The war in Gaza has been ongoing for almost eight months and the war in Ukraine is in its third year. Society has become increasingly politicized, with the poetic, the aesthetic and the political going side by side in our world today. In light of these tumultuous events, how does poetry, an art form that seeks to articulate the unspoken and the unspeakable, capture the current events?
On May 30th, at the ANU Museum of the Jewish People, journalist Maxim Glinkin and literary scholar Eugenia Vezhlyan organized a large-scale event dedicated to Israeli poetry amid these two wars, with the support of the NADAV Foundation. The event brought together nine Israeli poets of different ages and from different waves of aliyah.
The evening opened with a speech by Leonid Nevzlin, founder of the NADAV Foundation, on the changing status of Russian classical literature and the Russian language in the modern world. The guests of the museum heard poetry readings in both Russian and Hebrew by Israeli poets, who also shared their personal experiences and reflections on the two wars, in Ukraine and Israel, as well as on the new wave of repatriates and the future of the world. The event also featured a poetry performance by Anatoly Belyi, who read poems by Eugenia Berkovich, and a musical interpretation of Psoy Korolenko’s song “Broken does not break” by Vanya Zhuk. The evening concluded with a discussion on contemporary literature and literary processes in Russia and Ukraine, as well as the impact of poetry on politics between the moderators of the event and Israeli political scientists.
