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| Nathan Zach |
Death of My Mother |
| Non-Fiction |
Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1997. 125 pp.
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This surprising, moving short book by Natan Zach, leading Hebrew poet, is an homage to his late mother. In addition to the biographical aspects, it contains the poet's thoughts about the suffering of the flesh, the decrepitude of old age, nullity and death. Returning from the funeral of his friend, the Arab writer Emile Habibi, Zach finds some notes he wrote many years before, following his mother's death. The two events coalesce and Zach recalls in deeply moving brief fragments his mother's world, scenes from her life and her long illness.
He was an only child of parents who met in Europe between the two world wars. She had hardly ever spoken to him about her native Italy, but towards the end she reverted to her native tongue, which no one around her could understand. She had never struck root in Israel, took no interest in her son's poems, and he knew little about her inner life. Her decline began after her second husband's death, and she became blind, racked with pain and increasingly senile. Pity and sorrow blend with alienation and revulsion through the text, which includes a poem by Paul Celan, brief essays on euthanasia and the right to a dignified death, and some of Zach's own poetry. All in all, it is a prose document which is wholly poetic.
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About the Book
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Nissim Calderon, writing in Ma'ariv, called it: "A wrenching book, a book to keep you awake. You read and feel the acid corroding your eyes.... You will never forget this book." The Ha'aretz critic commented: "This is the first time a text by Zach stirred me emotionally, rather than, as usual, to admiration, appreciation and deep thought."
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