The Stones of Lifta
The Stones of Lifta by Marc Kaminsky. Dos Madres Press, 2019. 92 pp. $17 (paperback)
No faith but the faith / that this can’t go on.
--Marc Kaminsky, “In Bethlehem”
We would call it a ghost town. Lifta is a village of stone homes on a steep hill outside the gates of Jerusalem, empty of inhabitants since the Nakba. This word is an Arabic term for "catastrophe" or "disaster." It refers to the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 as a result of the conflict following the passage of the UN Partition Plan for Palestine. Paradoxically, Lifta does have absent inhabitants, the survivors and descendants of the people who were forced to flee their homes over 70 years ago. They have never been allowed to return to their village. Instead, their homes were disabled, holes long ago blown in the domed ceilings to prevent even temporary re-occupancy.
Displaced villagers, elderly now, children then, return to visit and call to the ghosts of their ancestors. They try to keep both the story of Lifta and their own claim to the village alive. In stark contrast, Israeli developers have a plan to improve the hillside—it envisions luxury villas and condos, a five-star hotel, a mall, a synagogue, and a small museum for any relics unearthed during construction. Lifta is the only remaining former Arab village that has not yet been plowed under or resettled for Jewish occupancy. A Palestinian and Israeli coalition emerged to stop the development of Lifta and instead preserve it, in whole or part, as a historical site.
Marc Kaminsky is a Brooklyn-based poet. He came to write about Lifta after watching an early cut of a documentary about the village, “The Ruins of Lifta,” in his Brooklyn office. The film was made by a friend. Kaminsky's response was to something very like a religious call, a uniquely Hebraic call: “We recognize it immediately and answer,” he writes in the book’s first poem, “Here I am.” The call said,
…. Go
to Lifta, accompany your friend to the emptied village
of Lifta, walk beside him as he treads carefully
around the boulder that blocks the winding path up to Lifta.
It was a call to witness, motivated by an act of friendship. This book, The Stones of Lifta, is the result of that witness, in the author’s voice and in the voices of participants in the controversy, including those rooted in history and theology. Even the inanimate finds voice—the very stones. If the biblical sense of "being called" sounds overblown to you, the poems more than substantiate Kaminsky’s sense of mission and the integrity of his purpose: delivering rigorous, unflinching poems that express compassion and insist on justice.
The book, arranged in four sections—The Impasse, Front Lines, On the Site of Loss, and On the Road to Jerusalem—contains 25 poems that take us into the midst of the arguments for and against Lifta’s possible fates. But the poems also build a sense of deeper understanding of the tragic situation on the ground, past and present, the impasse that seems to have no yield but violence, imprisonment, occupation, corpses, and continued injustice.
The title poem for the first section concludes with statements from a developer and from one of the displaced inhabitants of the village.
And Itzik Shweky answers: If I let Lifta stand
as a monument that says on this site
there was an Arab village, it would lead
to painful memories and hatred, I
would be causing conflict. They will say,
“This is how we once lived and then
the Jews came and threw us out.” No!
I’m not going to let that happen.
And Yacoub Odeh answers: This
is how we once lived and then
the Jews came and kicked us out. I
left my village 64 years ago, but surely
I will come back again, and if not
I, then my children.
The poems are not simple; they are nuanced and textured, as real as life in conflict is. The language is clear and direct, raw and insistent, beautiful and compelling. Every line insists on what is and what might be but likely won’t—when will we return to our village, when will they finally learn the lesson, the only lesson they understand: force.
Kaminsky doesn’t shy from the violence of the conflict or its fevered anger, but among the most moving poems are the quiet ones of grief and loss and culpability. The allegoric poem of two infants in the womb fighting for survival (“We forgot we were brothers”); the poem where a soldier forms an effigy that takes life and grows into his companion in hate (“And I thrust my hands into / the land my enemy reddened / with the blood of my brothers”); the poem about the boy who became a bomb; and the poems of futility and fading hope (“the key to the door / that’s long gone / hangs from my neck” and “As if their unlimited power over the body / could prove to us the impossibility of holding / the nothing in our hands that they can’t shake: / our capacity to wait / and go on waiting beyond the limits of a single lifetime.”). One of these poems ends, “No one / to mourn with, / no way to make small / steps toward peace.” Another ends:
I hope my indignation is
sufficiently tempered by the futility
of the war between us, that I might
imagine this unlikely scene:
Let me invite you
to stand with me at my missing
hearth. Walk across the room
despite your fear that I’ll open fire.
There we have it: futility as the last, best hope for peace.
Fittingly there are a lot of halved wholes and mirrored reflections in this collection—younger and older selves (“Gray Bird” in section one and “Remorse” in section four) cousins (“First Cousins”), womb-mates (“Birth Trauma”), terrorists and terrorizers (several), dialogue poems and poems in dialogue with others poems (all of them).
In the final section, On the Road to Jerusalem, Kaminsky writes about two first cousins, a New York and an Israeli Jew, the Israeli skeptical about a cousin who arrives on his first visit to Israel with what he views as ignorant indignation to make the case for justice for the Palestinians. Over the course of the poem the Israeli thinks he has gained traction with his cousin when the New Yorker admits he can see himself in the coffee house of Lifta in 1948 bursting through the doors “spraying the room with bullets.” The Israeli replies “You’ve turned / the key in the door I kept locked / against you.” No, the New Yorker says to his too pleased cousin:
As a Jew, I’ve long identified with the Palestinian
diaspora. Now walking beside you, I
feel you carrying the weight of the eternal Jew-
hatred you believe nothing
can change, and you call this reality;
it fuels the state of war you call Israel.
And I see Lifta is the only gate
through which I could have come to Jerusalem
to face the rage and perplexity of contending with you
and the horror of encountering the murderous tribesman in myself.
This long poem reaches its startling last line with its recognition of “the murderous tribesman in myself” but it also prepares us for an even more startling line in the book’s final poem, “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
That poem, set in Lifta, is in two parts, the first part in two sections. In the first section, aging villagers “bearing magnetic ID cards that declare / them present absentees” wander Lifta, “wholly present in exile… at the bottom of the open wound of their history.” In the second section the aging villagers are matched with “Jewish citizens strolling through the last / reserve of green space near the city…. Arabs / once lived here.”
They condemn us to see, in the fate
we imposed on them, the image
of ourselves we hate to have mirrored:
this is the open wound of our history.
In part two of the final poem, the book ends with the poet noting that “Every year I’ve concluded / the seder with the inconclusive words Jews everywhere / in the world repeat” (Next year in Jerusalem). Next year, though:
I will look out at the physical city
from Lifta, and I will see what the last phrase
calls on us to grasp: that even in Jerusalem we are
not in Jerusalem.
Over the course of the book, Marc Kaminsky has moved from being a poet of witness to an insistent, soft-voiced prophet, telling us that if there is a path to peace, to justice, we must recognize the murderous tribesman within us, acknowledge the complicated open wound in our own history, and maybe then we can begin to hope, to take the first real steps toward peace and reconciliation.
Throughout, Kaminsky insists on being truthful, as prophets and witnesses are called to do. The poems in The Stones of Lifta never flinch or get distracted from this layered testimony—the personal, the historical, and the moral argument faith demands, particularly when God is claimed by both sides. If the lessons of experience, history, and our faith can’t liberate us from such an impasse, we are doomed. So, they must. It is the only means by which we can find our way to Jerusalem and be rightly in it. Kaminsky has written an important book, a beautiful and troubling book for us to heed.
—Reviewer Rick Larios is a reader and occasional writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cara. He reads because it saved his life as a child growing up on the West Side of Manhattan and he'd be a fool to stop now.