The rabbi of the Beth El community, located in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires, said: Jordan Rapper (Buenos Aires, 1987). He published his first poetry collection this year, Alexandria Jerusalem (Melina Caserola, $22,000). “It is a community that I serve with great humility and affection,” he told Los Angeles Nacion. “And, I hope, with some poetry too.”
On the one hand, Raber’s book joins the vast library of books on Jewish themes, which authors such as Santiago Kovadlov, Diana Sperling, Monica Severim, Marcelo Bermaguer, Ricardo Forster, and Emanuel Taub (who signs the back cover text) continue to expand in Argentina. On the other hand, it joins the publisher’s catalog that brings together works by Jewish authors such as Sergio Saposenik, Gabrielle Maier, Deborah Vogel, Laura Sherman, Gabrielle Reich, Patricia Weiner, and Noemi Frenkel, which has just published Migrant forest. A Jew disarms him. Raber’s is the first title in Milena Noiland’s collection.
Issues such as exile, the sacred, death, tradition, nostalgia for God, and forms of divinity are part of the repertoire of Raber’s first book. “I like to think of the concept of uprooting as an ontological category Or perhaps in Jewish images, as a typical idea that goes beyond its purely geographical or temporal meaning,” he emphasizes one of the axes of his work.
“Between the heavenly Jerusalem / And the earthly Jerusalem stretches / Like the mournful bellows of the bandoneon / The staircase that the patriarch dreamed of in mystical ecstasy,” reads the beginning of “Jerusalem del Plata,” where the “psalmist from the outskirts” makes the waters of Eden meet the river of La Plata.
He says about the poetry collection: “It is the culmination of a long period of writing that was characterized by the experience of uprooting.” In the desire to read, he finds Raber’sAn ambition to transcendNot in an elegant sense, but with the deep human desire to establish an encounter with the other, in a certain continuity outside the boundaries of the self.
“The soul or essence of poetry is in the possibility of movement -He says-. A poetry reader is someone who has at some point been able to be touched by a ray of light that has crept through a window or by a loving gesture from a stranger on the street. Or who felt dwarfed by the breadth of the horizon or who simply needed a lift in their spirits in the middle of a rather dull morning.
On the other hand, religiosity is the motivation. “An existential inquiry that finds its natural means in language and religious motifs,” he describes. “In this sense, Poetry and devotion are inseparable: both streams emerge from the depths of that human need to express oneself, to move in search of beauty in the world. Or, when everything seems fatalistic and dreary, spruce it up.
He adds: “It is not surprising that there is so much attraction in the Jewish tradition of reading the Psalms or that the Prayer Book is full of poetic compositions from all ages, and that, when understood as literature, they have nothing to envy Shakespeare, Vallejo, or García Lorca.”
He defines his first book as a model for construction. “In the most Cortázar sense of the expression,” he notes. There are fragments of poets and prose writers breathing, perhaps flawedly, in my poetry. Every so often a bad imitation of Borges, another Israeli of Yehuda Amigai, suddenly appears, and Gilman’s bird suddenly sneaks between the poetic themes, some existentialist lines in the style of Pessoa, the nihilism of Pizarnik or perhaps the author of Ecclesiastes, and the seriousness of the psalmist. I’m a little bit of all of them.
He is currently working on a collection of short stories and another collection of articles. “I hope I don’t have to spend so many years or so much wandering around before publishing again,” he jokes.
In his view, the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel should not be understood as an escalation of a pre-existing conflict, but rather as a raid. “Simply put, the carnage of the 21st century,” he says.
“Hamas did not invent anything new, but rather broadcast on television and published on Instagram what the Cossacks committed hundreds of years ago against the Jewish settlements in Europe – pictorial -. What happened as a result of that brutal and bloody event and how the subsequent war conflict was managed at all levels, political, military and humanitarian, can be a matter of debate, and everyone will take their position on the matter. I lived that long period of two years, Until the end of the last truceWith great pain because of human pain in all its dimensions and without distinction between parties, because humanity can never be thought of in any other way. This may be one of the primary legacies of the biblical prophets and Jewish survivors of the pogroms.
He concludes, “What worries me most today is not anti-Semitism, but how we Jews respond to hatred and defamation. I see a Judaism that is beginning to be reshaped from the confrontation with the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the time. It disturbs me that the central element of our ethnic or religious affiliation is the reaction to the new anti-Jewish defamation.” We risk living an alienated Judaism, thought and experienced only through that hatred, but at the same time lacking its own foundation because it willfully ignores the sublimity of its cultural and religious heritage. It worries me more to see a Jew who is unable to be moved by Yom Kippur prayers, or who does not feel compassion at hearing a word broadcast in Yiddish or Hebrew or Ladino, than to hear an anti-Semitic insult. In an age where contradictions abound, and where many believe they have the right to vomit their vitriol against others, my question is more about the Jewishness of Jews than about the contempt promoted from abroad.
To schedule
On Thursday the 11th starting at 6pm, Melina Caserola celebrates her twentieth anniversary at the La Libre bookshop (Chicabuco 917), in San Telmo, with the participation of several authors. There will be toasts, promotions and surprise guests.