Waiting In The Balcony Of Darkness

“In Conversation” with Paul Hamann

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 CBC Radio 1 interview of Rafi Aaron by Janet Dirks. May 9th, 1998

The Toronto Star, Saturday, April 18, 1998

A Seed In the Pocket Of Their Blood
By Rafi Aaron
Amphitheatre Publications,
95 pages, $49.95

By Libby Scheier

Courtesy of: Canadian Jewish Congress Archives

Is the discrete lyric poem out of fashion? After reading Rafi Aaron’s A Seed In the Pocket Of their Blood, I can only say I hope not.

I think the world has room for both “serial poets” (as the late Roy Kiyooka, a wonderful poet, called himself) and poets like Aaron – who allow simple, fresh, vivid words to cut individual jewels out of the material of language. His book also includes accomplished and sometimes moving images by various photographers (some of international reputation), selected by Aaron to evoke the poems; the photographs are not leading-edge “experimental” but realist and representational.

This is a work of Jewish poetry (and images) in the same way that A.M. Klien’s poems reflect Jewish life and thought, but also transcend that specificity into a universality which should touch any reader.

Born in Canada, Aaron lived in Israel from 1982 to 1990. Since his return to Canada in 1990, he has won prizes or honourable mentions in three national poetry competitions. I must confess that when I first caught sight of his large-format book with shiny-smooth paper and traditional concept photographs accompanied by poetry, I dismissively thought “coffee-table book.” My mistake. (That leads me to ponder the value of “avant–garde” snobbery. Some great work falls into this category, but also some awful junk; likewise some “mainstream” work can be very fine, and some is trite and dull. Aaron’s book is in the very fine category.)

The book divides into a section of love poems set in Israel, poems about Jewish life in Europe and immigration to North America, and poetry about war and ethnic hatred. The last section touches on the Holocaust, the Middle East conflict and anti-Semitism among the literati (a poem entitled “‘By the Way Ezra I Forgive Your Anti-Semitism’ – Allen Ginsberg In A conversation with Ezra Pound” also incriminates Eliot, Lorca, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Kerouac, and Larkin).

The most powerful and fully realized poem is “The Sound traveller,” whose beautiful ending line has become the book’s title and whose classic facing-page image of a man in silhouette apparently looking for something down a narrow walkway has become the book’s cover. “(U)nder the full moon i rattle the scared/ artifacts that have passed from hand to hand,” Aaron writes. (My) tongue stumbles over mountains and plains/ sliding backwards over consonants i hear the trapped/ echo clawing its way out of Eastern European languages.” As the poet looks (or listens) for his roots, for knowledge (or sound) of ancestors, most of whom were murdered, he “seek(s) the last ember of a fire that hides under the dead/ a seed in the pocket of their blood.”

“The Photograph Of The Children” is also an effective poem-plus-image on this theme. A family photograph of three woman, a man, and a young girl is cut away to the young girl only on the following page, where the text reads, “my eyes always find/ the youngest child/ in the lower left-hand corner/ i see her separated from the others/ and finally parted/ from her long black hair/ i wonder about her last moments, her last gasp/ the mark her thin nails made/ as she scraped the walls/ for a hand full of air.”

The excellent short poem “The Conflict” exemplifies Aaron’s ability to economically combine the topical and the universal, while a number of the love poems set in Israel show his talent at richly evoking a sense of place and his ability to suggest an uplifting grace that can hold sorrow and tragedy.

This year’s Jewish Book Fair (2006) features Toronto poet Rafi Aaron, whose few published volumes to date have traveled surprisingly far and gained impressive renown in the world.

On November 12, Aaron and friends are due to present a celebration in words and music of the life and poetry of Osip Mandelstam, the legendary Russian-Jewish poet who died in a Stalin-era labour camp in 1938.

Mandelstam is the subject of Aaron’s latest collection of poems, Surviving the Censor: The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam. Although Seraphim Editions only recently brought out the 86-page volume, its contents have already won renewed critical attention for Aaron since some of the poems were previously published in journals and were short-listed for national magazine awards.

Two years ago the Canadian foreign ministry invited Aaron to speak about Mandelstam in St. Petersburg, Russia, an adventure he calls “the trip of a lifetime.”

Aaron took eight or nine years to complete the collection of 48 prose poems through which he sought “to pay homage to a master.” The poems were written in four voices: the poet, his wife, a researcher, and a fellow inmate of the camp in which he died. “I set out to tell Mandelstam’s story in art,” he said.

Part of the creative process involved reading many volumes of Russian literature, memoirs and history. “As soon as I learned the facts I tried to forget them, because I’m trying to convey the spirit of the times — to squeeze the facts to get the juice.”

Mandelstam was arrested in 1934 for a poem attacking Stalin, and endured four and a half years of persecution and internal exile until his death at 43. His wife Nadezhda and others so revered his state-forbidden writings that they committed many of his poems, fiction, literary criticism and even newspaper articles to memory.

Aaron, born in Ottawa in 1959, said he was “totally blown away” the first time he read Mandelstam’s poetry, which “was unlike anything I’d ever read.”

“The effect it had on me as a reader was amazing. It’s so filled with literary references, it’s actually an education just reading one of his poems and trying to come to the end because there are so many tangents.”

After completing courses in Judaic studies at York University, Aaron lived in Israel for nine years and held a senior position with a prominent advertising and public relations firm. His colleagues were astounded when he announced he was leaving the company to write a book.

That first poetry volume, The Lost and Found, was published in 1990. It won the Tel Aviv Foundation prize in Israel, among other awards, and prompted PEN Israel to arrange a reading tour for Aaron to the United States.

His next book was the coffee-table volume A Seed in the Pocket of Their Blood (1998), which was republished by Syracuse University Press in 2000. The book, which combined poetry and photographs, became a traveling exhibit seen by many thousands of people in Canada, the United States and Israel.

At the Book Fair, Aaron teams up with actors Dmitry Chepovetsky and Shauna MacDonald (who will read in Russian), and musicians Daniel and Carey Domb, to present A Celebration in Reading and Music of the Life and Poetry of Osip Mandelstam. The event takes place at Leah Posluns Theatre on Nov. 12, 8 p.m., and costs $5.

© 2006
Used by permission of Bill Gladston
www.billgladstone.ca

Honouring what she refers to as the “Ortho shul” tradition of orthodox synagogues, director Jennifer H. Capraru has taken a small fringe show and turned it into a complex spectacle of meta-theatrical elements that enchant the eye, warm the heart, and shed light upon the connections between Stalinist tactics and current global concerns around privacy and the rights of the artist.

Nicole Wilson as Nadia Mandelshtam, & Omar Hady as Osip Mandelshtam

In Rafi Aaron’s beautifully poetic play Mandelshtam a very young woman takes centre stage and enchants the audience with her precocity through a brief introductory speech that sets the tone for an hour of delicately drawn scenes that bring the subject to light in a way that reminds spectators of the power that poetry and art in general can wield within a profoundly troubled state. The audience is immediately engaged by the introductory claim that there will be no direct physical contact between men and women during the play. Although this may initially strike some as unsettling and cumbersome, it quickly becomes, in the hands of a skilled director, a powerful aspect of a play honoring both history and human intimacy. One is reminded of Anna Deveare-Smith’s transcribed/performed testimonies from Fires In the Mirror as an example of the ways in which particular orthodox Jewish traditions can be adapted in order to make the experience even more dramatic and enlightening.

Simple puppets behind a backlit screen – touching and yet not actually touching – a fragile string of lights passed between a man and a woman, and a final circle of light on a floor inscribed with poetry along the circumference, give the overall mise en scene an almost childlike quality that allows the actors to take full power over the word – and to play with those words in brilliant and moving tableaus.

Bruce Beaton as Aleksandr, with Omar Hady

Capraru and Aaron have been blessed with a cast who grasp all of the nuances of the poetic script and the essential physicality of the director’s interpretation. Bruce Beaton, as the poet’s friend and colleague Aleksandr, exemplifies this as he skillfully interprets long poetic sentences in a sometimes clipped, sometimes drawn out rhythm that allows the words, like poetry, to wash over us without losing any of the meaning or intensity. He gives contemporary, poetically inflected dialogue a sense of naturalistically rendered Shakespearean tones that simultaneously sooth, inform and dramatize. The other performers match his skill for subtle renditions of complex, at times metaphoric turns. The entire ensemble excels as they execute dance-like gestures that move them in and out of the simple circular playing space located in the basement of Anshei Minsk Synagogue in the heart of Kensington Market.

Nicole Wilson as Nadia Mandelshtam portrays the poet’s wife and comrade with an emotional honesty that attests to the actual character’s drive to memorize her husband’s work in the face of destructive politically charged censorship. Pieces of paper move about the stage in a resonant manner as one is constantly reminded that particular waves of history can drown the artist’s words if there are no witnesses who can take those words and move them into future generations of spectators and practitioners. Tatjana Corniq as fellow poet Anna Akhmatova brings further power to the overall theme of protecting the poet’s work and life, and has an especially powerful scene as she seamlessly self-accompanies on the accordion – circling the playing space as she delicately recites a tribute to Mandelshtam’s work through the playwright’s beautifully rendered narrative gaze that reveals Nadia Mandelshtam attempts to piece together Osip’s fraught legacy.

Tatjana Corniq as Anna Akhmatova, with Omar Hady

Osip Mandelshtam, played by Omar Hady, is brought to life with physical agility and poetic exuberance. Hady never misses a beat in a relentless and moving tribute to the artist’s belief in how personal politics often become integral to the poem. His physicality and his fervor are matched by two performers who must constantly remind him of everything that is at stake, giving the overall script a timeless quality regarding the powerful position of women within major political struggles.

My seat at the corner of a circle, beside a frequently illuminated puppet screen, gave me a very special and enlightening perspective. I could see the stage manager manipulate the puppets while the back stage actor sat in a chair and recited the puppet lines. Capraru added the puppets to the show, as well as the simple inventive string of lights that added intimacy without breaking the Ortho shul tradition. These touches gave the script added and highly effective layers of theatricality. As a single audience member unintentionally allowed to watch the mechanics of this approach, I felt the script come alive in complicated ways that could be developed in a larger production. Further use of dance like movement, evocative back lighting for the puppetry, and simple lighting gestures throughout, coupled with elements of the exposed back stage goings on could move this hour long show into a full length inter-disciplinary piece highlighting many art forms as connective tissue to the primary art of the poet that inhabits the script.

More of Mandelshtam’s actual poetry, interspersed with work from Akhmatova, could flesh out the poetic plot lines. And the life of the poet did seem at times overly condensed to fit the hour long requirements of the fringe festival. And yet sixty minutes, in the hands of a sensitive playwright attuned to the arduous journey of his subject, mixed with the insights of a brilliant director who knows how to make poetic dialogue come alive through physicality and direct, simple stage business, rendered this tribute to a highly gifted and highly politicized poet a very special moment that reveals the power of theatre and the power of words.

When Toronto poet Rafi Aaron first read the poetry of 20^th century Russian Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam, he was transfixed – both by the content, which Aaron described as “intriguing, complicated, something you could go back to and keep seeing more,” and by Mandelstam’s life story.

Aaron’s fascination with Mandelstam, who spent several years in internal exile in the Soviet Union for writing a poem satirizing Stalin and was later re-arrested and died in a labour camp, led him to write the play Mandelshtam, (spelling intentional) which premiered at the Toronto Fringe Festival July 1.

Directed by Jennifer Capraru, Mandelshtam, Aaron’s first play, recounts Stalin’s persecution of Mandelstam and explores the latter’s relationship with his wife Nadezhda.

It will be performed at the Anshei Minsk Synagogue in Kensington Market.

The play is based on a book of prose poetry Aaron published in 2006 about the couple’s experiences called Surviving the Censor – The Unspoken Words of Osip Mandelstam.

 The book was the 2007 winner of the Stan and Helen Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for poetry.

“The book has four characters – Mandelstam, Nadezhda, an anonymous voice from the labour camp and a researcher who’s trying to piece it all together – relaying through monologue what happened. I started wondering what would happen if they could actually talk [to each other],” Aaron, who’s written three other books of poetry, said. “I’d never written dialogue, but at some point I took a stab at it and got very good feedback from people in the theatre world. And one thing led to another.”

He adapted the play so that the cast of four characters includes a friend of Mandelstam who may or may not be an informer and the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, a close friend of Mendelstam who is also persecuted.

Aaron, who was raised in Ottawa, studied Judaic Studies at York University and spent a decade living in Israel, underwent a process of intensive research on the poet and his wife for Surviving the Censor, including traveling to Russia as a guest of the Canadian government to meet with Mandelstam scholars.

However, he said, “as soon as I learned all the dates and facts, I tried to forget them. What I tried to do was pass on the feelings of what it must have felt like for them. The dates were used as postmarks along the way, but my purpose was to translate history into art.”

Mandelshtam reflects this, Aaron said, as it attempts “to get away from the historical narrative and…emphasize how, as Stalin was tightening the noose around [the couple’s] necks, it was affecting their relationship.”

The play begins with Mandelstam’s initial arrest in 1934 and covers the roughly five-and-a-half year period that followed, in which he returned from exile and was re-arrested.

Both Mandelstam and Nadezhda, who became famous in her own right after publishing a memoir in the 1970s exposing treatment of the intelligentsia under Stalin, were unique figures, Aaron stressed.

Mandelstam broke the mould insofar as most artists under Stalin either kept silent or became “state-controlled puppets,” and Nadezhda for memorizing everything her husband wrote in an attempt to ensure its survival.

Aaron chose the historic Anshei Minsk, which was founded by Jewish immigrants from Belarus, after discovering it on a Heritage Toronto walking tour.

“I researched it and found out its architecture dates back to the same period as the play is set,” he recalled.

Further, he saw a link between the censorship of Mandelstam’s words and the shul, once a target of arson.

More broadly, the message the play conveys about speaking out in the face of adversity is topical, he said, given recent Canadian events of people staying silent at the CBC and cases of bullying in schools.
“[Mandelstam] is a man who spoke out because he couldn’t stand what was going on around him. He knew the consequences would be dire, but he had no choice.”