276 PART THREE
When you live in Jerusalem you begin
to feel the weight of stones.
You begin to know the word
was made stone, not flesh....
There ’s a huge rock lying on my chest
and I can’t get up.And in a collection called From One Life to Another,
You can’t learn two
landscapes in one
life he said
or a language
to put them in.She couldn’t speak with her Yiddish grandparents, her mother’s tongue is not
her mother tongue, and the Hebrew “holy tongue” comes hard. Yet Kaufman
has translated Israeli poets, with their help, naturalizing their strangeness into
English: Amir Gilboa, Abba Kovner, Dan Pagis, themselves émigrés and sur-
vivors from eastern Europe to Palestine, and Meir Wieseltier. Meanwhile “I
have fallen in love with the landscapes, the wooded mountains of the north,
and the stark mountains of the Judean wilderness... But I’m always reminded
of my marginality.”
Inevitably she finds another divide, as much geopolitical as personal, in the
city built upon a hill.
When I stand on this ridge,
the earth slides helpless
in two directions. There ’s only
Jerusalem on my left, everyone
climbing over the corpses,
on my right the frozen wilderness,
black goats looking for something green.The terrain lays bare a history that “slides helpless / in two directions”: every-
one ’s losses littering Jerusalem, and goats as ever, David ’s or any nomad peo-
ple ’s “looking for something green.” A later poem ends with Jewish Sarah and
Egyptian Hagar,
two halves
of an ancient slippage
split
on the fault lines.The land is biblical, political, personal.
This countryside offers up metaphors without a poet ’s having to invent them.