This piece is part of our Wit­ness­ing series, which shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the expe­ri­ences of Jew­ish writ­ers around the globe in the after­math of Octo­ber 7th.

It is crit­i­cal to under­stand his­to­ry not just through the books that will be writ­ten lat­er, but also through the first-hand tes­ti­monies and real-time account­ing of events as they occur. At Jew­ish Book Coun­cil, we under­stand the val­ue of these writ­ten tes­ti­mo­ni­als and of shar­ing these indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences. It’s more impor­tant now than ever to give space to these voic­es and narratives.

Thin Ice 

1.

On the plane to Toron­to, August:

is it a long enough flight 

to shed my rugged Mid­dle East­ern self, 

back to my Cana­di­an innocence? 


2.

Anx­i­ety is a thin ice

as I walk across it 

at the end of sum­mer in Toronto.


What went wrong?

A door­knob didn’t turn your way?

A wait­ress didn’t get your accent? 

The guy who invit­ed you to dance one moment,

boy­cotted you the next because you were born

in one place or the other?


With your back­pack on

you are ready to split.

For at least a week 

you’ll sur­vive the liv­ing of it.


An immi­grant with

bro­ken English, 

a bro­ken country,

a mis­sile-bro­ken roof, 

no build­ing to point out

as your home

you sail

anchor

at the kind­ness of one friend to another.


You still find refuge in cafés,

solace in chitchat­ting with baristas. 

What would Cana­da even be like 

with­out its kind­ness to the foreign? 

Like an old lady who los­es her nat­ur­al beauty

it relies on its good graces to be liked. 


Toron­to, a city with too many witnesses 

who watch its behavior.

Do I patron­ize it?

O Cana­da, oh boy Canada,

my home and native” land…


At least this time you placed me

on a street I can pro­nounce better

than any Eng­lish-native Canadian, 

Gough Avenue, like the name of the painter 

with whom I share a birthday

and a ten­den­cy for self-harm. 


I cel­e­brate Rosh Hashanah in the diasporic

embrace of my Toron­to friends,

none of us know

the cor­rect blessings,

I don’t even know them in Hebrew. 

Yet this is where I would have chosen 

to cel­e­brate again

if mis­siles, 

or anti-Semi­tism,

won’t stop me.


The lines: Oh Cana­da, oh boy Cana­da, \ my home and native” land” ref­er­ence the Cana­di­an anthem that starts with the lines: O Cana­da! \ Our home and native land!” 
 

The views and opin­ions expressed above are those of the author, based on their obser­va­tions and experiences.

Sup­port the work of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and become a mem­ber today.

Gili Haimovich, is an Israeli Cana­di­an poet writ­ing bilin­gual­ly in Hebrew and Eng­lish. She was award­ed prizes for best for­eign poet at the inter­na­tion­al Ital­ian poet­ry com­pe­ti­tions I col­ori del­l’an­i­ma (2020) and Ossi di Sep­pia (2019), a prize at the Proves Hong Kong Inter­na­tion­al Poet­ry Con­test (2017), a grant for excel­len­cy by The Min­istry of Cul­ture of Israel (2015), and more. She is the author of four books in Eng­lish includ­ing Promised Lands (Fin­ish­ing Line Press, 2020, US), as well as a mul­ti­lin­gual book of her poem Note, (El nido del fénix, 2019, Mex­i­co). In Israel she has pub­lished sev­en vol­umes of Hebrew, her recent one, Exper­i­ments in Part­ing is com­ing out these days. Her poems are trans­lat­ed into 34 lan­guages and pub­lished world­wide in numer­ous antholo­gies and jour­nals such as: The Best Asian Poet­ry Anthol­o­gy, World Lit­er­a­ture Today101 Jew­ish Poems for the Third Mil­len­ni­umNew Voic­es: Con­tem­po­rary Writ­ers Con­fronting the Holo­caust and A World Anthol­o­gy of Bor­der Poet­ry. In Israel her writ­ing is wide­ly pub­lished in major pub­li­ca­tions such as The Most Beau­ti­ful Poems in Hebrew – A Hun­dred Years of Israeli Poet­ry and A Naked Queen – An Anthol­o­gy of Israeli Social Protest Poet­ry. As a poet­ry trans­la­tor and edi­tor, she was the first to bring Eston­ian poet­ry books into Hebrew, for which she received recog­ni­tion from the Eston­ian Min­istry of For­eign Affairs for her con­tri­bu­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of Eston­ian cul­ture (2022). Gili is a grad­u­ate of the Cre­ate Insti­tute, The inter­na­tion­al school for inter­dis­ci­pli­nary stud­ies and the art school Cam­era Obscu­ra and engages also with visu­al art, edit­ing and teach­ing writ­ing from an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary approach.