People: Frederic Brenner, photographer and Yehuda Amichai, poet

Photographer Frederic Brenner has traveled for nearly two decades, photographing Jews in more than forty countries and capturing the diversity of their experiences in the Diaspora. Ten years ago in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Israel, Brenner has produced an exquisitely crafted book of black and white photographs of members of some fourteen recent immigrant families, all of whom he had previously photographed in their native countries: in Yemen, Ethiopia, Russia, Yugoslavia, United States, France, England, and India.

Tzabari Zendani families Wadi Amlah Yemen 1985, Frederic Brenner

Tzabari Zendani families Kikar Rabin, Tel-Aviv Israel 1997, Frederic Brenner

Viewing the magnificent photographs in Exile at Home (Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1998), we ponder the definitions of “exile” and “home.” Writes Frederic Brenner in the introduction to this work of art: “1978: My journey started in Jerusalem in Mea She’arim. Then, as if on a reverse journey from this Diaspora in the heart of Israel, I went to search for the multiple fragments of exile. 1997: Many contrasting, contradictory photographs, gleaned from forty different countries, have deconstructed the emblematic image of the Jew that was at the origin of my journey.

Photographer Frederic Brenner has traveled for nearly two decades, photographing Jews in more than forty countries and capturing the diversity of their experiences in the Diaspora. Now, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Israel, Brenner has produced an exquisitely crafted book of black and white photographs of members of some fourteen recent immigrant families, all of whom he had previously photographed in their native countries: in Yemen, Ethiopia, Russia, Yugoslavia, United States, France, England, and India.

Barsky family, Moscow Russia 1990, Frederic Brenner

Barsky family, Sodom Israel 1991, Frederic Brenner

To return to Israel is to interrogate, to confront these images, these differences, and to ask what unites and what divides the Jewish people. I have chosen to address these questions to fourteen families I photographed between 1978 and 1997, whom I found again united and scattered throughout Israel. Only after extensive fieldwork and many conversations did I determine how to portray these families in their new homeland. On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, this photographic essay remains a book of questions, a mirror that I interrogate as I attempt to understand what place to ascribe to the exile within us, so that the promise may yet come true.” “Exile at Home” opens with two short essays by Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai.

What Kind of a Person Yehuda Amichai

“What kind of a person are you,” I heard them say to me.
I’m a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.

I’m a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I’m not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.

I’m not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.

Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.

s Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.

I’m not a car, I’m a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.

Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, in A Life of Poetry: 1948 – 1994, New York, HarperCollins, 1994.