“Quitter Psagot” (Psagot: sipour aziva), by Yonatan Berg, translated from Hebrew by Laurence Sendrowicz, L’Antilope, 254 p., € 22, digital € 16.
As a teenager, Yonatan Berg often went for a walk in the ruins of the ancient biblical city of Ai, facing the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea. He went “Surrender to silence”, he writes in Leaving Psagot. “I had built a world there that turned its back on implantation and its arrogant rigidity, on incessant religious and ideological discourse …” The settlement is Psagot, founded in 1981 on the lands of the Arab village of Al-Bireh, in the West Bank, by Jews with very Orthodox religious practices. The Israeli writer was 4 years old when his parents immediately decided to settle there.
Growing up in Psagot, on the promontory overlooking Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian Authority, in this colony flanked by a military base and surrounded by a fence that separates it from Al-Bireh, is to live as cut off from the outside world, in a form of isolation that is both protective and suffocating. Thus, Psagot’s child will soon be on the lookout for anything that can broaden his horizon: the soldiers at the military base who tell him about Tel Aviv, the intriguing capital, 40 kilometers away. bird, and especially the neighborhood of Palestinians of Albireh. Not to mention the books in the library and the great rabbinical texts whose philosophical and poetic inspiration will be decisive in his attraction to literature. Without counting either his reveries in the ancient city of Ai. “There I started my life of wandering and traveling, the one that ultimately gave me my exit ticket. “
Feeling of exile
Yonatan Berg left Psagot after his military service. Three years of travels in Latin America and India, a sort of headlong flight, during which, hard drugs helping, he hoped to consummate his divorce from the place of his childhood and be reborn to another reality. But it has not happened. Back home, established in Tel Aviv, the feeling of exile and constant displacement continued. So he started to write. “Why haven’t I cut it straight?” “, he asks himself in these pages. “I appeal to my intimate memory. To clarify what happened or not and, perhaps, while writing, find the path that will lead me from the past to the present, from the kid refusing to sign the death warrant of his childhood to the ill-tempered adult comfortable on that ground. “
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