275“the tree making us / look again”
Shirley Kaufman’s Roots in the Air
mericanhyphenIsraeli” seems the way
to describe her, says Shirley Kaufman (b. 1923) in a talk called “Roots in the Air.”
Born in Seattle to immigrants from eastern European villages that crop up in her
poetry, Kaufman lived in San Francisco, had three daughters, and at forty-six
published her first book. In 1973 she moved to Jerusalem with her new husband,
a South African who’d immigrated during Israel’s war of independence. “The
little line that has become a bridge between America and Israel, has begun to
sway and swing like the Golden Gate Bridge suspended on cables between San
Francisco and Marin County, and even though the wind is strong coming in
from the ocean and over the bay, I begin to find my balance on it. I discover that,
after all, it does connect me. I am not rootless... That hyphen—that bridge
and what it connects me to—is my place in the world.”
My place in the world—a vexed enough question for anyone nowadays,
and all the more so for Kaufman. Seattle, California’s gold country, Bayshore
Freeway, Big Sur, Watts, Taos, Brest Litovsk, Ulanov, Lake Como, Mycenae,
Ganges, Cairo: her poems range wherever some viewpoint if not foothold may
be found. Eventually they come back to the adopted landscape: Ramallah, Rosh
Hanikra, Dead Sea, Mount Sinai, City of David and Mount of Olives, Western
Wall and Dome of the Rock, Mount Moriah and Via Dolorosa, places that surge
up against the soles of anyone keeping her balance in the Holy Land.
“What are you doing in Jerusalem?” Kaufman asks herself in “Stones.”
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