You may not have to be a romantic to write poetry. After all, there are, for example, manifold rappers who spout poetic lines to great effect without even a smidgen of tenderness. Then again, having that in your makeup can certainly help to produce the evocative lyrical goods.
That clearly applies to Gad Kaynar-Kissinger. The septuagenarian emeritus professor and former chairman of the department of theater arts at Tel Aviv University is living, breathing, and publishing proof of how a palpable dosage of love coursing through your veins can infuse your textual output with duly emotive expressions and metaphors that prompt powerful imagery.
Kaynar-Kissinger’s poetic bibliography to date features eight titles, but that tells only half the story. His first book, Ba’even Hazot Zormim Mayim (“water flows in this stone”), saw the light of day in 1978. It took another 11 years for his sophomore effort to come out, followed by 11 more for the third. However, the pace has picked up appreciably, and he has released four books in just the past 10 years.
And he doesn’t just slave away over a hot computer keyboard. He puts his thespian training and acumen to good effect by staging a variety of works, which include material created by other writers.
He recently did just that when, together with his fellow thespian sibling, Doron, he went to Germany in 1938 to perform Address Unknown, written by Kathrine Taylor, aka Kressman Taylor.
The book comprises fictional correspondence between Max and Martin, two close friends, Germans who immigrated to the United States and established an art gallery in California. But there, the common ground apparently ends. Martin, a non-Jew, decides to return to Germany to witness “the great things” evolving under Hitler, as, to his mind, his homeland resurrects itself in the wake of the catastrophe and humiliation of World War I. Max stays in California, and the exchange of letters becomes increasingly difficult, as Martin’s mail is censored by the Nazi authorities. He fears for his position within the party as his Jewish former business partner continues to write to him from the safety of the US.
The backdrop is not that far from Kaynar-Kissinger’s own bio. He was born in Tel Aviv to German-born parents of contrasting personalities and personal philosophies.
His father, a top-of-the-range tailor, made aliyah in 1934, but only after having been incarcerated by the Nazis for reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in public. He was soon released thanks to the intervention of Rabbi Leo Beck, head of the German Jewish community, who, at the time, still had some pull with the Nazi authorities.
Kaynar-Kissinger’s mother got out of Palestine with her family only in 1939.
“They were very different,” the poet notes. “There were two kinds of Yekkes: the ardent Zionists, who were mostly kibbutzniks; and the ones who lived their lives here [in Israel] in a sort of German cultural enclave.” His mother pertained to the latter. He says his father was a soft-spoken, tender Zionist, while it seems his mother was a very different kettle of fish.
That gets a mention in a poem titled “In My Mother’s Drawer,” which is included in Rescue Mission, an English-translation compilation of some of Kaynar-Kissinger’s work. He spells out his childhood angst in no uncertain terms, at being kept at arm’s length instead of being able to nestle in a maternal embrace fed by unconditional love. “In My Mother’s Drawer, I found aerial photos, That mapped me, Out, From afar. From above. Un-touching,” the short work reads. The emotional gulf is there in plain painful sight.
That surely left some scar tissue, which appears to have undergone a degree of palliation as Kaynar-Kissinger’s career path has wended across the years and a range of material. I wondered whether that absence of maternal openness has colored his literary and theatrical endeavor. “Undoubtedly,” comes the unequivocal response. “It is said, and I can vouch for that myself, that actors and artists in general, in their art compensate for all kinds of traumas, or mini-traumas, they experienced in childhood. You can say that art is therapy. In my case, that is crystal clear.”
For Kaynar-Kissinger, having grown up in a home steeped in German culture, and with his mother’s clinical take on life and relationships, his choice of professional path and, more poignantly, his general mode of expression seem to be at odds with the domestic ambiance of his earliest formative years.
“Yes, that was a sort of rebellion,” he chuckles. “I was a straight-A student and a really good boy. When I was around 30, I asked my mother why she never complimented me for bringing home such good grades, and she said, ‘Why did I need to compliment? That was the way it was supposed to be, no?’”
The mother-son liaison eventually changed as his mother aged and became ill, and Kaynar-Kissinger could see the end on the horizon.
“She became more tender, and my approach also softened,” he recalls. That fed into his work, too. “My writing changed, and I felt I owed my mother some sort of apology. I savage my mother in my earlier books.” That changed, and the publication intervals shrank significantly.
It is fascinating to examine the work of multidisciplinary artists, to discern the nuances that spill over from one field to another. That may come across in metaphors or seemingly extraneous rhythms or emphases, or pure subject matter, or simply how they approach the endeavor in question.
Kaynar-Kissinger says all the above, and more, apply to him. “That is quite common among artists whereby one field fuels another.”
But he feels it is hard to put one’s finger on exactly how the reciprocity works. “Sometimes images from plays and theatrical activity come out in my poetry – for example, in Pygmalion or “In the Place Where Hamlet’s Son Stops Asking Questions” from [2018 release] Selfie, or when certain poetic insights affect my understanding of a [theatrical] role.”
There is current evidence of that two-way traffic. “I am working on the role of the professor in Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, and I can feel how the part illuminates in me certain emotions about myself which come through in my poetry.”
That leads seamlessly to the issue of poetry’s place in the world and how, if at all, it leaves its mark on how we feel and go about our daily business. After all, not many of us regularly pick up a poetry book and lose ourselves for an hour or two in verse as we might do, say, in a novel. That, too, gets a stratified reply.
'Poetry represents and accentuates existing approaches to reality': Kaynar-Kissinger
“It doesn’t affect us directly,” Kaynar-Kissinger posits. “In one sense, poetry represents and accentuates existing approaches to reality. One can, for example, cite the work of [British WW I poet and soldier] Wilfred Owen and the influence that had on the generation of World War I, or our ‘Shir Hare’ut’ (“camaraderie”) with regard to the generation of the War of Independence.”
But poetry doesn’t come to the fore only in extremis. “It can, to an extent, soften and mitigate the emotions of the reader or listener and thereby fine-tune sensitivity towards others, neutralize violence, and lead to an out-of-the-box view of life.”
Extolling the virtues of his literary vocation may come naturally to Kaynar-Kissinger, but he is under no illusion that poetry can change the world en masse. “No poet has yet prevented war. In fact, sometimes it is quite the opposite. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s greatest 20th-century poet, was a fascist and a warmonger.” One might also note that D’Annunzio was also a general in the Italian Army.
Given his unapologetically romantic take on poetry and, it seems, life, I was surprised to hear Kaynar-Kissinger cite lauded German playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht as a central figure in his personal literary pantheon. After all, Brecht was known for encouraging his audiences to take a step back from the onstage emotional dynamics of his plays.
I am summarily set right on that score. It is, Kaynar-Kissinger advises, a commonly held misconception of Brecht’s philosophy.
“The German term ‘Verfremdung,’ or ‘estrangement’ in English, means turning the familiar into something alien. But there is nothing cerebral or any absence or emotionality [in Brecht’s work]. Almost all Brecht’s plays – Threepenny
Opera; Mother Courage; The Good Person of Szechwan – are melodramas or emotional tragedies. However, the elements of the works include distancing from the audience in order to arouse in the viewer awareness of the reality in which they live, and criticism of it. That applies to some of my poems in which I employ irony, sarcasm, and such like.”
That comes through in “Shir Hare’im” (“comrades’ poem’), 7.10.23, in which Kaynar-Kissinger takes a stark stab at the horrific events of that fateful day. “Hamas shot them from the front. The country shot them in the back. It seems there is no need for pits, like at Ponary and Babi Yar.” The irony he says he packs in his poetic toolbox is front and center there. Clearly, there is more to the man and poet than baring his heart and soul.
The fact that his parents got out of Germany before the Holocaust began in earnest left him with less emotional baggage in his dealings with the German language and culture. He and his brother are fluent German speakers, and Kaynar-Kissinger says he has no qualms about going to Germany, reading his poems and acting there, and in German. He declares he thoroughly enjoyed his role in Address Unknown in which he played Martin, the turncoat. “As an actor, you always want to play the bad guy,” he laughs. “Nice guys are far less interesting.”
His lighter Holocaust emotional load is also indicated in the fact that the Holocaust features infrequently in his oeuvre.
When I tell him about my mother’s escape from Vienna at the age of seven on one of the first Kindertransport consignments to Britain, he tells me he wrote a poem about that. It appears in his latest book of poetry, The Dove Desires the Flood. He references the number tags the children had around their neck and the scars etched into the children’s hearts by being sent away by their parents to a strange land, with a strange language. “There are no homelands and no religions, only endless exile,” he writes in one of the stanzas.
That struck a sensitive chord, as does the vast majority of Kaynar-Kissinger’s work, which has brought him honors and awards, including Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit, following the translation of some of his poems into Norwegian. Other poems have found their way into English, Spanish, German, and Swedish.
At the end of the day, Kaynar-Kissinger comes across as an incurable romantic with a sunny disposition that barely conceals emotional pockmarks which come through in the cruel light of day on the pages of his books.
“I look for the line on which to sign with a kiss, and try to decode how to express the word ‘love’ in the language of pain... if at all,” reads the closing lines of “If At All” in his 2020 volume, High Risk, dedicated to his late mother.
For Kaynar-Kissinger, love, albeit encapsulated in words, knows no bounds.