The third
mother: Bat-Miriam
Avot Yeshurun and Abb Kovner conducted a friendly relationship, partly
enhanced by the mediation of a significant third figure- the poetess
Bat-Miriam. Both poets admired her and used to meet in her house, show her
their poems and even write poems to her, sometimes against her will. Yocheved
Bat Miriam (1902-1980) was an exceptional figure in the local poetic scene.
Her choice of a name, Bat-Miriam, was due to the fact she saw herself as the
poetic descendant of the biblical Miriam, the sister of Moses, Israel's first
poetess. Bat-Miriam is considered a symbolist, enigmatic poetess, "a
poets' poetess". In 1948 her beloved son Zhuzik died at war.
Since the death of her sonshe almost never left her home, wore only
black and talked to her visitors in third person form.Bat- Miriam ceased
writing poems but wrote daily letters to her daughter. Abba Kovner used to
visit her, sometimes with Avot Yeshurun, and show her of his poems- some of
which were dedicated to her – and listen to her verdict.[i]
A profound attachment came to exist between Avot Yeshurun and
Bat-Miriam. It was told that "Bat-Miriam charmed Avot with her beauty and
wisdom, but it seems that beyond these, he was drawn to the bereaved mother
image. Her always-clad-in-black figure symbolized for him the total
sanctification of a bereaved mother to her son's memory".
Avot: "I loved
her very much. It was an effort to read here poems, but for her I made a
concession. ---she had that wholeness of the Jewish type as I knew it. I knew
she had in her some of that Jew. True Jewish manners. The most charming Jewish
type. And all that gone. That was Bat-Miriam".[ii]
Bat-Miriam appears again
and again in Yeshurun's and Kovner's poems, whether as a character in the poem or
as the one the poem was dedicated to. In these poems a likelihood and affinity
are generated between Bat-Miriam and the mother figures, and she is manipulated
according to the poetic rules that characterize each of the poems.
In Kovner's poem "And
So He Knew Your Face" that is dedicated to Bat-Miriam, a
Connection appears
between the poetess' dead son and the speaker that comes to her as if from
afar. Here, too, the bed appears as a metonymy of the mother, not unlike the
bier the speaker had to carry in "Ahoti Ktana": "And so he
perceived there too the sound of the bed\ of his mother sinking slowly, muddy
rain\ unfathomable…"
The bed is not even seen
but appears as a missing sensual memory, only the sound of its sinking is
heard. If in "Ahoti Ktana" the speaker had to carry the weight of his
mother's bier, here the burden is as if dropped, and anxiety rises towards that
sinking.
The mother's memory that was reanimated
through Bat-Miriam's mediation also diminishes, draws away, like the
mother's skull in his early poem that turns into the speakers reflection when
he tries to hold it.
In his poem "A
Last Storm" that he wrote in honor of Yocheved Bat-Miriam's memory,
Kovner describes calves that are born blind into the world:
These Calves see "All
that there is to be seen In an innocent calf's eyes saying Me – Me
to the world." The calves are brought as if from without the poem,
which is in memory of Bat-Miriam, actually retelling the son's hailing to his
mother when he shall return home, Ma– Me. It is the mumbling that
will never become verbal, and just so reveals the attempt to manufacture an
experience of babyhood between Kovner and Bat-Miriam.
Avot Yeshurun:
As a rule, Yeshurun's
poetics tie between the maternal quality and the capacity of sacrifice.
Bat-Miriam's devotion to bereavement, her obsessive involvement with
bereavement customs like fasting and dressing in black, and above all her vow
to silence as a poet that stopped writing after the death of her son-
all these bore a strong impact on Yeshurun's soul. His poem "Bat-Miriam"
opens with the moment of silence: "And she held her piece".
Because of her silence, Yeshurun dubs her poetic and spoken voice, in order to
retrieve it. It is the same as he acts upon his mother and family- he revives
them through reviving their authentic dialect. Through the course of the
poem he inserts the names of her poem books and cites from them. The poem
demonstrates an admiration to her character, and treats her customary fasting
as a sublime characteristic of her entity, a noble choice: "divine
fasting". If the poem opens with the vow to silence, it ends where the
mother and dead son pray, bonding them together by a single word: "Vatidom"
(and she went no further, and she became still), meaning both the cessation of
speech and movement, referring to the mother's silence and the death of the
son. This way he melts them together, returning them each to the other's
bosom.