Dr li shir
The panel opened the final session of the student conference, entitled “Building Bridges.” As suggested by the title of the entire session, the panel too aimed to take part, through the stories students wrote about their family history, in the construction work necessary to building bridges between different time periods, places, languages, communities and generations.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, a bridge is a structure carrying a path across an obstacle. Figuratively speaking, a bridge is something intended to reconcile or connect between two seemingly incompatible things. This session aims to build bridges, that is, to connect and reconcile, in the wake of individual and collective traumas. I say bridges, in the plural, since the obstacles blocking our way are many and all too real – the crimes of war and the aftermath of violence are hard to forget inasmuch as they are hard to forgive.
Building bridges is hard, all the more so because – as catastrophe and English grammar teach us – ‘build’ is an irregular verb. But this conjugational shiftiness is not without some hope: for it may also teach us, that the present doesn’t necessarily have to repeat the mistakes of the past, and that a simpler future could be made continuous, even if not perfect.
The stories comprising the panel are grouped into three thematic clusters.
I. The first cluster, “Epic Heroes in Our Lives,” aims to explore the continuous presence of the past in our lives through family members whose larger-than-life stories have made them significant role models. It consists of texts written by Marie Abel, Mira Leventhal Abudi, Harpaz, Lior Keren, Adina Simhony, and Ornit Shachar.
II. The second cluster, “Re-Membering the Dead,” explores the symbolic function of language in the face of individual and collective trauma of loss and death through texts written by Hanni Simpson-Grossman, Samantha Moshe, Anni Lupu, Irit Givol, and Gal Shimoni.
III. The final cluster, “Storytelling,” looks to the future and focuses on the therapeutic power of the oral and written stories passing from one generation to the next. This cluster celebrates the way these narratives continue to shape our lives as individuals and as a unified family through texts written by Nofar Shalom, Ilit Gefen, Giada Shmidov, and Alaa Marhaji.
To read the texts comprising these thematic clusters, click on the title of each cluster. As you will read for yourself, once presented together, these poems and stories recreate the colourful mosaic of cultural, ethnic, and national identities constituting Israeli society. It is our hope that these stories will carry us, like a bridge over troubled waters, towards a broad-minded and open-hearted dialogue between individual and collective memories of different periods, places, cultures and languages; between old and young, natives and immigrants, past and present.