Israel brought together the poet Igor Guberman and the artist Aleksandr Okun, who used to live in Kharkiv and St. Petersburg, respectively. Guberman, who is widely known for his quatrains Gariki, and the well-known artist meet from time to time not only to have a nice talk but also to create together. The first book they wrote was titled A Book on Tasty and Wholesome Food. Written with a sense of humor and knowledge of the subject matter, it is not exactly a collection of recipes that occur in one edition or another: it propagates a taste for life, and a meaningful life at that.
This time they arrived in Kyiv at the initiative and with the assistance of the Israeli Embassy in Ukraine to launch their new opus A Guide to the Country of the Elders of Zion. In spite of an unobtrusive and easy-going narration, the book is incredibly informative and uncovers many new and unusual facts and events from the distant past to the present day, even for a well-prepared reader.
Let us begin with your book A Guide to the Country of the Elders of Zion the launch of which is, after all, the reason why you came to our country. The book is written in a genuine and rich Russian. It takes a somewhat paradoxical view of the history of mankind in general and Jews in particular. Yet the material is easy to read and follow. How did you come upon the idea of writing this book and what kind of readers is it intended for?
Guberman: “In my opinion, it is aimed at a wide audience because it is not a guidebook per se. It does not say much about what to see on the right and on the left. It is a book for people who love Israel very much, and would like to share their love of and information about that country with others. In general, I think one should write about serious things with lighthearted language only, otherwise it is impossible to read.”
Okun: “And I think the addressee is an individual who takes a lighthearted attitude to that country and sees it as one of many. Every person has three motherlands: the first is the one they were born in, the second is Italy because all that inspires us now came from there, and the third one is Israel.”
You are an idealist, aren’t you?
O.: “And why not? It is better to be an idealist than a materialist. Materialism is no good in any case.”
The phrase “Elders of Zion,” which you included in your book’s title, was interpreted quite ambiguously in what once was our common fatherland. For some, it meant a relentless and fierce struggle against all things Jewish. For others, it was a philosophy of existence. Were you afraid that such a “provocative” headline might trigger an undesired reaction?
G.: “We were not afraid because the latter category, for whom it was a philosophy, are just poorly educated people who live in a world of chimeras. For, in reality, there were no Elders of Zion at all. It is an invention, a myth. Great Russian philosophers, such as Solovyov, Berdyayev et al., considered this as utter nonsense. Even at that time, wise people could guess that this disgusting myth was cooked up by the tsar’s secret services. But as long as this has been firmly embedded in people’s minds as a morpheme and an expression, we had to give the book this title for purely commercial purposes.”
O.: “The book’s working title was entirely different — And This Was Here — but, as Igor has just said, the publisher thought that A Guide to the Country of the Elders of Zion was better.”
G.: “Incidentally, the title And This Was Here a priori contains some tragedy. Our common essayist colleagues used to write: ‘And this was here, look around and get terrified!’ But we do not write tragedies, and it is our fundamental principle!”
Mr. Guberman, you and your family went through all the upheavals of the “extraordinary” 20th century. You were born in 1936, on the eve of the “black” 1937 which could not but affect your family. Then the illusions of Khrushchev’s Thaw, then…
G.: “You know, the illusions are still there because wonderful personalities were born at the time. They were later known as ‘people of the 1960s.’ Many of them called themselves, quite aptly, ‘children of the 20th Congress’ [of the Communist Party. – Ed.]. The illusions they harbored lasted for their whole lifetime.”
What about the “bulldozer exhibition” or the notorious “meeting” between Party leaders, writers, and artists? Could those overtly loutish dressing-downs have left any illusions intact? I agree that one can love their youth and the country they were born in, but one cannot love the ideology that did not let one “live, love or breathe,” can one?
G.: “We all cared very little about ideology, but as for all the rest, I can just quote the verses I will never forget:
“When the home country / That has raised and cherished you / Is sweet / Then even a spoonful of everyday shit / Will almost whet your appetite.”
How did you manage not to become embittered and remain so tender, even though you had your share of the police’s “passionate” embraces?
G.: “Maybe, it is all about senile imbecility. You know, Misha Turovsky, a wonderful artist who once lived in Kyiv and now stays in the US, produced the following aphorism: ‘Look back at your youth, it is so beautiful now!’”
O.: “The subject you have touched upon reminds me of a well-known dialog between Voltaire and Casanova. When the latter escaped from prison and showed up in Paris, Voltaire received him with outstretched arms, expecting him to condemn the horrible Venetian regime. But Casanova was not exactly rushing to do so. ‘I am not at all resentful of them,’ he said to the great philosopher. ‘Their role was to catch and mine to escape.’”
G.: “Do you expect me to give you a recipe for self-preservation? All you have to do is deride them (I mean all kinds of officials) all the time.”
O.: “This is what they could not pardon him for.”
Mr. Guberman, I know that you avoid, as a matter of principle, talking about your relationship with Joseph Brodsky, but you were once the first to bring his poems to Moscow, weren’t you?
G.: “Do you know why I do not speak about this subject? Brodsky was a great personality, a genius. Fate decreed that I mingle with him for several years. Then we fell out because it was not interesting for him to be with me. Nor was it for me, incidentally, because it is very difficult to communicate with geniuses.”
How did you meet?
G.: “While drunk. It is Sergei Wulf who brought us together. He read out poems, knocking back a glass or two, and I asked for them to be published in the journal Syntax. I brought them to Moscow, crying out: ‘Genius!’”
You call your own literary pursuit “rhymes.” And which of the classics influenced you, for we all grow out of somebody?
G.: “Sasha Cherny. I was crazily happy when I read him. Then came Zabolotsky, Omar Khayyam, and others.”
Why not Kharms?
G.: “I did not know him at the time, I read him later. I consider him an extraordinary genius, but he is a genius in an absolutely different sphere than Omar Khayyam is.”
Educated on Russian literature, both of you found yourselves in such a “cosmopolitan” (i.e., multicultural) country as Israel. How did and do you feel there? Is your “Russianness” intact?
G.: “I was and still am living in my Russian cocoon.”
O.: “And I do not see the reason why I should renounce my origin and education. Besides, I think Russian culture has never been one in itself: it has been a very powerful product of Jewish influences. It is part of this culture. For example, why should I renounce Italian or English culture? Russian culture is in the same line.”
Mr. Guberman, another great poet, David Samoylov, once played a key role in your destiny…
G.: “He helped me immensely: I was allowed to settle at his place in Estonia when I was released from prison and was banished from Moscow and other cities within the 100-km zone around the capital. Do not think that he appreciated me very much — he was just friends with my mother-in-law Lidia Lebedinskaya. This in fact prompted him to help me. Thanks to this, we made friends and maintained close contacts.”
You know how to focus on certain key moments and describe them gorgeously. What was your first impression of Israel?
G.: “I was stunned thanks to my friends, including Aleksandr Okun. We got sloshed on the very first evening, for we had not seen each other for many years. The next day he came to us at 10 a.m. and said, without listening to our curses: ‘Get up, friends. The Golgotha is open until 12.’”
Aleksandr, how different are the cultures of fine art perception here and in Israel?
O.: “A situation, when you can find unique oeuvres at a garbage dump, does not depend on geography. My US friends once found a small picture at a New York dump. It turned out to be a Rubens sketch. A stroke of luck… It is difficult for me to judge myself, but I think I finally matured as an artist in Israel. I find it difficult to speak about the past because when I finish some work, I no longer feel it is mine. Can you remember Tstetayeva’s maxim: a true artist will say ‘It came out’ rather than ‘I did it?’ This is true because good things come out and bad ones… we do them. As for perception, I will never forget going to see frescoes in Arezzo, Italy. The cathedral turned out to be under restoration, but I was really in rapture because the Italians had painted the scaffolding: the bars in black and the connections in gold. What came out was a modern sculpture of genius! You will never find this in Israel due to the absence of plastic traditions, and tradition is indispensable — especially for an individual who claims to be a trail-blazer, a revolutionary. The point is that in art every revolutionary is a true conservative, for he will be the guardian of a tradition. I could cite here Matisse or somebody else as an example. Israel does not have this tradition for quite an obvious reason: its people are still to undergo a ‘collective eye training’ for hundreds of years. This is why the Israelis are on the foreground of new materials and new media. Classical plastic traditions are simply irrelevant in present-day techniques. I taught at the Academy and our school of animation won at a very prestigious international contest last year, outdoing London’s Royal College of Art. We are actively developing ceramics. Incidentally, the applied arts faculty is the strongest at our Academy and the faculty of arts is the weakest.”
Israel is a very religious country, one of the few where religion is not separated from the state. Can this active perception of all new things bring about any changes in this area?
O.: “Very many people will not agree with you that Orthodox Judaism is the linchpin of Israel — I think it embraces only a half of the country. But, oddly enough, when sacred cows, even sickly and pliable ones, are being slaughtered — and they really are with a terrible force — man begins to seek out a myth. When the myth of classical socialist Zionism comes to an end in our country, and other myths vanish in other geographical points, man begins to reach out for religion. It is very funny that religion is needed and is on the rise in a century that claims it is highly technological. The question of faith is the question of faith. It is discussed in no way, nowhere and by nobody. And it cannot be discussed. I agree with Viktor Frankl (nobody knows if he was a religious man) who said: ‘It is much more important for the Lord God, if he exists, whether or not an individual is good than whether or not he believes.’”
I saw you actively discussing new book covers and names as you went past the book shelves. What are your priorities in contemporary literature?
G.: “I like a lot of contemporary writers, such as Dina Rubina, who I am very proud of, or Pelevin. As my tastes are low, I adore Akunin. As any other writer, he may have had tremendous flops, but his Fandorin series is astonishing! Dmitry Bykov. I hope Brusnikin will warm me up — I have already read his novel Pechorin and Grushnitsky. That is perhaps all so far.”
O.: “For me it is Pelevin, Ulitskaya, and Rubina. Now it is Aleksandr Sekatsky, a Petersburg-based philosopher, who has written an excellent book titled Two Coffers. It is full of play, as it were a translation from the Chinese. But, in general, I am fond of classics. I recently reread War and Peace. And Diderot.”
The book is popular. I have even heard it said that it would be a good idea to translate it into Hebrew — this would be interesting for native Israelis. What then?
G.: “Well, we are too lazy to do translations. Meanwhile, my new book, The Seventh Diary, has been published. This is my seventh book with about 800 poems and some prose. We can discuss this with Kyiv aficionados on October 23 at the House of Officers, where I will be speaking. So see you soon in Kyiv.”
O.: “And I am now busy painting. No more plans so far.”
THE DAY’S FACT FILE
Igor Guberman was born on July 7, 1936, in Kharkiv. He spent his childhood in Moscow and graduated form the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers. After graduation, he worked in his field. Then he met Alexander Ginzburg, the founder and editor of the samizdat journal Syntaxis.
For some time, Guberman worked as an engineer and pursued a literary career: he wrote popular-science and documentary books as well as documentary film scripts.
Later on, samizdat began to publish Guberman’s quatrains known as “Gariki” (Garik being the author’s diminutive name). In the 1970s, Guberman was on the staff of and an active contributor to the samizdat journal Jews in the USSR.
The people who founded this journal considered it their mission to spread among Jews the knowledge of their religion, history and language. As for emigration, they thought it was a person’s private affair.
In 1978 the “Gariki,” until then being circulated among the populace, were collected and published as a book. In 1979 Guberman was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.
He kept a diary in the prison camp, on which he later based his book A Walk around the Barrack (1980, published in 1988).
Guberman was released in 1984. He was denied permission to live not only in Moscow but also in small towns less than 100 kilometers away from the capital. But the poet David Samoylov registered him in his house in Parnu, Estonia.
Guberman worked at the Leningrad Documentary Film Studio. The Visa and Registration Department summoned him very soon and suggested that he and his family move to Israel. “It is a most difficult thing to leave the place where it is impossible to survive,” he wrote later. Guberman has been living in Jerusalem since 1988.
In Israel, Guberman wrote the novel Touches to a Portrait. 1996 saw the publication of his memoirs Old-Age Notes, and his book A Country of Travels came out in 2001.
What brought him the greatest acclaim was, naturally, his “Gariki.” He uses typically postmodernist techniques in his verses, such as ironic periphrasis of well-known expressions, attaching an opposite meaning to phraseological units, and, sometimes, the use of foul language.
Far from all readers and critics are fascinated with Guberman. He himself takes it as read: “Those who praise and those who malign are right.”
Aleksandr Okun was born in 1948 in Leningrad. He graduated from the Mukhina Academy of Arts in 1972, and was repatriated to Israel in 1979.
He was a member of the Alef group, taught painting at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and Emunah College in Jerusalem. He was an Adjunct Professor at Bellarmine College, Louisville, US.
Okun has won a number of prizes and scholarships, including an Ofer Feniger Award in 1983, a Gestetner Fellowship in 1985, and a residence fellowship at the Paris-based Cite International des Arts in 1987.
Okun is a member of the UNESCO-sponsored International Association of Art.
His works are displayed in many museums of Russia and Israel, including the exhibition hall of the Mukhina Academy of Arts (St. Petersburg), the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), the Negev Museum (Beersheba), the Janco Dada Museum (Jaffa), and private collections in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Russia, and the US.
