Israel's Natan Zach was a wonderful poet – but also a racist

Mati Shemoelof examines the tension between Natan Zach’s celebrated poetry and his racist remarks about Mizrahim. Reflecting on Zach’s legacy, Mizrahi poetry and the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide in Israel, Shemoelof questions how literary culture remembers influential writers while confronting the racism embedded in their words and the wider cultural structures of Israeli society.

Originally published in Haaretz.

Below, the first sentence is based on the wording of our story as we wrote it in 2010. “The Mizrahim will get the Blacks, and the Ashkenazim will get the bastards .... The idea arose to take in people who have nothing in common. Some come from the highest culture – Western European culture – and some come from the caves.” This is how the late poet Natan Zach described Israeli society in an interview on the Channel 10 program “Hamakor” (“The Source”) in July 2010.

No, Zach didn’t invent racism in Israel but gave it a voice, provoking demonstrations and boycotts against him and becoming a disgrace among the educated Mizrahi community. The poet Roy Hasan wrote his poem “The State of Ashkenaz,” which made waves at events by Israel’s Ars Poetica poetry collective.

Hasan, referring to the Ashkenazi writer Yoram Kaniuk, who died in 2013, wrote: “I did not mourn Kaniuk / And I burned Natan Zach’s books / And I do not celebrate your independence / Until a state is established for me / If you divorce me, I’ll go.” (This poem appeared in Hasan’s first book of poetry, which translates as “The dogs that barked in our childhood were muzzled.”)

Natan Zach’s racism is so different from his clean writing about human destiny: “Not good, a man being alone / But he is alone anyway. / And he’s waiting and he’s alone / And he lingers and he’s alone. And he alone knows / That even if it is delayed / Let him come, he will come.”

Upon learning of his death, most writers treated Zach’s poems in a clean, dignified and loving way. Kindness and lamentations poured out from all corners of Facebook. I waited until after the shivah, the seven-day mourning period, to write about the Ashkenazi left’s euphemisms and the silence of the Mizrahi camp after the passing of someone who was called a national poet.

How can one write about “Not good, a man being alone” and forget his words about the Mizrahi people who came “from the caves”? How can one forget an entire generation of Mizrahim who were educated on Ars Poetica’s poetry events, the poetry of Adi Keissar, Roy Hasan and others?

The euphemism was celebrated. Articles celebrated Zach’s universality, his existentialist writing, his joining of the literary group Likrat (Toward), the many musical adaptations of his poems, and so much more. No mention was made of the fact that European racism internalized by German Jews had emigrated with them to Israel.

If no objections, here I’ve used way of thinking so as not to repeat the very formal word discourse.

Natan Zach was born in Berlin in 1930 as Harry Seitelbach to a German-Jewish father and an Italian-Catholic mother. Like many German Jews, the struggle between East and West penetrated into their way of thinking. The German Jews saw themselves above the Eastern European Jews, and so the ethnic hierarchies of Europe penetrated into the internal Jewish discourse.

Similarly, here I’ve used genre so as not to repeat discourse.

Also, the last line, the scroll was signed over Israel doesn’t sound right in English; can we write it as I’ve done it, change it or take it out?

Later, with the emigration of German Jews to Israel, the East-West classification also emigrated. And what Zach said about the Mizrahim is actually a whole genre that was brought into Israel, and within "the East" the Mizrahim were placed, and within "the West" the Ashkenazim were placed, and the deal was sealed.

Researcher Aziza Khazzoom explained this in her 2003 article “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel.” She showed that an entire discourse in which Mizrahim didn’t exist had moved into the Middle East and imposed on Mizrahim’s ethnic hierarchies something they did not know before (within the Jewish discourse).

Here I've avoided another use of the word discourse, if no objections. Also, the and its appreciation does not read well in English, so I’ve taken it out wenn Du nichts dagen hast.

Amid all the lamentations, I would expect those same men and women with intellect, daring and integrity to connect these two extremes of the universal so-called writing of poetry in Israel with racist writing and thinking, and to tell the truth. Natan Zach was a wonderful writer but was part of a generation of Ashkenazi poets who were racist and imported racial and ethnic classifications into Israeli culture. And in retrospect, we couldn’t have enjoyed Natan Zach’s poetry without understanding the context in which it was cast.

It’s not good to be alone, but I’m alone in this review, and I expected many to write similarly and connect the dots without losing love for Natan Zach, though without ceasing to be angry at his ignorance.

Publication information

Originally published in: Haaretz
Author: Mati Shemoelof
Category: Opinion / Literary Criticism
Topics: Israeli poetry, Mizrahi identity, racism, Israeli literature

Category - Articles and Essays

Tags - Natan Zach, Nathan Zach, racism in Israel, Mizrahi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi poetry, Israeli poetry, Israeli literature, Mizrahi-Ashkenazi relations, Jewish racism, Mati Shemoelof