Poetry Has Lost Its Appeal
By HELEN KAYE
Seventeen years ago, poet/author Ilan Sheinfeld was working with auteur director Ruth Kanner, two creative people sharing an offbeat, ironic sense of humor.
“Why don’t you write a play about a mermaid in Bat Yam?” she asked him, the Hebrew for mermaid being bat yam – a play on words combining the magical-mythological with the prosaic and pedestrian.
So he did. It’s called Mermaids and is one of the 10 staged readings that together with five full productions form Beit Lessin’s annual Setting the Stage festival of new Israeli plays. The festival will take place at ZOA House from September 11 through 13.
Mermaids concerns two fishermen who find a mermaid on a Bat Yam beach. She has crawled from the sea to seek humanity. Her introduction to the human world begets events and emotions whose ebb changes the surface, but not much else.
“What interested me,” says Sheinfeld over lunch at ZOA, “was life in a world of amputated dreams.”
The play is an allegory and shows that we are born with a given nature; however much we try to change it, or are influenced by circumstance, not only do we remain what we are, but must live with the consequences, Sheinfeld explains.
Among the productions at Setting the Stage are Shadow of a Woman by Shirli Oded-Doron, based on the agonies suffered by abused women, and Tania – New Immigrant,Eby Orli Rubinstein-Katzap, centered around immigrants from the FSU.
The staged-readings include Blindness by Itamar Orlev, about a single mother trying to raise her teenage son, Last Wish of a Spinster, a romantic comedy with a twist by Noam Gil, and Who Knows Amos Hefer by Tuvia Tzippin, about a high-school teacher accused of sexual harassment.
For the playwrights, all unknowns, these are their first plays. Mermaids is Shoenfeld’s sixth play. It joins three novels, eight books of poetry, five children’s books as well as writing textbooks and innumerable articles for the various newspapers he wrote for from 1981-2004.
SHEINFELD IS a respected, popular and critically acclaimed man of letters. Indeed, his latest novel, Tale of a Ring, has sold more than 40,000 copies, an amazing amount for this little land. To pay the bills, he also works as a PR spokesperson, and he gives writing workshops all over the country; in addition, he is a courageous and outspoken gay rights activist.
The oldest of four boys, Sheinfeld, 48, grew up in Ramat Hasharon. Shy, introverted and perhaps over- sensitive, he was the class butt, unmercifully teased and nicknamed “Rabbit” because of his ears, a name that has stuck with him to this day.
He wrote his first poem at 14 inspired by a visit to his grandmother’s grave. “I knew then that I would be a poet.”
At 16, his first published poem appeared in the school newspaper. The day was unforgettable. His schoolmates shrank from him in dread. His counselor told him that he was direly disturbed and needed urgent help.
Rereading “To Sleep I Must Toss Dead Children from My Bed,” Sheinfeld decided that perhaps they were right. He went to another school counselor who asked him, “Have you hurt or harmed anybody? No? Then keep right on writing.”
Years later she told him that his coming out of the closet had helped her deal with her own son’s homosexuality.
Almost as early as he realized that he was a poet came the realization that he was gay. The activism grew from the death of his first partner at only 28, “and nobody understood my grief. It was then I came out of the closet in an interview printed in Haaretz. I have always felt that gays are people before their sexual orientation, and that this must be recognized.”
Writing prose was always part of his output, but Sheinfeld only became confident in his ability to write it with the success of his novel Shedletz in 1998. Tale of a Ring finally convinced him, and today he’s writing mostly prose.
“Poetry has lost its appeal. Writing a poem is a Sisyphean task and right now I want to tell stories.”
Originally published by HELEN KAYE.
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