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With his New York restaurant, Shmoné, Israeli chef Eyal Shani earns his first Michelin nod
(New York Jewish Week) — Israeli celebrity chef Eyal Shani, who currently boasts 40 restaurants worldwide, became a sensation on these shores when he opened Miznon in 2018 at Chelsea Market. There, he introduced New Yorkers to a new style of Mediterranean street food that eclipsed the usual falafel, hummus and shawarma offerings. Locals and tourists alike lined up to devour Shani’s smashed potatoes, inventive pita creations and now-iconic whole roasted cauliflower heads.
Last May, Shani opened the latest addition to his NYC restaurant group: The aptly named Shmoné, which is located on West Eighth St. — “shmoné” is eight in Hebrew. The restaurant’s fresh approach — it features a new menu daily — landed Shani in the Michelin guide for the first time ever earlier this year, nominated for coveted star status. According to Michelin, “this small, sleek space punches way above its weight with dazzling Neo-Levantine cuisine.”
“I’m very, very happy for that, [but] I’m not focusing on getting Michelin stars,” Shani told the New York Jewish Week.
In fact, though he takes pride in all his restaurants — and voices enthusiasm for every culinary feat — Shani doesn’t believe Shmoné is “his most creative spot.” And yet, he said Shmoné is a very personal place to him, one of his most beloved restaurants. Ever the raconteur, he spoke about the energy that he puts into his food there and the harmony that results. “You need the magic,” he said. “I cannot explain it.”
As with all his restaurants, Shmoné has an open kitchen, which allows diners to observe the “food choreography,” as he called it. “I’m not cooking without a precise address,” he said. “I will cook for you when I see you. I am cooking for your eyes. If I cannot see you, I’m not cooking for you.”
Local sourcing and farm-fresh ingredients play a key role, too — something that Shani sees as very Israeli. “[Our ancestors] used to eat very pure, very close to the earth,” he said. “When you serve pure food to people it reminds them of something that’s exciting them.” The staff at Shmoné comb the Union Square Greenmarket for fresh produce, while their chicken is sourced from a small farm in Pennsylvania.
Shmoné’s menu is divided into categories by “creature” — though Shani utilizes an unconventionally broad definition of the word, including not only animal life but produce, breads and desserts. A “wheat creature” could be focaccia with sour cream; an “earth creature” could be tomato ovaries and green chili or a “stretchy stracciatella lasagna” served in a pyrex tray. Shani’s distinctive sense of humor is evident throughout the menu; for example, Shmoné previously served a dish called “I think I’ve managed to make a better mashed potato than [renowned French Chef Joel] Robuchon and it’s vegan.”
Like Shani’s other restaurants, Shmoné has an open kitchen and focuses on fresh produce. (Max Flatow)
Shani, 64, was born in Jerusalem and now lives in Tel Aviv. A self-trained chef who had studied cinematography, he cited a few inspirations for his career, though a major one was his vegan grandfather, who lived upstairs. Shani’s grandfather served him raw food, juices and salads and, in taking Shani to vineyards and markets, taught him to appreciate the purity of vegetables and fruit.
After his army service, Shani traveled for two years in Europe. But when a girl broke his heart, he returned to Israel and lived on a friend’s farm in the north. It was there that he decided to become a chef. “I lived there for a year like a priest — I ate from the fields and drank the water that I took from the ground,” he said. “One day, there were some hunters who were my friends and they came to bring me four porcupines. I lit the fire and ate [them], drank two bottles of wine and fell asleep in the middle of the field. I woke up in the morning and decided that all I wanted to do was cook.”
After painting houses for a while, Shani got a job in 1988 at Hotel HaSharon’s restaurant in the Herzylia Pituah neighborhood of Tel Aviv. He admitted he did not know how to cook but promised to work hard. Once he advanced to sous chef, the future restaurateur could be found racing to the parking lot to refer to the Julia Child cookbook he had tucked away in his car.
In 1989, Shani opened his first restaurant, Oceanus, in Jerusalem. A small, 24-seat space, it offered bouillabaisse, focaccia, fish and salad, and it was there that Shani began to really hone his skills. It closed after 11 years and was followed by Ocean in Tel Aviv, open for two years. Then, in 2008 he and his partner, Shahar Segal, opened the trendy, high-end HaSalon in Tel Aviv, serving up modern takes on Israeli cuisine with some Italian influences. This was the start of his restaurant empire in Israel; soon HaSalon was followed by the casual Miznon and seven others.
After he established himself solidly as a force in Israel, Shani expanded the Miznon chain to Paris in 2013, then Vienna in 2016, followed by Singapore, Melbourne and, eventually, New York, where Shani said he was seduced by the city’s exciting, vast and diverse food scene, calling it “the essence of American culture.”
At the same time, Shani said he feels challenged to upend New Yorkers’ culinary expectations. “When they are putting walls around me it’s seducing me, it’s seducing me to break them,” he said. “It’s my nature.”
From that first Miznon outpost at Chelsea Market, Shani expanded to eight restaurants across Manhattan, including a two-story Miznon North sit-down restaurant on the Upper West Side in 2019. (One Miznon branch has since closed.) That same year he opened HaSalon on Tenth Ave., where he serves dishes like “Hell’s Chicken” (a play on the neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen), and a hand-rolled 12-foot pici pasta noodle, inspired by the notion that everything in New York is big and presented on a large scale.
Shani opened Naked Tomato, a skewer restaurant with generous salad accompaniments, in Hudson Yards during the pandemic. There, he became notorious for serving a single tomato on a plate for $24, inspired by a “perfect tomato” that he came across in an upstate New York greenhouse. “If a dish is a sentence, my culinary sentence is one word and that is the subject,” he said. “If I’m doing something with tomato, it will only be tomato: no sauces to warp it, cover it or mask it. You have to serve it completely naked. You are standing completely naked in front of your plate, in front of your audience.”
Shani explained that, with each new restaurant he opens, he visits each location and tries “to get some signals.”
“I can feel the environment, I see my team, I’m looking at the architecture, absorbing the atmosphere, the energy, the vibe of the place,” he told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s like a new ingredient coming to me and something inside myself assembling [assembles] them into the shape of a new restaurant.”
Shani says he immerses himself fully into the process of opening a new place. “I’m there and all the outer world disappears, all the noises are cut and I’m completely focused on one thing, and that is the only thing that exists in my life.”
And the new places keep coming: Since 2021, Shani has opened restaurants in Toronto, London, Miami and Boston, and, most recently, Dubai. Currently in the works are expansions to Amsterdam, Mexico City, Barcelona and Zurich, and two more New York eateries are also coming soon: a Miznon outpost uptown at 2895 Broadway, near Columbia University, as well as a “gastro bar” called Port Said, which is slated to open at 350 Hudson St. this summer.
“When you are establishing a restaurant you cannot change it anymore — it’s got its own character,” he said. “Because I’m changing all the time, I’m opening restaurants all the time.”
As for the recent Michelin nod, even though it was for a New York-based restaurant, Shani said it was “one of the most wonderful things that can happen for Israel,” as it will continue to enhance the country’s reputation as a culinary destination.
“Israeli cuisine started 70 years ago — it began without roots in any tradition,” he said. “Nothing is shaping them besides their ideas and imagination. Israelis are importing ideas and then shaping them in their own way, and that makes the cuisine so special.”
Shani is not shy about the impact he has made when it comes to introducing Israeli food to the world. “I’m the godfather of Israeli cuisine,” he said. “The main structure of Israeli food was built by me.”
Ultimately, no matter the price point or location of his various restaurants, Shani believes his food brings people joy. “I think it’s about giving happiness to people, he said. “That is my cuisine.”
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The post With his New York restaurant, Shmoné, Israeli chef Eyal Shani earns his first Michelin nod appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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For poet Velvl Chernin, life is interwoven with the sword
אַז אַ פּאָעט באַטיטלט זײַן נײַ בוך „לעבן מיט אַ שװערד“ איז שׂכלדיק צו שטעלן צװײ פֿראַגעס: װעמענס לעבן, און װעלכע שװערד?
אין דער פּאָעזיע־קריטיק איז מען אָפֿט מאָל פֿאָרזיכטיק אַװעקצושטעלן אַ קלאָרן אונטערשײד צװישן דעם נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער, דאָס הײסט, דאָס קול, װאָס רעדט, און דעם פּאָעט אַלײן, דעם בעל־מחבר. דער נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער איז נישט גלאַט אַן אָפּשפּיגלונג פֿון דיכטער. (אַ באַרימטער בײַשפּיל: שעקספּירס סאָנעטן זײַנען נישט אַ פֿאַרצײכענונג פֿון זײַן ביאָגראַפֿיע, נאָר אַ נאַראַטיװ פֿון אַ פֿיקטיװן פּאַרשױן.)
מע קען אָבער אַ מאָל זײַן צו מדקדק וועגן דעם. אין דעם דאָזיקן בוך, איז קלאָר אַז דער הױפּט־נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער איז מער װײניקער דער זעלבער װאָס זײַן נאָמען געפֿינט זיך אױפֿן שער־בלאַט: װעלװל טשערנין, אַ באַקאַנטער פּאָעט, רעדאַקטאָר, אַרױסגעבער, און גרינדער פֿון זשורנאַל „ייִדישלאַנד“ װאָס װױנט כּמה יאָרן אין כּפֿר־אלדד, א קאָלאָניע אױפֿן מערבֿ־ברעג.
װי באַװוּסט איז ער אַ געבױרענער אינעם געוועזענעם סאָװעטן־פֿאַרבאַנד, געאַרבעט אין רעדאַקציע „סאָװעטיש הײמלאַנד,“ געװען (אומלעגאַל) דאָרטן אַקטיװ װי אַ ציוניסט, און דערנאָך עולה געװען אין 1990. דאָס דאָזיקע בוך איז זײַן זעכצנטע. קײן ביכל איז דאָס נישט; ס׳איז אַ װאָגיק באַנד פֿון 200 זײַטלעך. דער לעצטער אָפּטײל פֿון בוך נעמט אַרײַן געשליפֿענע, שאַרפֿע איבערזעצונגען פֿון פֿאַרשײדענע שפּראַכן, אַרײַנגערעכנט אוקראַיִניש, שפּאַניש, העברעיִש און רוסיש.
טשערנין, מיט אײן װאָרט, איז אַ פּאָעט אַ רעליגיעזער ציוניסט, אַ קאָלאָניסט אױפֿן מערבֿ־ברעג, און אַ כּלל־טוער אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַרישער װעלט. ער פֿירט אױך אַן אינטערנאַצינאַל לעבן. אַ סך פֿון די דאָזיקע לידער טראָגן די נעמען פֿון אײראָפּעיִשע שטעט, און די באַציִונג צװישן אײראָפּע און ישׂראל, דורך די אױגן פֿון אַ רוסישן ייִד אַן עולה, גיט צו אַ פֿאַרשידן־מיניקײט צו דער זאַמלונג. אַזאַ, אין סך־הכּל, איז טשערנין, און אַזאַ איז דאָס „לעבן“ פֿון טיטל.
װאָס איז ער אױסן אין דעם בוך? מיט דעם דאַרף מען אָנקוקן די „שװערד“ פֿונעם טיטל. כאָטש מער װײניקער אַ דריטל פֿון בוך איז אָנגעשריבן געװאָרן נאָך פֿאַרן גורלדיקן ייִדישן יאָר תּשפּ״ג, און פֿאַרן כאַמאַס־אַטאַק פֿון זיבעטן אָקטאָבער, איז דער צענטער און אױסגאַנגפּונקט פֿונעם בוך, װי אַ גאַנצקײט, יענער אַטאַק, און װי אַזױ דער לירישער איך פֿונעם פּאָעט רעאַגירט דערױף.
לױט טשערנין איז דאָס לעבן איצט געקניפּט און געבונדן מיט דער שװערד. כאָטש ער פֿילט זיך געריסן, האַלט ער אױך אַז דאָס פּרוּװן פֿונאַנדערטײלן לעבן און שװער איז נאַיִװ.
און דו וועסט לעבן מיט דײַן שווערד, אויב דו וועסט לעבן.
אַלטערנאַטיוועס זײַנען וויזיעס, ניט מער.
ס׳איז צו געפֿערלעך צו אַ שלום חְנוניש שטרעבן.
דעם פֿאַקט דערווײַזן איז לעת־עתּה גאָר ניט שווער.
עס זײַנען קעגן דיר די הענט כּמעט פֿון אַלע.
עס מוז אויף אַלעמען זײַן דײַן ברוטאַלע האַנט.
די ווערטער זײַנען אַ נבֿואה אַ באַנאַלע,
וואָס ווערט מקוים, כאָטש דו קלאַפּסט זיך קאָפּ אין וואַנט.
בודאַפּעשט תּשפּ״ד
מע מוז זײַן ברוטאַל, לױט טשערנין. די שװערד װעט מען האַלטן נישט נאָר װי אַ דערװײַליקע נײטיקײט, נאָר אין אַ װיזיע פֿון אַחרית־הימים, װי ער רעכנט אױס אין זײַן ליד „גמר חתימה טובֿה“:
עס וואַרטן פֿאַרבלוטיקטע שווערדן
אויף ריינער ווי אמת נעילה
אין הימלען אויף ימען אויף ערדן
בלוט שפּריצט דורך און דורך די לידער. דאָס זײַנען אַװדאי די מחשבֿות פֿון אַ יחיד בימי מלחמה. דער ליריקער איז דאָך אַן אינדיװידועל, װיל מען הערן זײַנע געדאַנקען. אַ מלחמה־בוך אָן בלוט װאָלט נישט געװען אַקוראַט.
װידער קערט מען זיך צוריק צום טיטל. „לעבן מיט אַ שװערד“: איז נאָר פֿאַראַן אײן לעבן מיט אַ שװערד? װער געפֿינט זיך אױפֿן צװײטן עק שװערד?
מע זעט נישט און מע הערט נישט פֿון קרבנות, פֿון די פֿאַרשניטענע. דאָס װאָרט פּאַלעסטינער װערט דאָ נישט דערמאָנט, דאָס װאָרט „אַראַבער“ אױך נישט.
טשערנין קען מען פֿאַרגלײַכן מיט אַן אַנדער פּאָעט, אַ גדול פֿון אונדזער ליטעראַטור, װאָס האָט געהאַלטן פֿון ייִדישער סופּרעמאַטיע און פֿון אומגעצאַמטן כּוח פֿון ייִדישער שװערד פֿעסט אין דער האַנט קעגן גױשע שׂונאים. אורי צבֿי גרינבערג האָט אָבער בפֿירוש דערמאָנט די שׂונאים און געטײלט זיך מיט זײַן קלאָרער װיזיע פֿון דער װעלט. טשערנין בלײַבט אײַנגעשלאָסן אין זײַנע אײגענע בלוטיקע דלתּ אמות.
אַ ליריקער װאָס לאָזט אױס האַלב פֿון דער מלחמה באַגײט נישט נאָר אַ מאָראַלישע נאָר אױך אַן עסטעטישע עוולה. װעמען הרגעט די שװערד? פֿאַר װאָס זעט מען נישט די מתים אױף דער דאָזיקער קאַנװע פֿון קריג?
ס׳איז אַקוראַט און נײטיק אָנצורופֿן טשערנין בײַם נאָמען: אַ טאַלאַנטירטער פּאָעט, אַ געשיקטער איבערזעצער פֿון פֿיל שפּראַכן, אַ שטיצער און דערמעגלעכער פֿון דער הײַנטיקער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור — און אױך אַזאַ װאָס איז גרײט מקריבֿ צו זײַן יענעם.
עס שמעקט די לופֿט מיט הייסן שטויב,
וואָס בלײַבט דעם זיגער פֿון זײַן רויב.
איך האָב געזיגט. עס טוט מיר באַנג.
אַלץ ווערט צעשטערט. אַ שיינעם דאַנק.
דער דאָזיקער בולטער רמז אױף סוצקעװערס „װאָס װעט בלײַבן“ איז אױך אַן אָנװוּנק אױף דער מאָס פֿון דער טראַגעדיע װאָס דאָס ייִדישע פֿאָלק האָט אַדורכגעלעבט מיטן זיבעטן אָקטאָבער, און װאָס װערט דאָ פֿאַרטײַטשט פֿון טשערנין.
לױטן דאָזיקן פּאָעט איז דער מוסר־השׂכּל אַ בלוטיקער, אױף אײביק, כאָטש מיט ספֿקות און אינערלעכע קאָנפֿליקטן. ס׳איז אַ לירישער אַפּאָקאַליפּסיס אין אַ הערמעטישן קאַמער.
עס קען זײַן אַז מיט דעם שטעלט זיך פֿאָר די צוקונפֿט פֿון דער ייִדישער פּאָעזיע, בלוט און שװערד, בשעת אַלע אַלטערנאַטיװן װערן טאַקע צעשטערט. װעמען זאָל מען באַדאַנקען?
The post For poet Velvl Chernin, life is interwoven with the sword appeared first on The Forward.
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5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory in the Michigan Democratic primary means he’s going to have to work hard to persuade skeptical liberal Michigan voters.
I’m not from Michigan, but I am liberal. And I am skeptical.
I appreciate El-Sayed’s political skills and his relentless focus on the health and economic disparities that undermine the American dream for so many.
But while many Jewish Michiganders supported El-Sayed, his narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens has many other Michigan Democratic voters worried. It’s “ridiculous” that Democratic Jews wouldn’t vote for El-Sayed based on his positions on Israel, former Rep. Andy Levin told the Forward, but I’m not sure El-Sayed’s views on Israel are the main concern.
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told JTA, “he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism.”
Many of El-Sayed’s comments and actions during the primary cast that support into doubt. Here are the five questions I’d like to see Michiganders put to him:
You said, “Hurt people hurt people.” Do you also believe that enraged people hurt people?
After a man whose family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon attacked children at a West Bloomfield, Michigan synagogue, you said, “Hurt people hurt people.” You said you were explaining the act of terror, not excusing it. But we know too that incendiary rhetoric also foments violence. The Egyptian man who attacked Jews at a peaceful march in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2025 screamed anti-Israel political phrases and said he targeted the group because he believed they were “Zionists.” You have called Israel “evil” like Hamas, “bloodthirsty,” and you singled out AIPAC as uniquely nefarious and powerful among all influence groups in the country. Doesn’t such rhetoric endanger the lives of constituents you claim you want to protect? After extremists attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, you accused President Donald Trump of inciting them via tweet. Will you cool your own rhetoric?
Is there any circumstance you would vote to send military aid to Israel?
Oct. 7, 2023 was supposed to be an all-out war. Hamas along with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran and the Houthis discussed striking Israel in unison, and could have. In such a scenario, as in the October 1973 war, Israel would have faced many thousands of casualties if not an existential threat as it quickly exhausted its defensive shield. Now imagine you were in the Senate during such a scenario. Would you have voted to send help to an ally? You said you supported sending military aid to Ukraine when it faced invasion. Why not Israel in a similar scenario?
How would you work toward a two-state solution?
You told CNN that every definition of a Jewish state “ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” You told The New Yorker that you support a two-state solution with equal rights and self-determination for Israeli Jews and Palestinians — which is a mainstream liberal Zionist position. So explain: What’s so illiberal about a Jewish-majority state you support? And do you believe in it enough to work toward one?
Is money really the only reason politicians and others support Israel?
You accused Israel’s supporters in Congress of being motivated solely by money. Is there really no other possible reason? Until Israel’s post-Oct. 7 destruction of Gaza, a majority of Americans and the vast majority of American Jews supported Israel. Couldn’t congressional support reflect their constituents’ support or their own religious or political beliefs? Could they believe in Jewish self-determination, especially post-Holocaust? Or is support for a Jewish state only a function of Jewish money (see #1)?
Which do you care about more, the Jewish vote, or Hasan Piker?
The Twitch streamer Hasan Piker said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. He called a Jewish man a “bloodthirsty violent pig dog.” You defended your appearance with Piker by saying you needed to reach his three million followers. I get that: Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris helped tank their campaigns by refusing to engage young voters wherever they could. But you continued to campaign with Piker, and refused to disavow his extreme rhetoric, saying you wouldn’t be distracted by “cancel culture.” No one is asking you to cancel him. But why won’t you, at least, confront him on his rhetoric?
There is, as you and countless pundits have pointed out, a lot at stake in this election. Right now too many American Jews feel that one of those things is their own safety. Please answer these questions, Dr. El-Sayed.
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The post 5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys!
If you have read any one of the at least 60 English translations of Homer’s Odyssey or have seen Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie, then you are probably aware that Odysseus leads a more active life than the average person. As if living through the Trojan War weren’t hard enough, he blinds the cyclops Polyphemus and gets cursed by Poseidon with epically bad weather. His men are regularly transformed into pigs, picked off by Laestrygonian giants, and drowned in storms. The nymph Calypso detains him on her island for seven years and forces him to be her lover, (although whether this counts as a hardship depends on your perspective). The man of twists and turns has seen a lot. But he probably never predicted his story would be translated into Yiddish. Or Ladino.
At first, the parallel lives of the two men who translated The Odyssey into Yiddish and Ladino sound like the makings of a sphinx’s riddle, or a cryptic prophecy from the Oracle at Delphi: both men would be called “Moshe”; both would be alive at the beginning of the Holocaust; only one would survive to the end. Their names were Moshe Leyb Pitshenik (1895 – 1941) of the Odiseye (אָדיסייע) and Moshe Ha-Elion (1925-2022) of La Odisea.
The two men never met, yet there are unexpected rhymes between the lives of the Moshes, as if their lives were composed in the same meter. Not even a photo survives of scholar, writer and translator Moshe Leyb Pitshenik, but the Congress for Jewish Culture records that he was born in Zlotshev, eastern Galicia, now Ukraine. He spent his whole life traveling various pathways to erudition. As a child, he attended a religious elementary school and a small synagogue study hall before working as a bank employee in Vienna. The corporate life must not have been for Pitshenik, for he soon moved back to Poland and enrolled in a teachers’ seminary. He spent the rest of his life as a teacher and director at the local Jewish high school in Loyvitsh (Łowicz), writing ferociously on the side.
His poems, articles, short stories, and translations appeared in publications in Krakow, Warsaw, Łodz, and Vilna. Occasionally he would publish under pen names like “A Zaytiker,” an outsider, and “Nekhed Mohel,” which translates to “the grandson of the mohel (ritual circumciser),” but sounds suspiciously like something else.
In 1937, he pulled off his translational tour de force: the Odiseye, so literally epic an achievement that he won an award from the Yiddish PEN Club, the Yiddish branch of the PEN international network with epicenters in Warsaw, Vilnius and New York City. In the book’s introduction, fellow poet and translator Shloyme Shaynberg gave Pitshenik a hearty mazal tov for “anchoring one of Homer’s magical ships on our shores.”
But the time to celebrate ran short. Just two years after the Odiseye’s publication, the Nazis invaded Poland, confining Pitshenik and thousands of other Jews in the Łowicz ghetto. He had been working on an original epic poem in ancient Greek at the time of the invasion. Had he been allowed to finish it, the poem would have been the first original ancient Greek epic to be published since the 5th century C.E. In 1941, he was led into the Kazimierz Forest and murdered, leaving the poem unfinished.
Pitshenik was already 30 years old when Moshe Ha-Elion, his Sephardic counterpart, was born in Thessaloniki in 1925. Like Pitshenik, Ha-Elion studied at a Jewish primary school before receiving a secular education, discovering The Iliad and The Odyssey in ancient Greek during junior high. Ha-Elion was 16 when the Nazis invaded Thessaloniki, he recounts in his oral history for the United States Holocaust Museum. Two years later, in 1943, Ha-Elion and his mother, sister, and grandparents boarded freight wagons believing that they would be resettled in Poland. But these wagons were headed for Auschwitz. On arrival, every member of Ha-Elion’s immediate family was sent to the gas chambers but him.
For the next 21 months, Ha-Elion labored in Auschwitz. Teaching became his lifeline: He gave Greek lessons to a Christian prisoner with special privileges in exchange for food. In 1945, as the Allies approached, the Nazis transferred Ha-Elion and thousands of other prisoners to concentration camps in Austria. The hunger, Ha-Elion recalled later in an interview with El Mundo, was so unbearable that he ate train coal to survive.
After the liberation of the camps, Ha-Elion entered mandatory Palestine on a refugee ship. He fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Humanities at the University of Tel Aviv. Like Pitshenik, he spent the rest of his life stirring up a tornado of writing across genres: He wrote a memoir of his time in the camps, a book of autobiographical poems in Ladino entitled En Los Kampos de la Muerte, or In the Death Camps, and even music to accompany one of these poems, La Djovenika al Lager (The Young Girl in the Lager), about the murder of his sister Nina.
But it was not until the end of his life that Ha-Elion undertook his translation of The Odyssey. When Ha-Elion was 90, he and the Israeli poet Avner Peretz published a Hebrew and Ladino dual translation of The Odyssey. He even managed to keep the poem in dactylic hexameter, a line-for-line Ladino mirror of the ancient Greek epic.
There are strange reflections of each Moshe in the Odysseys that they translated. For Pitshenik, the story seems omen-like: In the poem’s first line, Pitshenik translates the first adjective to describe Odysseus, polútropon, as the Yiddish word farvoglt, or “far from home.” This is unusual. English translators usually style Odysseus as “cunning” or a “man of twists and turns” or just downright “complicated.” It is as if Pitshenik read the signs of his own coming displacement in Odysseus before he read them in himself. But the translation’s strange prescience deepens just a few words later. Odysseus, Pitshenik says, participated in the “khurboynes” of holy Troy. At the time Pitshenik wrote this, a “khurbn” meant a total, cataclysmic destruction. It was reserved to describe horrors like the destruction of the first and second Temples and pogroms in Russia during World War I. But Pitshenik could not have known then that the word “Khurbn” would one day be used as a metonym for the approaching Holocaust. In Pitshenik’s translation, far-from-home Odysseus would survive a “khurbn” and find his way back. But Pitshenik himself never did.
For Ha-Elion, The Odyssey is like another form of autobiography. Like Odysseus, he was flung far from home by war, and spent the rest of his life trying to find his way home — or some place that felt like it. If translation is the process of rendering something foreign into something familiar, then perhaps translation is an attempt at homecoming in itself. Pitshenik and Ha-Elion never returned to their homes again after the War. But in the Odiseye and La Odisea, a piece of home survives. And it sounds like this:
Kontame, Muza, del ombre astuto…
O Muze! Bazing mir di maysim fun farvogltn gvir…
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns!
The post Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys! appeared first on The Forward.
