Upbeat victory

He won’t comment on the controversy surrounding this year’s Israel Prize for Literature, but laureate Erez Biton hopes to promote unity and raise awareness of racial discrimination.

By YAAKOV BAR-ON
Erez Biton (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Erez Biton
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Justice had been done. That was the overwhelming feeling when the announcement came out late last month that the Israel Prize for Literature and Poetry would go to Erez Biton. After many years of being ignored on the prize circuit, the 72-year-old poet received, in the space of less than a year, the Yehuda Amichai Prize and the Bialik Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and now he is receiving the country’s most prestigious award.
“I suddenly find myself on the ‘accepted’ track,” he says in an interview. “Perhaps this is thanks to my latest book, Nofim Havushei Einayim [Blindfolded Landscapes], in which I not only wrote about the difficulties of immigrating, but also touched on my personal experience, which might have led to a more inclusive view of my poems. I was already on a high after winning the first two prizes.
I, who for all those years had embraced [Haim Nahman] Bialik’s poetry, suddenly discovered I was so accepted that I had become a little [like] Bialik.”
Indeed, the Israel Prize announcement described him as “a major poet and a prominent source of inspiration in the Israeli poetry canon.”
Of course, one can’t discuss this year’s Israel Prize for Literature without mentioning the controversy surrounding it.
About a month and a half before the recent elections, the Prime Minister’s Office disqualified two judges, Avner Holtzman and Ariel Hirschfeld, claiming the committee wasn’t diverse enough and that it included anti-Zionist members. As a result of the interference, several other judges announced their departure, and prize candidates withdrew their candidacy.
The storm died down only after Attorney- General Yehuda Weinstein ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reinstate the judges because it was an election period.
“The Israel Prize is being awarded to me after the last elections, when there was some serious verbal sparring over ethnicity, which I didn’t take part in,” says Biton.
“How can you judge the value of one person over the value of another, even if you think your culture is superior to another’s?” Asked if he feels he is receiving recognition only late in his career, he responds that “one can always say it was ‘too late,’ and one can always say ‘it was the right time.’ Many years ago, I was already considered worthy of this prize. But the deluge of happiness over the prize is happening now, after over the last few years, I have felt more and more acceptance by the Israeli poetry community, which has come to know me up close. This is part of the general atmosphere of acceptance that has been created among poets here, whereas in the past they took pot shots at each other.”
DESPITE HIS celebratory attitude, an undertone of criticism creeps through his words.
“The decision to award the prize for poetry and not for prose is a big blessing, as in the past few years poetry has been unfairly ignored,” he says. “The fact is that there is fantastic poetry in Israel today, which plays a role in the Zionist enterprise of establishing the Hebrew language. It is a magical act, or verbal alchemy.
What is it that we, the poets, do? We take pain and distress and try to cloak them in something sustainable.”
He is well aware of the racial discrimination that many say has plagued the prize, which has almost completely ignored writers from Sephardi backgrounds. In the days following the announcement that Biton had won, he was presented as the first Sephardi nominee to win. This appears to disregard Yehuda Burla, who won the prize in 1961, and A.B. Yehoshua, who won it 34 years later. However, they are prose authors, and Biton is the first Sephardi poet to receive the prize.
“Do you know who decided to award the prize to A.B. Yehoshua?” he asks. “It was... Erez Biton! Yes, yes, I was on the committee that decided to award the Israel Prize for prose to A.B. Yehoshua and the prize for poetry to Nathan Zach. My considerations weren’t ethnic or political.
I thought they were both worthy, and I voted for them without thinking about their ethnic backgrounds.”
SHAS LEADER Arye Deri, who may become the next interior minister, was among Biton’s well-wishers and punctuated his congratulations by saying that “we managed to put the issue of exclusion of Sephardim on the public agenda.”
However, Biton stresses that “I don’t want to get into politics. Politicians typically exaggerate [issues]. Unlike them, I don’t think I was awarded the prize because I am Sephardi, and I prefer to ignore Deri’s words.”
It is usually the education minister who calls the Israel Prize winners to tell them they have won, he says, “but as there is no education minister, someone from the ministry called.... When I asked him if it was about the Israel Prize, he said yes.
‘And what does it have to do with me?’ I asked him – and then immediately realized what it was about, after I was initially completely surprised.”
In addition, he says, “Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat called to congratulate me and express her joy. When she was education minister, she had my poems included in the matriculation exams.”
Asked his opinion about the controversy surrounding this year’s prize, he replies, “Allow me to be happy, and don’t involve me in the politics of prizes.”
Indeed, he says, “literature and politics are not good friends. Literature comes from a very personal place, of a person with himself, in his inner sanctuary, dragging himself from poem to poem, always wondering if the poem is exactly right and not a verbal pretense posing as poetry.
Politics, on the other hand, requires other skills, which I am not disparaging.”
Yet he acknowledges that the ethnicity issue does arise on occasion.
“Every so often a ‘false gladiator’ bursts into the media, talking about Moroccans in derogatory terms. Whoever says [these things] is detached from reality and hasn’t noticed that Moroccans make up most of the population in the periphery.
Who has been barraged for years by Kassams in Sderot? Mostly Moroccans.”
Will Biton’s winning the award calm matters down? “I don’t think one cloud brings the rain or one swallow heralds spring,” he says.
“Many of my personal friends and my poet colleagues come from different backgrounds.
I hope that the awarding of the prize to Erez Biton will bring about some reconciliation and maybe even make us more united.”
Since winning the two prizes last year, he has been “writing almost nonstop. While one new book is about to be published, a second is in the final stages. Something has opened up. This is after many years in which the feeling that I wasn’t succeeding in taking the center of the poetic stage was apparently making me withdraw a little.”
He explains that “I wrote for myself, but I didn’t publish many of my poems until, in 2009 – about 30 years after my books Minha Maroka’it [Moroccan Gift] and Sefer Hanana [The Book of Mint] – I had a revival with the book Timbisert: Tzipor Maroka’it [Timbisert: A Moroccan Bird].”
HIS LAST book, Nofim Havushei Einayim, corresponds to his childhood. Biton, the son of Moroccan-born parents, made aliya at the age of six from Algeria. Five years later, he lost his sight when he tried to dismantle a bomb that may have been a relic from the War of Independence.
“In the space of a moment, my life changed,” he says. “I went from being an active boy surrounded by friends to a child without a present, certainly without a future. My eyes were injured, and my hand was severed. When I woke up in the hospital, I felt total helplessness.”
From which, he affirms, he has recovered completely.
“I have never been a quitter. I always had a need to change. I always had a need to progress. That is how I became the first blind social worker in Israel and the first rehabilitation psychologist. The same curiosity that made me try to dismantle the bomb also propels me forward.”
In fact, this reporter remembers watching him ride a horse during an activity for the blind in the 1980s in the fields of Kibbutz Ein Shemer.
“Indeed, they have added me to activities for the blind, for disabled soldiers,” he says. “I have never let my disability stop me. I have ridden a horse, played chess, and for years I swam at the Gordon pool [in Tel Aviv]. Indeed, I am an incurable daredevil.”
At the Jewish Institute for the Blind in Jerusalem, where his name was changed from Ya’ish to Erez, he says he started to write poetry spontaneously.
“At the Institute for the Blind, words burst out of me that were trying to describe my emotional state,” he recalls. “It turns out those words were none other than poems. One of the workers at the Institute for the Blind took them to literature professor Simon Halkin. ‘This boy is a poet,’ he told her. Ever since a poem of mine he sent was published in Keshet, I have been considered a poet.”
Biton, who had the honor of being a torch-lighter for country’s 40th Independence Day and served as chairman of the Hebrew Writers Association, has found himself more than once in the role of public referee.
“The attempt to hold onto Western cultural markers hasn’t gotten the Sephardim anywhere,” he claims. “At best, they have found themselves jumping on tables to the strains of Greek music, which is ‘borrowed’ music, nothing deep. I think there is a sense of tragedy to Moroccan Jewry, which is where I come from. The original sin was that in the ’50s they put almost everyone in development towns or the periphery. These were the Moroccans who were on the front lines facing PLO terrorism in Ma’alot and suffering Katyushas in Kiryat Shmona.”
He recalls that “I grew up with my parents’ identity crisis. When they came to visit us at school, we were ashamed of them, with my father’s beret and my mother’s headscarf. Their memory is scorched in my soul, although they do not bear a grudge toward the country and were pure Zionists. For them, Ben-Gurion was the Messiah.”
Less so, it seems, for him.
“Ben-Gurion’s melting-pot policy was a terrible mistake, and it backfired,” he states. “In spite of this, and despite the suffering I endured from my childhood injury, I am not willing to trade this country for any other place in the world.
Eventually we will all become the Land of Israel’s organic waste. It’s possible that if we were to internalize the full meaning of our existence in this country, maybe we would behave less like wild animals to each other, be less egoistic, and maybe there would be fewer post-Zionist phenomena that eat at me.”
According to Biton, the job of the country’s poets and authors “is to highlight the human and the humane in order to soften the political atrocity, including between us and the Palestinians. I have participated in encounters with them, and I left with a feeling of failure and even complete despair, when nothing has come of these encounters.”
Although the Israel Prize has been years in coming, Biton knows he found the real prize years ago, when he met his wife, Rahel, the daughter of Greek immigrants, through friends. The two – one blind, the other sighted – are residents of Ramat Hasharon and parents to a son and a daughter. They have found a common and loving language, and Rahel is his right-hand woman in editing the literary journal Apirion, which he has been publishing since 1982.
In that regard, he says, “I’ve won.”