I guess what I'll do here is quite illegal, but then again it's the internet and I'm also doing it in a private blog so it should be OK. I came across a whole box of Else Lasker-Schüler's papers that apparently hadn't been seen by anyone before me... about 70 envelopes each containing a couple of letters, sometimes one or even a single postcard. The series is rather fragmentary (and I can tell this only out of my experience with the Hannah Arendt Papers where the gaps in between months or years isn't as pronounced). The letters are all directed to Emil Rass (her lawyer friend in Switzerland) and start in 1933, although the early letters (at least these ones) aren't too interesting for me and I was more keen on finding the Jerusalem-related stuff, and I did! The hand-writing is very very difficult and it'll take me long months until I might be able to decipher her almost hyeroglyphical-German, unless Katharina comes to Jerusalem or that I might have someone to help me (and this might not happen anytime before November). But I did manage to read most of it at a glance, the letters are incredibly uncanny because of the innocent language portrayed therein (and which is in a way the all-devastating success of Lasker-Schüler's beyond-surrealism aesthetic sense) and the drawings in so many of them are just fantastic. One day I'd like to make a collage out of them, there're so many themes there... so many thoughts! Already in a letter of March 23. 1938 (around the same time of Mascha Kaléko's journals of emigration) she writes to Raas about her arrival in Jerusalem before 1. June 1938, I'm not sure if this materialized... this is not the definitely the date when she made her home in Jerusalem, but I do know she spent a short period in Palestine and also travelling through Egypt, time after which she wrote "The Land of the Hebrews" (that is coming out in English very soon, first present I'll give to G. for his starting a master's degree), but I'm not too clear in my head about when did this exactly happen. Anyways she's in Jerusalem already by 1. April 1939 when she writes a letter to Raas and tells him her address is in some "Hotel Vienna", there she would live at least for the first few years... in the letter she says she's been in town for three days already. I wasn't sure at all about the location of the hotel, and I don't know if it exists still (due to be checked...) but as far as I know until the early 1970's it still stood in Sheikh Jarra, a neighbourhood in East Jerusalem where today many wealthy Arabs and foreign diplomats live, quite a stone's throw from the Hebrew University.
It's uncannily difficult to imagine what those six years should have been like, while she was living in Jerusalem, and we know from accounts of other people (most beautiful of those accounts are the long stories re-told by the Israeli German-born writer Yehuda Amichai, that he wrote many years later as an introduction to his Hebrew translations of her poems and later on translated into English as a foreword to translations of her poetry into this language, impossible to forget how Amichai relates that "she was the first hippy I ever saw"). What puzzled me from the letters I read is that later on she started writing letters to Raas in the most broken English I can think of, adding as well that she prefers to write English because she writes it better than she can speak it!!!! Even my painter's English is far better!
This is a postcard she writes to Raas on 21. January 1.940,
"Dear Mill, I thank you for your beautiful card, it is here the time: Rain (Regen) but one day sunshine 20 grad, other day the sea from the sky. Here now all good. We all people very good, the Englishmen all gentlemen. I have momentan picture Austellung. A gentleman here has given me extra money for a travel through Palestine. Still one moment I go to Baghdad and Damascus and Beirut and one day to Cairo. One day from here for a Pfund to travel. But I'm very sorry for the world. All the men which dead now. Write soon again, yours, Yussuf"
This truely made me laugh so hard, only because I can no longer weep. Not to mention how she spoke about King David in one letter, it was thoroughly nerves-freezing.
And here now an unpublished poem of April 1.938 (and there aren't many of these anymore), the poem is such a perfect rhyme in German that by translating it I can only destroy it, but perhaps that's all what I could ever do with such jewel of beauty.
"Im Bautsch und Bogen ungelogen,
Muss ich aus meine Cautsch herautsch;
Es kommt ein Spatz wohl angeflogen,
Doch nie ein Frühstück an mein Cautsch.
So leb ich seit ich rautschgezogen
Vor fünf ein halbes Jahr o grautsch!
Schau auf den Zürchersee, aud seine wogen...
Fürwahr so schlecht war nicht der Tautsch."
(by the way... the poem has those horrible Swiss-German word-contractions!.. this means the translation has to wait for a day or two... I'm too tired)
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