Living between the lines

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15/04/13
Living between the lines - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
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Living between the lines
A severe learning disability didn't stop Ophir Nuriel from becoming a unique voice in Hebrew
poetry today. His short, confessional, wrenching poems highlight the tension between the
limitations of the body and the freedom of the soul.
By Yham Hameiri | Dec.03, 2010 | 12:53 PM
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Ophir Nuriel with his m entor, poet Agi Mishol. "She's the Scheherazade of poem s."
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Ophir Nuriel carries a backpack crammed with books wherever he goes.
Quite possibly, there's a causal connection between the weight of his load
and the slight stoop of his shoulders. When I inquire what books he has in
there, he takes them out and displays them one at a time: Ha'akademia
Lelashon Megumgemet (The Academy of Stuttered Tongue ) by Shlomi
Haski, books of poems by Raymond Carver and Mark Strand (translated
by Uzi Weil ), Agi Mishol's "House Call" and "Moment," Anat Levin's
"Revolving Anna," Lior Granot's "And the Sun is" and Yehuda Amihai's
"Open Closed Open." And there's another book in his bag - "Gzar Din Guf,"
his first collection of poems, recently published by Pegasus Press. Now he
takes it out and his hands tremble slightly. His slumped shoulders
straighten out for a rare few seconds, connoting the uniqueness of the
moment, and his face beams with real happiness. "A friend asked me if I
cried when the book came out," he says. "I didn't cry, but I wanted to yell
with all my might, so the whole world would know that I published a book.
And a few girls, especially."
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THIS STORY IS BY
Yham Hameiri
The opening words of the book offer an explanation for Nuriel's habit of
walking around with books: "The only thing that makes me feel worthy of
the title of human being are words that I read or erase," it says. "This is
why I always have poetry books in my bag, why I
www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/living-between-the-lines-1.328601
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15/04/13
cannot leave home without them. They help me to not
make a mistake or get lost in the middle of the day or
the street."
The fear of getting lost derives, at least in part, from
the disability with which Nuriel, 31, has had to contend
since childhood: a severe learning disability that
affects his functioning and coordination. His life is
therefore a constant attempt to be liberated from his
physical limitations and to reach worlds and spheres
that are detached from physical existence. Nearly
every poem in his book contains an echo of Nuriel's
lively movement between these two poles, between the
terminality of the body and the boundlessness of the soul. Hence, the title,
Gzar Din Guf ("Body Judgment" ).
"Woody Allen, Hanoch Levin and even Nissim Aloni work around one
subject," he says. "And Yossi Banai once quoted Fellini, who said that a
man sings one song his whole life. And I'm a person who asks, who
wonders, a person in overdraft, who exceeds my limits. I have this
compulsion. But on the other hand, maybe I've managed to reach beyond
my limits."
But this attempt to transcend limitations is not always successful. The
opening poem in the collection continues as follows: " ... Now no line from
a cherished book can free me from the sorrow of the flesh. And my entire
being is deep in this grief that is me. So I take myself out to the street a
little, to death, and give myself a shot of shwarma in Iraqi pita instead of a
bullet to the head."
T he midwife: Agi Mishol
Lacking
I lack a vitamin, a type of iron
In order to be worthy.
It is not some
Muscle that can be developed, it's more like vision
You either have it or you don't, although in my case
It's a congenital defect - being a frog
I can't go out with princesses
Ophir Nuriel's poems are short and confessional, cutting and wrenching,
limning the tension between the limitations of the body and the freedom of
the soul, and the pain entailed in trying to wriggle free of this limitation.
They do so with power and with penetrating words. One person who was
touched very deeply by the plain, compact truth of Nuriel's poems is the
poet Agi Mishol, who first met Nuriel eight years ago when he attended a
writing workshop she gave. She has since become a kind of mentor to him.
At first she helped him refine his unique viewpoint into poems, and later
edited his book together with the poet and editor Amir Or.
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"With Ophir, I immediately sensed the poet that was trying to forge a path
to be born, and I was only the midwife, I helped him come out," says
Mishol.
Asked about the quality of Nuriel's book, she replies: "In terms of the
inner world, what makes 'Gzar Din Guf' special is the way it grapples headon with the mind-body difficulties he encounters because of his unusual
situation. He views them rationally and sometimes with a kind of cruel
self-humor. The direct style stirs a sense of empathy and identification in
the reader, for who hasn't felt like Kafka's Gregor Samsa at one time or
another?"
Outwardly, Ophir Nuriel's disability is hardly noticeable. He is a short,
slightly stout fellow with a high forehead and brown, curious eyes. Only
from time to time does it seem that his facial expressions "break down"
MAG AZI NE
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15/04/13
and scatter, as if directed at disparate targets. It mostly happens when his
eyes remain sad while his mouth smiles.
"People with a severe learning disability like Ophir are usually people with
a rich inner world, who have a lot to give, but these organic disabilities,
which are manifested mostly in the logical-mathematical sphere and in
motor coordination, make it difficult for them to translate their desires
[into action] and often cause people around them to make fun of them,"
explains Rachel Regev, psychologist and director of the Nitzan Onim
institution where Nuriel has lived for the past 11 years. "The result is great
frustration, because their ability to see the world and express themselves
is at the level of a normal person and beyond, but at the same time there
are other things blocking them from being able to function normally, like
difficulty in planning and organizing and dealing with financial matters."
Nuriel was born in Hadera. His mother is a preschool teacher and his
father is an electrician. He recalls a home that was fraught with tension,
primarily due to his father's difficulty in holding down a regular job. His
mother's decision to divorce his father made things even tougher, since
the father insisted on remaining in the house even after the separation.
After Ophir's older brother, now an engineer at Rafael Advanced Defense
Systems, left home to live in a boarding school for naval officers, Ophir
was left in the middle between his parents, caught in the need to negotiate
between them.
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"Those years were very hard for me; I was afraid," he says. "I escaped into
music and would listen to the radio for hours, to Doron Nesher talking
about freedom and about God, and connecting the two."
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In second grade, he learned to read, and books have been his refuge ever
since. "'Double Ora,' 'Pitzponet and Anton,' Uriel Ofek's 'Five Minutes of
Fear' - those books took me to other worlds," he says. "I wove entire
adventures in my head. Uriel Ofek also has a children's book called 'Seven
Mills and a Station,' in which the hero cleans his room and finds a little
piece of paper that gives him the inspiration for a story he writes. I was
enchanted by this idea of creating something from nothing. It inspired me
to keep a little box with articles I clipped from the newspaper, a box of
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And so he created for himself an alternative existence in which there was
no daily, Sisyphean need to worry about his mother and father, "and to
protect them from one another. That's why I didn't share my poems with
the family. I wanted it to just be mine." And yet, he says he also wishes to
make it very clear that he still loves his parents very much.
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On my penis.
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I'm so beyond caring about myself anymore
that I just ate a whole chocolate bar. It was
‫ ח ברתי של פייס בוק‬P lugin ‫יישום‬
good.
Anyway, no girl will agree to stroke me unless it's for pay. But then too I
would
die
for her to feel something real with me, not just something with
a wallet
that props up her bank account. For her to whisper in my ear,
"Come,
to you I will give for free, you're not like the other men,
fucking and leaving. You stay, ask how I am,
read to me
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Poems. Come every day, even if you don't have money,
come, I've missed you," and in the end I'll marry her.
In elementary school, Nuriel's feeling of otherness acquired an "official"
cast. "My class was called the Hemed Class," he recalls, "and every time
the principal would come into the classroom she would say to the teacher:
'You know why this is called the Hemed Class? Because the children in it
are such hamudim [cuties]." It took me six months to realize that Hemed
was really an acronym for hinuch meyuhad [special education].
Fortunately, for Bible and literature, two of my favorite subjects, they put
me in a regular class."
At 14, he transferred to the Shafririm School on Kibbutz Givat Haim,
which specializes in teaching children with learning disabilities. Two years
later, in conjunction with his studies, he joined a Netanya theater group
called Habustan, and it was there that he first became acquainted with the
role of creativity as a possible bridge to the life of the soul: "For me,
getting to know the plays of Hanoch Levin and Nissim Aloni opened up an
amazing window of love for text, and the attempt to hold my own on stage
gave me a lot of confidence that I didn't have before," he remembers.
The Shafririm administration recently invited him to give a talk to the
school's students. "To tell them that there is life after Givat Haim," he
says. Nuriel plans to tell them, "not to stop believing in themselves, not to
be afraid to go somewhere else and to get help from others. To find a
friend or someone who will guide them, because people sometimes don't
understand and don't know. To this day, it's still hard for me sometimes."
The person who helped him along the way was his personal counselor at
the school, Yishai Shaya Eshed, who was killed five years ago. "Gzar Din
Guf" is dedicated to him.
At age 20, Nuriel came to the Nitzan Onim Center, which specializes in
helping teens and adults with learning disabilities of varying severity. He is
still connected with the institution, whose goal is to train its pupils for the
labor market and for as independent a life as possible. Nuriel spent his
first four years there living in a dormitory.
"It was a very difficult time," he says. "I hated myself, I felt like everyone
was pressing on my wounds and I couldn't see myself as belonging to this
group. 'It was splendidly bad,' as Alexander Penn put it. I couldn't stand
myself. I felt like it just highlighted the weaknesses that had brought me to
this place. I was very frustrated."
Improvement came when the staff at Nitzan Onim persuaded him to begin
psychotherapy. At first he rejected all his counselors' suggestions to start
therapy, part of which would be paid for by them. Then one day he
happened to come across a copy of Haim Aherim (A Different Life ), a
monthly journal about natural medicine and spiritualism. An article by
psychologist Boaz Shavit about the borderline between psychology and
spirituality caught his eye, and he decided to call Shavit directly.
"I showed up bursting with anger at the system, and at the same time, I had
dreams that I wanted to achieve. At the first session, he told me two
things: The first was 'You know that you look a little different. Not exactly
ordinary,' and I was very glad that he said that, because up to then no one
had told me that to my face even though I always felt that there was
something unusual about my appearance; the second thing was: 'You have
a lot of dreams, start writing.'" This was the point in time when Nuriel's
poetry was born.
"It's hard for all of us to just be 'I,' to purify this place and separate it from
attempts to impress, from cliches about writing and psychology, from the
desire to be clever. But I asked him to remove all the censorship," says
Shavit, who consented to be interviewed at Nuriel's special request.
"Because it's hard to talk from the simple places. Ophir finds a way into his
difficulties, into his pain and humiliation, into some very hard things.
Most of us wouldn't dare to tell even our closest friends the kinds of things
he was prepared to write in the book."
One topic on which Nuriel's candor is particularly striking is his feelings
for women. An entire chapter of the book (one of three ) is devoted to "the
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15/04/13
curse of the body" - a curse that results in Nuriel's struggle with having to
accept the need to be present physically in his relationships with women;
he would prefer to be there only in spirit. "If only I could come to you
without a body/ to pleasure you with my words - he writes in the poem "Lu
Hayiti Yakhol" ("If I Only Could" ). When I ask him if he has ever been in a
romantic relationship, he says, "Never, except for when I was 6, with
[radio newscaster] Orli Yaniv, but she wasn't aware of it."
For the past eight years, Nuriel has worked in an Israel Electric
Corporation warehouse at the Reading power station. At first he was
disheartened by the dreary work, but in time he grew more accustomed to
it. Today he shows up for work every day at 6:45 in the morning and
finishes at 4 in the afternoon, "though sometimes the manager wants me to
stay until 6. It's tiring and can drive you a little mad, because the work is
monotonous and physical, but I know I have no choice. One time my boss
asked me if I wanted to be a rich man. I told him that I wanted to be
someone with time and the 'financial breathing room' to allow me to write
and read, and he didn't get me at all. But it's okay, because at work I also
have a lot of books and I escape to them once in a while."
At the end of the workday, Nuriel returns home to an apartment in
Ra'anana that is affiliated with Nitzan Onim, in conjunction with the
Ministry of Welfare, where he lives with two flatmates, Inbal and Moshe,
who are also in the program. The apartment has a spacious living room
connected by a long hallway to three bedrooms. Nuriel's room, at the end
of the hall, is crammed with CDs and piles of books that reach from the
floor to the ceiling. His music collection includes Yael Kraus, Ehud,
Evyatar and Meir Banai, Amir Lev, Amir Benayoun, Pink Floyd and the
Beatles. His impressive literary collection includes books of prose,
psychology, Jewish philosophy and, of course, poetry.
"I feel that the books are a part of me, they're like my friends, they give
me the feeling that I have somebody to rely on. At work at the Electric
Corporation we did earthquake-preparedness drills. It made me think that
I'll die with the books and CDs," he says.
The next moment he pulls one of the books out of the pile and reads aloud
a passage he is particularly fond of, from Yossel Birstein's "Stories from
the Realm of Tranquillity": "I, too, saw my funeral in a dream. I'm being
carried in a coffin, and behind me walks a man who is loudly weeping. I
wanted a polite and civilized funeral and he's carrying on and ruining it for
me. I sit up in the coffin to see who is walking behind me and weeping and I
see a little bald man. It's me - I'm the one ruining my own funeral."
In some of the poems, you're angry at God, seeking to settle scores with
him.
"I ask questions. I have a hard time just accepting things. But I haven't
given up on God completely. I need him and need to be in contact with
something that is ongoing, that has no end. Something that will enrich the
fragmented stream of consciousness. Not like a television show with
commercials. Although if Meir Wieseltier were to hear me, he would give
me two slaps and say it has nothing to do with God. But there's something
that even he cannot explain; in this way that you connect to something
that is endless."
What Wieseltier would have said
A long time ago
Everyone is destined for disaster (David Avidan )
For a long time I haven't touched words, the only thing I did
Was to erase my thoughts that always seemed like nonsense or drivel
That was missing something, maybe God. When I remembered to lift my
head
The sky was always above me. And yet the reality
Pushed its way into every line and did not contain desire or spirit, just too
much flesh,
5/8
15/04/13
Blood or killing. Everyone is destined for disaster. It takes courage or
madness
To look straight ahead, not to lower your gaze, not to stoop
And to forget everything.
Another thing Shavit gave Nuriel, beyond imploring him to start writing,
was the introduction to Agi Mishol. On the direct recommendation of his
therapist, eight years ago Nuriel signed up for the writing workshop the
poet was giving at Alma College for Hebrew Culture, and their relationship
has continued until now. "Agi is all heart," says Nuriel. "Her sharpness, the
way she talks about words, the sentences that come out of her - all of it is
inspirational. Even when she's talking about mundane things like pets or
the weather, it's poetry. Beyond that, the lessons with her also gave me
practical tools, like the need to write every day for practice, to walk
around with a notebook. With a single comment or shift of a word or line,
she raised the level of the poems, made them more flavorful. She's the
Scheherazade of poems. For me, she was the outstretched hand that said,
'Come here.'"
Mishol also took to Nuriel very enthusiastically. She saw him to be a kind
person who came to class laden with two bags full of books, "like someone
walking around with a nostalgia for something unseen," and giving them
out to the other students as gifts.
"When I met him, I felt like he touched my soul," she says. "He reminded
me of what Amihai wrote about his father: 'He drew love from his small
body.' Ophir is like an exposed nerve, his soul is right there on the surface.
It's impossible not to love him. The other students became fond of him
right away, too.
"From the start, his difference was the raw material for his writing. It's not
a simple psycho-physical starting point. 'Sometimes pus, sometimes
poetry - always something is excreted,' as Amihai wrote. His writing excels
in its de-familiarization, its dual gaze, his ability to see himself from the
inside and outside at once. To behave in a certain way and to observe
yourself behaving that way. Faith is also a very strong component in
Ophir's work, a deep attempt to believe. People tend to be impressed by
boldness or candor, but poetry, no matter what the subject, is first of all
about language.
"There's a story about the painter Degas who came to the poet Mallarme
and complained that while he had profound ideas and powerful emotions,
he couldn't manage to write poetry. Mallarme told him that the reason was
that a poem is made of words and not of feelings. It's true that Ophir's
poetry is revealing and honest and brave, but that's not the most
important thing. Not every emotion is poetry."
Nuriel attended Mishol's workshop for two years, during which time he
became acquainted with the Gurdjieff system of meditation, and afterward
he joined the poetry workshop sponsored by Helicon Press and led by
Amir Or. "Ophir's inner turmoil and uncloaked sensitivity never subside
for a moment, and at the same time his rhetoric has a very stirring and
moving honesty that you don't often find," says Or, who edited the book
together with Mishol. "The result is that we feel like he's speaking to us in
the most intimate and direct way; saying things that are brimming with
irreconcilable tensions, but therein lies the secret of his thrilling power."
Or adds that seeing a young poet "finding and polishing his unique voice is
perhaps the most exciting thing I can experience as a person, a teacher
and editor."
Nuriel's work was first published two and a half years ago in the 18th
edition of the Shevo literary journal published by Uzi Agassi (Even
Hoshen Press ), and was edited there by Mishol. It was a cycle of 13 poems
by the same title, "Gzar Din Guf," that was later used for Nuriel's book.
"One of the great privileges of editing a poetry journal is that from time to
time you come across fresh lines that move you beyond description," says
Agassi. The newly minted poet sent a copy of the issue to the author David
Grossman.
Grossman, without any prior knowledge of Nuriel or his unusual story,
6/8
15/04/13
sent back a letter via the Even Hoshen offices, saying: "Dear Ophir, Your
poems are so moving. As soon as I read them I go back and read them
again. They are strong and full of integrity, without any sentimentality,
and with a self-laceration that inspires empathy rather than aversion. You
have given me a great gift." W
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