The language of exile

Six old people, three men and three women I think, sat in a comfortable middle class living room in Jerusalem in the video clip that Monica Tempian showed us during her talk about German-Jewish speaking poets. They read their poems to each other in a German oasis in a Hebrew speaking country. Their language was no longer the language in common use in the German world that they had left behind. The Munich, the Czernowitz, the Europe in their memories was no more. There was something nostalgic, something sad about the scene. But these poets were better off than those who stayed and were murdered. They were also better off than Karl Wolfskehl, the German poet, who was stranded in the remote, colonial town of Auckland in 1939, not the place where he wanted to be, but the only place he could get to. His towering frame, his broad-brimmed hat, his flowing cloak, was the romantic image of the poet. But he had no other German speaking poet to share his poetry with. He mingled with the educated German refugee set. He also mixed with New Zealand writers. Frank Sargeson however, the doyen of New Zealand short story writers, the pathfinder trying to find a New Zealand voice in his writing, said that 

'There were times with Karl Wolfskehl when I could feel myself overpowered, weighted down by so much civilisation, a feeling which I had often and keenly experienced during my time in England…and now here I was once again being overpowered by Europe, and this time in my own country.'

No one would have said this in Jerusalem.  Yet these poets had roots that we are familiar with and can imagine. Although I have never been to Munich or Czernowitz, I have a mental picture of what these places are like, but I think of my friend, Apolonia, who comes from South Sudan, an Acholi from Pajok, a member of a tribe that is a small minority among the tribes of Sudan, I think of the Chin family, refugees from the north of Myamar, whom I helped to settle in Lower Hutt. Who could these people share their poetry with in a place where people can't even imagine the world they came from. For me, the inkling of this world came from the garden my Chin friend established on his small section around his state house. Vegetables were planted in straight regimental lines, the soil worked to a fine rich porous dust. This was an attempt to replicate the field that he had left behind in North Myamar. This was his form of poetry that he could only read to himself. His language was incomprehensible to the people among whom he lived.