Israeli author Yonatan Berg found spirituality and inner peace in India. He tells Arjita Mishra how he had a conflicting past and how the current turmoil in his country affects him
To many, India is a place to find job and for others, India is a place of tourism but, poet and a novelist, Yonatan Berg found his way of living life and his inner spirituality.
Berg is an Israeli poet as well as a novelist who has received Yahuda Amichai poetry prize for his debut book Hard Sails. His short story, Elegy, won the prestigious Haaretz short story competition and Five More Minutes, his first novel, won Am Oved’s ‘All the Beginings’ competition.
Born in the West Bank of Israeli settlement (small villages in Israel), Berg also worked for the army for few years but due to violence he left the army. He visited India 10 years ago, where he found his inner spirituality and started writing poems about his travelling experience and his childhood at the settlement. According to him, “I started writing at the age of 15 or 16 but that was really very bad experience for me. Then I went to join army and for few years I was there and then I left army and came to India and actually in India, I started writing again.”
He said that he left his family and friends and came to India to find himself and India gave him the possibility of living with his family again. He wanted to find peace as scenes of conflict could always be seen in Israel every day. “I guess every Israeli is facing violence as it is much tensed place, there is always a strong conflict and violence surrounding people there,” said Berg.
One of the Berg’s poems is written on his experience while he was travelling to Varanasi. He shared, “The poem on Varanasi is very mystical poem. When I was in Varanasi, I went to see the Gangaaarti and when the aarti started, the smell of the burning diyas, the fragrance of the flowers and the voice of bells ringing over there took me to another world. I shut my eyes and started meditating and suddenly, I started moving my body as I went into the depth of the music. When I opened my eyes, I realised that people present over there are looking at me. It just changed me, I found my inner spiritual self and from there I started writing again.”
He also told us that he is not the only poet from Israel who had written about Varanasi, but there are few more poets there who had written poem on Varanasi.
The poet, however, confessed that if we were to read the poems that he wrote during his sojourn to India, we would not understand it. “It was my inner feeling that I wrote to myself and when I came back to Israel, slowly I understood that I have to bring the world inside to my poetry because I can’t write all the time about myself or on my inner spiritual thing. It was not enough — there is a world out there and poetry is about bringing together the inner place, society, traditions, relationships and nature. It took me time to understand that there is no poetry when I will write only for myself,” said Berg.
Berg’s first novel is based on his life, his childhood and of the time he spent in the army. The novel narrates the story of two childhood friends who are raised in the settlement in West Bank, where people are orthodox. They did things which their parents had been doing and they followed the same path and tradition. It was a very tensed place where violence was a recurring phenomenon. So the book traces the journey of just five days of the two childhood friends who had chosen the two different paths. One of them stays back in the settlement and raises a small family. He faces the violence in the settlement. And the other one leaves the settlement and serves as a warrior in Israeli army and due to some reason he started to take drugs. During his time in the army his unit had to kill a terrorist who had already killed one of their men. The amount of violence affected him very much. So, in a way, both the characters are facing violence in their own worlds yet living different lives.
Currently, Berg is working on his second novel which is not based on his life. “This time I don’t want to write about myself. This time, I am writing on serious issues and I know that there will be few readers for the book, but that does not bother me very much,” he concluded.