Artists' Quarter in Old Jaffa
by Maxim D. Shrayer
The frowned forehead of Kikar Kdumim,
a stoneware door sign “Sharir—שריר”.
(This used to be the home of our cousins,
such were the rules of that translingual game,
in Israel they Hebraized our name.)
Here lived the artist and his family...
The recent owners, a Jewish lady
from Germany and her German husband
destroyed the family abode of harmony
to build their own retirement home.
From here one can see
St. Nicholas Monastery, the Nunciature,
the Al-Bahr Mosque, where fishermen’s wives
prayed for their husbands,
and also a majestic restaurant, A-la-din.
Below, warehouses and fishing boats,
and further down—beaches, promenade, hotels,
volleyballs, submachine guns, hips, lips, and heels,
the joys and torments of every Jewish day
imprinted on the sky of Tel Aviv.
Maxim D. Shrayer is a bilingual writer in English and Russian, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, and a winner of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award. He was born in Moscow and left the former USSR in 1987. A professor at Boston College, Shrayer is the author of over twenty-five books, including four collections of Russian-language verse and two collections of English-language verse. His new poetry collection, Kinship, is forthcoming in 2024.
