Israel In Translation

On today's episode, host Marcela Sulak reads the work of Yonatan Berg. He is youngest recipient ever to win the Yehuda Amichai Poetry Prize, and his work has only begun to be published in Joanna Chen’s English translation. As Chen points out, Yonatan Berg’s poetry strides the lines that divide this country in so many ways, with honesty and compassion. "On Sabbath afternoon the air is quiet. We stroll towards the Sephardi synagogue, the hills filled with afternoon and beyond, the Dead Sea shimmers, burning with salt, thick with death. Rabbi Avi Sasson stands before us, his voice filling the curves of the stone with psalms. We sit down. Summer switches off and we give ourselves to the same cave where praises cover the decay of our lives – our parents arguing, journeys through Ramallah, the idea that around us hangs a permanent, burning growl of injustice: the shifting of Israel and Palestine’s tectonic plates." Yonatan Berg was born in 1981 in Jerusalem to a religious family and grew up in Psagot, a settlemen