelof presented Bagdad – Haifa – Berlin at the Jüdischer Salon am Grindel in Hamburg. The event focused on the three places, three cultures and three forms of belonging represented by the book.

The poems were later presented at the University of Leipzig, where the university described the collection as representing different stages of Shemoelof’s family history: Baghdad, where his family came from; Haifa, where he grew up; and Berlin, his chosen home. The university emphasized the book’s exploration of "home in foreignness" and "foreignness in home."

The publisher also provides video recordings of Shemoelof reading poems from the collection, including "ish bin juden dichtar" and "A Jewish Arab in Berlin."

From Hebrew to German

Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin is more than a translation project. It is a book about what happens to poetry when it crosses languages.

The Hebrew originals remain present beside the German translations. The reader can therefore see the distance between the two languages, but also the possibilities created by their encounter.

This is particularly important in Shemoelof’s work because the question of translation is inseparable from the question of identity. The poet himself lives between languages, and translation becomes another form of migration.

The book's three cities therefore also describe three linguistic and cultural positions:

Baghdad — inherited memory
Haifa — Israeli formation
Berlin — diasporic transformation

Together they form a poetic geography in which identity is never finished and belonging is never limited to a single place.

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AphorismA Verlag

Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin
ISBN 978-3-86575-076-1

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