Desert flowers with deep roots

“... Hanging by a thread, my fathers jostle together,
A sleeve of Hispania cloth permeated with the scent of jasmine
On an austere robe from the lands of years gone by
On a breeze bearing blows, payes and pelts…”

So reads a section from “Fathers,” a poem by Tel Aviv-born novelist, poet, and theater director Michal Govrin, whose poetry our host Marcela Sulak introduces to us today. The daughter of an Israeli pioneer father and a mother who survived the Holocaust, Govrin’s work is concerned with the legacy of trauma left to children of Holocaust survivors.

Govrin has described her poems as the flowers of a desert plant with very deep roots; some have roots as deep as fifteen feet, but when we see the flower we never imagine how much of the plant remains invisible to the eye.