WHAT I’M READING ...
‘A huge surprise to me in my reading was to find that Israel is just smaller than the Waikato region where I grew up, although its history is large.’
At present I’m reading A History of the Jewish People — to try to understand the culture and why antisemitism has existed through the ages, a question to which there are many and varied answers. Perhaps next year I shall visit the “Holy Land” on a guided tour, to observe present-day Israel — a nation just a year older than I am — and knowing, as Allen Curnow wrote so brilliantly, “reality must be local and special at the point where we pick up the traces”.
I love literary and historical pilgrimage — especially to ancient and sometimes dry and stony sites, which are in such high contrast to the lush greenness of Aotearoa and the richly wooded Taunus hills surrounding where I now live. A huge surprise to me in my reading was to find that Israel is just smaller than the Waikato region where I grew up, although its history is large — going back to over a millennium before Kupe. The number of people who have lived there is mind-boggling, ruler after ruler fighting to take power, the Jews being pushed out often in the cruellest ways possible, and yet returning.
As well, I’m reading a guidebook, Jerusalem, Israel & the Palestinian Territories, as I think it’s important to be able to orient yourself on such a visit. It contains small maps, a fold-out one of the old and new cities of Jerusalem. It has descriptions of the main centres and the many religious and historic sites, including places like the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, where I’d love to swim — float, rather! The book takes a contemporary look at this land of diverse people showing life as it is now lived and present-day problems, especially with so many diverse ethnic groups living side by side — a huge experiment for the great idea of peace on Earth. I wish Vladimir Putin would espouse this idea too.
Waikato-born poet Jan Kemp lives in Germany. Her memoir,
(Massey University Press, $35), is out on April 14.