The Writing of Tears
The works of Nurit Gur-Lavy (Karni) are composed of pages from a diary written by her grandmother, Sarah Kafri, one of the founders of Kfar Yehoshua. The pages of the diary are presented as they are, and the artist’s intervention in them is subtle, almost imperceptible. The first question that emerges in front of the works is: “What exactly is the work of art carried out on them, and why were they chosen to be exhibited in an art show?” One can certainly argue that Gur-Lavy’s work amounts to mediating, that is, transferring the pages of the diary from the family archive to the public realm. But does the work of giving access even worthy of the moniker “art”? After all, this work has more to do with archival practices than with artmaking. And yet, as we shall see immediately, the work of giving access, subtle as it may be, carries great artistic value.
In order to understand the artistic value of the works, we must examine them on the backdrop of other acts of archiving Sarah Kafri’s life, first and foremost of these is the Wikipedia page dedicated to her life and the book A Life of Meaning – a collection of her texts compiled posthumously by her daughters. Looking at the Wikipedia page and the book paints a picture of a prolific woman who dedicated her life to the Zionist enterprise. Sarah Kafri was born into a wealthy family in Minsk. Together with her brother, Eliezer Kaplan – who would later serve as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance in the first Israeli government – she was active in a Zionist youth movement and in the Tzeirei Zion party. After immigrating to Israel in 1920, when she was twenty, Kafri trained to be a nursery teacher at Lewinsky College, and later became the first kindergarten teacher in Moshav Nahalal. There she also met her husband, Michael Kafri (Kukso), who was one of the founders of Kibbutz Tel Yosef. The two were among the founders of Kfar Yehoshua. On the moshav, Kafri divided her time between farm work and raising her four children. She then devoted herself to public activities that included membership in the Education and Culture Committee and the Working Mothers Organization. In this context, she promoted a feminist agenda, which included encouraging gender equality and promoting the status of women. Later, Kafri served as Mapai emissary to the 20th (1937) and 21st (1939) Jewish Congress. In 1945, she was sent by the Women’s Council on a fundraising campaign in America and Canada. The pinnacle of her public career was her appointment as a Member of the Second Knesset on behalf of Mapai.
The disparity between the figure of the pioneer who dedicated her life to the Zionist enterprise, as it is outlined in the book, and the figure that emerges from the pages of the diary presented in the exhibition is remarkable. The first difference is a stylistic one: The writing in Kafri’s book is pragmatic and functional, while the diary uncovers a delicate soul whose writing has a distinctly poetic value, despite her statement that she is not interested in being a writer. We need only look at these lines to find support for this claim: “The wind carries the words that erupted / from my heart on this dark night and the stars listened.”[1] In the pages of the diary, Kafri also confesses her fondness for singing and dancing in her youth.[2] These artistic tendencies were all sacrificed on the altar of the Zionist enterprise.
Artistic talent was not the only thing sacrificed on the altar of Zionism. Browsing the diary, we discover the immense difficulties she faced. This is true of the hard manual work, in which she wanted to take part despite being a nursery teacher, insisting to live the Zionist dream in its entirety.[3] This is also true of the burden of the housework and child rearing.[4] Complaints about her husband, who does not help, to say the least, with the task of taking care of the home and raising the children. Not only does he not share the burden, he also silenced any criticism against him.[5] To this we can add insults and dismissive attitude on his part.[6] The harsh reality of life leads Kafri to recognize the unbridgeable gap between the existing situation and the Zionist dream.[7] All this pushes her to a breaking point, where she longs for death: “If only I died now in this moment!” or “Perhaps God will help me and I will die.” Among the pages we even find the mention of a suicide attempt: “Years ago one summer night I decided to go lie down on the railroad tracks and wait until the train comes.” According to her, the only thing that stopped her from going through with it was her commitment to her family and to her people. In that sense, the diary serves as a therapeutic means, alleviating the anguishes of everyday life through the act of writing.[8]
And so, it would seem that Sarah Kafri’s life was written twice, in two different writings. The one, which we find in the book, is official writing, producing an idealized representation of Sarah Kafri as an exemplary pioneer who lived the Zionist dream, and in the process also promoted a feminist agenda. The second writing is confessional writing, the one that we find in the pages of the diary, which exposes a figure that cracks under the strain, and in that also questions the possibility of fulfilling the Zionist dream. The prolific figure, who never ran away from a challenge, suddenly emerges as a fragile figure, who questions the sanctity of life and tries to take her own. The woman who championed a feminist agenda before this term even existed, appears as someone who gave in to her husband’s whims, who burdened her alone with the task of taking care of their home and raising their children.
Confessional writing is the writing closest to the essence of things as they are, to what really happened, or to put it another way, to the Real. Although we must keep in mind Derrida’s statement that confession is an impossible possibility, as it includes, by its very essence, concealment just as much as disclosure. It is also the writing of the body, as though it writes its chronicles with its own fluids. In this case, it is not the fluid of the heart – blood, but the fluid of the eye – tears.[9] Sarah writes the pages of her diary not with the blood of her heart, but with the tears of her eyes. After she had dipped the quill in the inkwell of her eyes, she illustrates the pages with line after line of script, whose power is held in its mesmerizing convoluted appearance just as much as in its content.
Limited in scope as it may be, this writing, the writing of tears, casts doubt on the necessity and value of official writing, which suddenly emerges as swells of ink that only cover up the real events. The writing of tears is therefore the writing of the crypt, of the secret, of that inaccessible abyss hidden by the shell of official writing that surrounds it on all sides. And what is this secret if not the torment of the body and mind of that epitome of a pioneer woman – Sarah Kafri – which pushed her to the depths of despair, where her death seemed better than living. We can presume that it was not only Sarah Kafri who experienced such torment. After all, the anguish, despair, suicidal thoughts and so on where the lot of an entire generation, a price they had to pay for devoting themselves to the Zionist enterprise. This heavy toll was purposely repressed and silenced by the prevailing narrative, in order to create an ideal image of the redemption of man and the land by the Zionist enterprise.
The very secret hidden in the pages of the diary explains the great lengths taken to hide it. First of all, the author herself declares in an act of subterfuge that she does not want her words to be read.[10] The family members are confident that the pages displayed in the exhibition are just a small part of an entire diary, the traces of which have been lost. It is quite possible that the pages that did survive were torn from the original diary due to their volatile content. Paradoxically, this effort to conceal the incriminating pages contributed to their survival, since the actual diary was lost or intentionally destroyed, whereas the pages removed from it were left intact. Kept by family members in a special envelop for years, the incriminating pages were discovered only after the death of their guardians. Thus, they eventually made their way to the artist’s mother. The mother consented to their display in the exhibition only after deleting the passages that she thought would be better not to see daylight. The writing of tears is adorned by ropes of black mist that stretch across the lines, as a testament to the explosive content that teems beneath them like lava.
The act of concealment on the part of the family is reinforced by the artist: Gur-Lavy scanned the original diary pages. She printed the scans on thick sheets of paper, which she then handed to her mother to censor. The censored pages were replicated again in a photo etching technique, and the prints of the photo etching are the ones on view in the exhibition. The diary pages were also deliberately left in their original size, making them that much harder to read. And so, the original diary pages underwent a series of erasures and duplications, forming a layered screen of sorts that stretches between them and the viewer, somewhat mitigating their explosiveness.
The subtle intervention in the pages of the diary thus proves to be of great value, as it fulfills the purpose of art. For art has a duty not only to convey reality but also to divulge it, that is, to expose its secret, unbelievable and unbearable as it may be. The manner in which the diary pages are presented produces a dialectic of exposing the concealment, or concealing the exposure, which, on the one hand, allows the discovery of the secret – the crypt of the extensive Kukso-Kafri family and of Zionism in general – and on the other hand, alleviate the explosive effect that the disclosure may hold.
Dr. Dror Pimentel
Senior Lecturer in the Department of Visual and Material Culture and in the Master's program in Policy and Theory of Art at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem