Remediation and hypermediacy: Ezekiel’s World as a case in point

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Visual CommunicationKohn and Weissbrod: Remediation and hypermediacy

visual communication A rtic l e

Remediation and hypermediacy: Ezekiel’s World as a case in point

Ayelet Kohn David Yellin College of Education, Jerusalem, Israel

R ac h e l W e i s s b rod Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

A b s tract

This article deals with Kovner’s graphic narrative Ezekiel’s World (2015) as a case of remediation and hypermediacy. The term ‘remediation’ refers to adaptations which involve the transformation of the original work into another medium. While some adaptations strive to eliminate the marks of the previous medium, others highlight the interplay between different media, resulting in ‘hypermediacy’. The latter approach characterizes Ezekiel’s World due to its unique blend of artistic materials adapted from different media.

The author, Michael Kovner, uses his paintings to depict the story of Ezekiel – an imaginary figure based on his father, the poet Abba Kovner who was one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance movement during World War II. While employing the conventions of comics and graphic narratives, the author also makes use of readymade objects such as maps and photos, simulates the works of famous artists and quotes Abba Kovner’s poems.

These are indirect ways of confronting the traumas of Holocaust survivors and ‘the second generation’. Dealing with the Holocaust in comics and graphic narratives (as in Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, 1986) is no longer an innovation, nor is their use as a means to deal with trauma; what makes this graphic narrative unique is the encounter between the works of the poet and the painter, which combine to create an exceptionally complex work integrating poetry, art and graphic narration.

K e y word s

comics • graphic narratives • hypermediacy • paintings • remediation • trauma

Visual Communication 2018 Vol. 0(0) 1–31 © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357218785931 DOI 10.1177/1470357218785931

1 . I n troductio n

The graphic narrative Ezekiel’s World (Kovner, 2015) illustrates how remediation and hypermediacy (Bolter and Grusin, 2000) function as artistic strategies and as a means to deal with trauma (Caruth, 1995, 1996; LaCapra, 2001). The term ‘remediation’ refers to adaptations which involve a transformation into another medium. This kind of transformation, widely discussed in both Translation Studies and Media Studies, has also been referred to as ‘inter-semiotic translation’ (Jakobson, 1987) and ‘medial transposition’ (Rippl and Etter, 2015). While some adaptations strive to be ‘transparent’, that is, to eliminate the marks of the previous medium, or any medium, and pretend to have a direct access to reality, others highlight the interplay between different media, resulting in ‘hypermediacy’. The latter is also referred to as ‘multimediacy’ (Wolf, 2005: 254), ‘hybridity’ and ‘heterosemiosis’ (El Refaie, 2014).1 According to Bolter and Grusin (2000: 46), ‘this form of aggressive remediation throws into relief both the source and the target media’; in their view, ‘The work becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces and their new, inappropriate setting’ (p. 47).

The latter approach characterizes Ezekiel’s World due to its overt blend of materials adapted from different media, which join to create a work of art with a narrative dimension. The story revolves around an imaginary ‘Ezekiel’ but – as the author states in the foreword - it is actually about his father, the Israeli poet Abba Kovner, who was one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance movement in the Vilnius ghetto during World War II. The author, Michael Kovner, is a painter and his graphic narrative is mainly comprised of his works as an artist (see Figure 1). In addition, the work contains a variety of readymade objects such as maps, photographs and images from films; variations on the works of famous artists; and – most notably – poems by Abba Kovner that echo the latter’s traumatic biography. Judging by his work, the son, too - a member of ‘the second generation’ (Hass, 1990) - is haunted by the traumatic past. As Hirsch (2012) explains, the memories of people who experienced the Holocaust live on in the minds of their descendants and their society at large, and affect their lives, even though they were not present when the traumatic events took place. The memories pass on through stories, behaviour patterns, testimonies, photographs and other objects which evoke the past.

The third generation, too, is likely to inherit them as one can infer from the scene in which Ezekiel builds a miniature replica of the ghetto from Lego bricks to explain the Holocaust to his grandchild. The past – the Holocaust and its reflections in later events, such as the Eichmann trial (1961–1962) to which Abba Kovner was summoned to give evidence – returns in the form of flashbacks, nightmares and fragmentary memories, and both father and son respond to it with their art. It has been argued that art, whether verbal or visual, makes it possible to mediate and master one’s traumatic experiences (Dreifuss-Kattan, 2016). In the case under consideration, this observation applies to both Abba Kovner and Michael Kovner - the poet and the painter

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Figure 1. The artist in his studio. © Michael Kovner. Reproduced with permission.

- whose works are integrated into the graphic narrative and, side by side with the dialogue, become its building blocks.

The overt juxtaposition of different sign systems has been explained as indicative of the problematic nature of all representation (El Refaie, 2014). In Ezekiel’s World, the insufficiency of one medium or sign system as a means of representation is evident. Exploiting the possibilities that hypermediacy offers, Kovner creates a rich collage incorporating painting and poetry. Through them, his work examines the relations between word and image while reflecting, thematically, on the father–son–grandson relationship.

The latter is determined, to a large extent, by the Holocaust. However, Ezekiel’s World also takes us back to the First Gulf War (1990–1991), when Israel was attacked with Iraqi rockets and people were equipped with gas masks because it was feared that the Scuds were loaded with chemical gas.

Another politically loaded reference is to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: the violence and injustice that Amos, Ezekiel’s son, experienced during his military service in the occupied territories drove him to leave the country with his family, a move that saddened and disappointed his father. Addressing the Holocaust and other highly charged topics in comics and graphic narratives (e.g. Colón and Jacobson, 2010; Croci, 2004; Eisenstein, 2006; Engelberg, 2006; Katin, 2006; Kubert, 2011; Satrapi, 2003; Spiegelman, 1986) is no longer an innovation, nor is the use of these media as a means to deal with trauma (Arieli-Horowitz and Golan, 2010; Bartal, 2010; Kohn and Weissbrod, 2012).

The uniqueness of Ezekiel’s World lies in the rich variety of materials utilized and especially the use of works of art – both paintings and poems. Using the term ‘a graphic narrative’ (e.g. Chute, 2008) rather than the somewhat misleading label ‘a graphic novel’ seems particularly appropriate in this case.

Our aim is to show how, while functioning as a means to deal with trauma, the building blocks of Ezekiel’s World also join to produce an exceptionally Kohn and Weissbrod: Remediation and hypermediacy

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complex and sophisticated work of art. To achieve this aim, we shall discuss and exemplify Michael Kovner’s paintings and their transformation into a graphic narrative (sections 2–3), his use of Lego which illustrates the role of readymade objects (section 4), Abba Kovner’s poems and their integration into Ezekiel’s World (section 5) and the creation of multimedial collages that mix all these materials (section 6).

2 . M ic h a e l K ov n e r : a P ai n t e r

As an artist, Kovner is known for his landscapes drawn in oil on canvas.

Preferring the figurative to the conceptual, even when it meant going against the mainstream of Israeli art (Enderman, 2015), his paintings express a sense of belonging and a deep connection with the places that he paints: Kovner portrays landscapes – his childhood landscapes among the orchards and cowsheds of his kibbutz, Ein Ha-Khoresh … His paintings are far from being mere landscapes. These are contacts, strong bonds of love and belonging between man and place. The beauty of the sights is not the main issue here, but their character, their nature, their existence in time; their uniqueness. When you see the cowsheds and cows lying down in Kovner’s paintings, you feel that the painter did not merely pass by and ‘immortalized’ the sight, or received some ‘impression’, but was truly there (Hirschfeld, 2007a, our translation).

According to Hirschfeld’s interpretation, what the paintings with their intense colours show is the impact of the landscape on the soul. The mountains, the trees, the dunes undergo a process of abstraction that finds in them hidden laws. When Kovner paints cows, for example, it is not a manifestation of academic expertise but the result of a slow internalizing of their shape in the mind, and the mind is a collective one – that of the community of people inhabiting the place, who experience it in similar ways.2 Interestingly, this interpretation also applies to the choice of names in Ezekiel’s World: Ezekiel, Amos, Na’ama and Michal are the names of Biblical figures who were part and parcel of this landscape.

Hirschfeld emphasizes the difference between the sense of belonging that he recognizes in Kovner’s landscapes and any political claim to own the places that he paints. The relationship with the landscape is cultural and mental rather than political. In this, he alludes to Kovner’s political stands which, in the graphic narrative, are attributed to Amos, Ezekiel’s son, whose disappointment in the country led him to leave it.

3 . T ur n i n g V i s ua l A rt i n to a G rap h ic Narrativ e

In an interview with Enderman (2015), Kovner told her that he was not familiar with comics and graphic narratives before he set out to create Ezekiel’s

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World and had no knowledge of their ‘rules’ and conventions. The decision to create a graphic narrative resulted from a strong need to use his paintings to tell a story, as in the frescoes or Bible painting traditions. Perhaps unknowingly, his words echo Art Spiegelman, who suggested the term ‘commix’ for art which mixes words and pictures to create a narrative. The new term was also meant to counteract the connotation of comics as intrinsically funny and entertaining (Spiegelman, 1988; see also Young, 1998: 670–672) – a connotation which is obviously irrelevant in the case of Ezekiel’s World.

Nevertheless, Kovner did not adapt the typical features of comics – two-dimensional drawings with no shading, black contours and – excluding the Lego scenes - the use of basic colours (see section 4). The landscapes in his graphic narrative are painted with shades of green and blue that are characteristic of his work in general. In some cases, he used pre-existing oil paintings from his collection. In the interview with Enderman (2015), he said that each picture was designed as a work of art in its own right and one can easily imagine it magnified and hanging on a wall. This implies that, in the process of remediation, Kovner retained his identity as a painter for whom the creation of a graphic narrative was an opportunity to examine new forms of art in which images and words join to tell a story.

When Ezekiel, the protagonist, finds that Na’ama, the physiotherapist, is a student of art, he tells her that he, too, used to study art (just like Abba Kovner in his youth). They look together at art albums and discuss the paintings of Cézanne and Van Gogh, which Kovner simulates and combines into the graphic narrative. The choice of these artists is not a coincidence since the influence of their work, and Impressionism in general, is evident in Kovner’s paintings. Sheffi (2010) mentions in particular the resemblance of his landscapes to Cézanne’s Mont Saint-Victoire series. The picture of Jerusalem (Kovner, 2015: 124, see Figure 2), for example, supports this view.

The simulation of Impressionist painting exemplifies what Bolter and Grusin (2000: 49) refer to as ‘refashioning within the medium’ - a special case of remediation that ‘proceeds from the same ambiguous motives of homage and rivalry’. In other words, it illustrates intertextuality - relations between identical media, which have been distinguished from intermediality - relations which transgress media borders (Wolf, 2005: 252). Even more precisely, the kind of relations referred to here is ‘interpictoriality’ – relations that take place among visual works (e.g. Hahn, 1999).

Interpictoriality is also apparent in the variety of ‘pictorial allusions’ (Kaindl, 2004: 186) to other artists and artistic trends. The following is a typical example. Stirred by the Lego play, Ezekiel/Abba Kovner recalls the famous manifesto he delivered in Vilnius Ghetto on 31 December 1941. In the manifesto, he called the Jews, especially the youngsters, to fight back rather than go ‘like sheep to the slaughter’ (Kovner, 2015: 197, 282). On the same page, Kovner inserted a picture of a horse, a rider with exotic clothing and a peacock hanging upside down (see Figure 3). The picture is reminiscent of

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Figure 2. Jerusalem. © Michael Kovner. Reproduced with permission.

Chagall, especially his paintings of the circus. Thus, he contrasted the situation to which the speech responds with the dreamlike atmosphere created by Chagall. The contrast is moderated, however, by the absence of the intense colours identified with Chagall. The picture (part of which appears, in colour, on p. 14) thus insinuates that Chagall’s colourful Jewish world is fading.

The pictorial allusion to Chagall is indicative of how the style and colour palette change drastically when the last days of the ghetto are evoked. The calm landscapes give way to abstract stains (as in Kovner, 2015: 280) which express a stormy mood. Brown and black become the dominant colours and the dialogue between the members of the underground is written in Yiddish in red letters that stand out against their dark background (see Figure 4). Using words as an integral part of the picture, which is typical of comics and graphic narratives (McCloud, 1994: 154; Rippl and Etter, 2015: 205), has a unique function in this case: the insertion of Yiddish script serves as a memorial because this is the language spoken in the ghetto, which was replaced by Hebrew in Israeli poetry, including Kovner’s. To use Eisenstein’s (2006: 65) words in I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, ‘the past and a language are fastened together.’

The contrast between the European scenery, with its dark and gloomy colours, and the illuminated Israeli landscape with which Michael Kovner identifies is loaded with symbolic meanings: the change of colour palette signifies a move to another place, another culture and another language.

However, Michael Kovner also acknowledges other life experiences.

Ezekiel’s neighbour, Ce’ela, tells him that during the Holocaust she had the happiest period of her life. She lived with farmers who were kind to her, made new friends and went to church with everybody. The real suffering started when she came to the kibbutz, where the other children were cruel to her (Kovner,

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Figure 3. The Manifesto. © Michael Kovner. Reproduced with permission.

2015: 201–211). Such a life experience required a different visual style and, indeed, the paintings were drawn by another artist, Noah Shir. Thus, Ezekiel’s World serves as a meeting place for various artists, which is a means to enrich the graphic narrative, but also a manifestation of generosity and a challenge to the readers who are called to identify the different styles and influences.

However, in this huge work – almost 300 pages containing about 3,000 pictures - Kovner also applied the language of comics and graphic narratives. His son, the filmmaker Amikam Kovner, has taught him about ‘reading paths’ (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996: 218–222, 1998: 189, 205–209), the arrangement of the pictures on the page and the transitions between cinematic ‘shots’. In addition to reading comics, he also learnt how to read scripts and use Photoshop. To create cinema-like scenes, he first designed them with live actors and filmed them on video. Then he selected the most fitting frames

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Figure 4. Yiddish script. © Michael Kovner. Reproduced with permission.

and created sketches the size of a folio page, using acrylic colours. Finally, he scanned and elaborated these sketches using Photoshop. To draw his father and himself, he used old photos. The end result of this complex process of remediation still retains the traces of photography, which is in line with the nature of this graphic narrative as a mixture of the documentary and imaginary. Through remediation and hypermediacy, history and biography are recreated as art in the artist’s ‘laboratory’.

The pictures and the accompanying dialogue join to create narrative sequences, but the storyline is elusive and hard to follow. Characters alternate, as well as inner and external situations, past and present. Through the use of cinematic techniques such as flashback, characters are suddenly thrown back to the past, or carried away by their imagination (as in the scene in which Ezekiel sees Na’ama naked although she is actually dressed – Kovner, 2015: 101). Kovner told Enderman (2015) that, in creating Ezekiel’s World, he

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imagined a poem rather than a story, that is, a work that would express the artist’s soul - his father’s (the poet) and his. On many pages, the pictures are not accompanied by any verbal text. Some of them contribute to the atmosphere rather than advancing the plot. The implication for the readers is an intense and demanding reading experience, which necessitates an active effort to ‘penetrate the artist’s soul’ and decipher his intention. To help the readers find their way in this complex labyrinth, the rectangles with the verbal text (which Kovner preferred to speech bubbles because he did not want to interfere with the composition of the pictures) have different colours for each character. A detailed key presented at the beginning of the graphic narrative helps readers differentiate between inner and outer voices (see Figure 5), flashbacks and dreams, and directs them to the historical notes at the end. Iconic wings mark ‘the voice of the angel’ - an inner voice which offers insights and truths regarding the interpersonal relations presented. There are also special marks for Abba Kovner’s poems, translated from Hebrew into English and explanations inserted in the body of the text are marked too.

The insertion of such a key highlights the tension between order and disorder, overflow and the need to control it by organizing principles. The latter are also manifest in the division of the work into two parts according to the timing of the events (Part 1 – February, Part 2 – March, The Weekend, April).

On the thematic level, the attempt to impose order on a chaotic inner world echoes the experience of trauma-stricken people, including Holocaust survivors and the members of the second generation, who find it difficult to create a coherent whole out of shreds of memory, ‘fragments that have not yet been sufficiently integrated to become part of the story of one’s life’ (Charles, 2015: 28).

The above description is in line with the distinction between ‘common’ and ‘deep’ memory made by Friedlander (1992; see also Young, 1998: 666–669). The former strives to establish coherence, offer closure and find meaning in the past, while the latter is inarticulate and beyond the reach of meaning. The difficulty of telling Ezekiel’s story in an orderly manner insinuates that the kind of memory that Kovner evokes in his paintings is the ‘inarticulate - and thereby deep’ one (Young, 1998: 667).

4 . L e go P art s a n d T h e ir F u n ctio n s i n T h e G rap h ic Narrativ e

A remarkable instance of remediation in Ezekiel’s World is Kovner’s artistic use of Lego parts. Due to their basic colours - blue, red and yellow – Lego parts highlight the affiliation of his work to the medium of comics. As McCloud (1994: 189) notes, these are the typical colours of superheroes such as Superman (blue, red and yellow) and Spiderman (blue and red). In Kovner’s work, they are part of his fluctuation between his own art and the newly acquired medium of comics. Beyond that, the Lego parts have an important role in the plot. Ezekiel and Noni, his grandson, use them to build a miniature replica of the ghetto (see Figure 6), its inhabitants and the Nazi soldiers.

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Figure 5. The key to reading the graphic narrative. © Michael Kovner. Reproduced with permission.

As in Roberto Benigni’s film, Life is Beautiful (1997), the play is intended to help a young boy cope with the Holocaust. In this case, however, the child does not live the events, but he learns about them through a process of construction and deconstruction involving concrete physical objects used by the grandfather to verbalize the unspeakable and make perceptible what is hard to explain.3 During the play, the grandfather and grandson conduct a dialogue and their ‘talking heads’ are seen hovering over the Lego parts. The dialogue is about the practicalities of the play, but it also helps to address the past. Play therapy is commonly used in the treatment of post-trauma in children (see, e.g., Gil, 2011). In this case, however, it protects both the child and the grandfather from getting too close to the traumatic events. From another perspective, using Lego blocks to explain the Holocaust resembles the simulation of historical battles through moving miniature soldiers and military vehicles in a sand-box. The use of Lego bricks implies that the structure that they build is

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Figure 6. A ghetto made of Lego parts. © Michael Kovner. Reproduced with permission.

temporary. Eventually, it will be disassembled and the Lego parts will be put back into their box. When Noni and his mother leave the grandfather’s house for the last time before they go back to America, Ezekiel remembers that Noni has forgotten his Lego box and Na’ama hurries after the boy to return it to him.

This may suggest that the play has fulfilled its therapeutic task and can now reclaim its childish naivety.

The double remediation – first, using Lego parts to simulate the Holocaust, then depicting them in a series of pictures which the author integrates into the graphic narrative, has both an artistic and a therapeutic function (for art therapy, see, e.g., Hogan, 2001). Kovner used to photo and then paint Lego parts before the creation of Ezekiel’s World, as part of his experimentation with new materials and methods. A 1983 exhibition of his works

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was based on this technique.4 However, in the graphic narrative – a medium he was not familiar with before he set out to create Ezekiel’s World (Enderman, 2015) - the Lego constructions function as part of the narrative.

Through them, Kovner also duplicates the dialogue between Ezekiel and his grandson and turns it into another one, between himself and his father - a dialogue that did not take place when the father was still alive.

The Lego bricks exemplify Kovner’s use of readymade objects in his artistic work. In that, he resembles other artists who integrated such objects into their art and used them to deal with the Holocaust. In 2010, the photographer Ido Abramsohn presented a work which consisted of a set of slides bought in the museum shop of the former concentration camp Majdanek (see Figure 7).

As Abramsohn explains, his memory of the Holocaust which he did not experience in person is mediated through visual and verbal evidence to which he was exposed: My memory of the Holocaust, like the memory of anyone who did not experience it first hand, is a constructed one: a memory of an experience that was established by an event which they did not undergo. This memory is a product of impressions, both visual and verbal, that the secondary witness experienced through pictures, movies, books, from first-hand witnesses and more. This constructed memory, like any type of construct, passes through ideological filters, which take their place in the mainstream. Hence the collective memory conditions not only the memory itself, but also the way in which we remember.

By observing its subject from a distant perspective, the series asks us to re-think the way historical events and trauma are perceived, as well as the role that photographic images have in this perception.5

Abramsohn is aware of the ideology with which the collective memory is imbued and tries to free himself from it by looking at his subject matter from an artistic distance. His work involves criticism of the commercialization of the Holocaust and the turning of a concentration camp into a tourism site.

However, he shares with Kovner the utilization of readymade materials and the underlying principle of engaging in a process of construction and deconstruction in addressing the traumatic past.

Another example is the work of the artist Christian Boltanski, presented in the Venice Biennale in 2011. Boltanski, whose works often deal with mass killings, the Holocaust, and the remnants that are left after the victims are gone, created a huge structure that is reminiscent of a newspaper printing machine. The machine was used to screen the photographs of the faces of thousands of children and babies who passed quickly on an assembly line.6 In an interview with the artist, published in a book dedicated to his art, he talked about art as an indirect way to address trauma in general, and the Holocaust

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Figure 7. Narrative no.1: Majdanek. © Ido Abramsohn. Reproduced with permission.

in particular, and linked it with his use of ready-made objects (clothes, in this case): At the beginning of all the work there is a kind of trauma: something happened. This might be a psychoanalytic problem. All your life you can be telling the same story, but then you can tell it in different ways – through poetry, through songs, etc. (Garb et al., 1997: 8) When I do a large piece with used clothes some people talk about it in relation to the Holocaust and say how sad the piece is. But children find it fun, it makes them happy because they can try on all the clothes.

I never speak directly about the Holocaust in my work … (Garb et al., 1997: 19)

In the realm of graphic narratives, Art Spiegelman, who incorporated maps, photographs and other documents into Maus (1986), meditated on the possibility of letting objects and documents speak for themselves: Perhaps the only honest way to present such materials is to say: ‘Here are all the documents I used … and here’s like thousands of hours of

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tape recording, and here’s a bunch of photographs to look at. Now, go make yourself a Maus!’ (Spiegelman, 2011: 34)

Eventually, he did not choose this option. Despite the authenticity of maps, photographs and recordings, it seems that they cannot provide the artistic distance sought by Spiegelman, Boltanski and Abramsohn. Kovner approximates them when he integrates Lego blocks and other artifacts into his art. In the words of Tamar Garb, the interviewer of Boltanski, which can be applied to Kovner as well: ‘People say, however, that you don’t have to work directly about the Holocaust, because the Holocaust works through us’ (Garb et al., 1997: 22).

5 . A b b a K ov n e r : Hi s P o e tr y a n d I t s I n t e gratio n i n to E z e k i e l ’ s W o r l d

Abba Kovner’s biography (see his portrait by Michael Kovner in Figure 8) and poetry seem to explain Michael Kovner’s choice to name his protagonist Ezekiel after the Biblical prophet whose prophecies juxtaposed destruction and resurrection. In his youth, before World War II, Abba Kovner was a student of art and studied sculpture at the Academy for the Plastic Arts at Vilnius (Porat, 2009: 33).The inclination to the plastic arts was eventually realized by his son, Michael Kovner, while Abba Kovner turned to poetry and became one of the major poets of Israel.7 Between 1947 and his passing away in 1987, he published poems and short lyrics, as well as prose, speeches, children’s books and more (for detailed discussions of his literary work, see, e.g., Barzel, 2002; Ben-Yosef Ginor, 1995; Lurie, 1988). He also translated Yiddish poetry into Hebrew. His first long poem, Ad Lo Or (Until No Light), which is about the Jewish partisans in the Rodniki forest, was first published in pre-state Israel in 1947. The Holocaust continued to be a major topic in his works and is also present in his last works, Shirat Roza (Rosa’s Song, 1987; Rosa was the name of his mother) and Sloan Kettering (1987). The latter took its name from the New York cancer centre in which he was hospitalized due to vocal cord cancer.

Another major topic in his poetry was Israel’s War of Independence, which led to the creation of the poem Preda me-ha-Darom (Farewell to the South), first published in 1949. In this war, Abba Kovner served as the culture officer of the Giv’ati Brigade. In his role as a person in charge of ideological education and propaganda, he published ‘battle pages’ which were controversial because of the hatred they expressed towards the Egyptians – a hatred which was probably inspired by his experience in the Second World War (Porat, 2009: 238–260).

Abba Kovner’s poetic work both resembles and differs from Hebrew poetry of his time. In an article by the literary critic Ariel Hirschfeld (2007b), he claimed that Kovner, like other poets of his generation, wrote modernist poetry but went further than his contemporaries in implementing the features of modernism. The reason is that, for him, modernism was inevitable rather than optional, a must rather than an aesthetic trend, because the

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Figure 8. Abba Kovner. © Michael Kovner. Reproduced with permission.

topics he dealt with could not be described directly in the realistic manner that modernist poetry rejected. Modernism in his poems is manifest in the fragmentary situations that do not combine into a complete whole; the high level of abstraction; the broken syntax; and – from the point of view of the readers – the difficulty of following the private, almost secret train of thought of the poet and eliciting a unified consistent meaning. The main two features that Hirschfeld finds in his poetry are ‘kri’a u-mekhika’ (tearing apart and erasure) and he compares it to a picture that has been ripped into pieces and only its remnants are available. The power of this poetry, he claims, lies in its impact on the readers, who can feel its greatness even when they cannot decipher to the full its overflow of meanings. Following Friedlander’s (1992) line of thought, the difficulty of communicating meaning links Abba Kovner’s poems with the inarticulate and therefore deep memory that we have also recognized in his son’s visual art.

In Ezekiel’s World, Michael Kovner inserted 19 lyrics and segments of poems by Abba Kovner, translated into English by different translators (Shirley Kaufman, Eddi Levenstone and Rachel Tzvia Back). They range from Abba Kovner’s early poetry to his last works and echo the Holocaust as well as referring to universal themes. Hebrew readers can also read the originals in a booklet that accompanies the graphic narrative.8 The relations Kohn and Weissbrod: Remediation and hypermediacy

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between graphic narratives and literature have been previously studied (e.g.

Vandermeersche and Soetaert, 2011); the integration of poetry, however, seems to be unique.

The inclusion of Abba Kovner’s poems side by side with Michael Kovner’s paintings turns Ezekiel’s World into ‘a familial story, collaboratively constructed by father and son’, a description originally applied to Spiegelman’s Maus (Hirsch, 1997: 12). Letting the parents ‘speak’ also characterizes other graphic narratives such as Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006); however, in Kovner’s case, the father/child dialogue involves the merging of two distinct arts. In an act of remediation, Michael Kovner extracted the poems from their original setting – poetry books – and created for them a new visual surrounding. The integration into the new context was possible because of the shared features of Abba Kovner’s poetry and Michael Kovner’s paintings. They include the use of art in order to probe into one’s biography and inner self, the blending of the most intimate with the collective and the creation of collages out of fragments so as not to address directly what has been hidden and repressed. The following are some representative examples that touch on the central themes of Ezekiel’s World created collaboratively by the paintings and poems.

In a scene in which Ezekiel writes a poem (Kovner, 2015: 198), Kovner inserted four lines, translated by Shirley Kaufman, from ‘Last Storm’ (originally – ‘Ha-Se’ara Akhrona’) in Shirat Roza (Rosa’s Song): Someone who is free can get up and leave, and someone who is free cannot get up and leave.

The paradox in these lines can be interpreted in the context of writing poetry, but it also echoes the unbearable choice that Abba Kovner and his friends in the ghetto had to make: whether to assert their freedom by going to the woods and leaving their beloved ones behind, or stay – as did Hadassa, Kovner’s friend, who chose to die with her mother (Porat, 2009: 53). The pictures on this page and on the next page (Kovner, 2015: 199), show Ezekiel at his typewriter. He explains to his grandson, Noni, that he is writing a poem. Noni is impressed and tries to write his own poem. They stop when they hear a knock on the door, which is simulated by the changing size of the letters, as in comics: ‘knock Knock’. The letters crawl out of the typewriter and merge with the frames of the picture. Thus, the verbal and the visual - the latter comprising both Kovner’s art and the conventions of comics become one unit (see Figure 9). Meanwhile, the readers witness once more how the memory of the first generation turns into the postmemory of the next generations.

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Figure 9. The verbal merges with the visual. © Michael Kovner. Reproduced with permission.

On p. 13, Michael Kovner quotes a segment from one of Abba Kovner’s famous works, ‘Akhoti Ktana’ (‘My Little Sister’, first published in 1967, translated into English by Shirley Kaufman): Even when shame came into all my limbs, With transparent nails glaring, We clung to our flesh As if alive.

Until we lay down One near the other.

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One within the other.

At the edge of the redeeming pit, My sister We remembered your going alone. (Kovner, 2015: 13)

The sister is possibly Hadassah, his friend. However, in the poem she has no name. This, and the omission of the definite article from the word ktana (little), create the impression that the poet speaks about a generic sister rather than an individual person (Pfefferkorn, 1988). She may represent any beloved one – mother, sister, wife, fiancée – who went alone to her death. This feature is reconstructed throughout Ezekiel’s World in the way he depicts the characters – Yvonne, Ezekiel’s daughter in law and Na’ama, the physiotherapist, are ‘realistic’ figures rather than abstract concepts, but their facial features are absent, or barely seen, so that they become generalized. The colours and artistic style, too, are in accord with the mood expressed in the poems. In the example quoted above, the lines of the poem appear against the background of a portrait of a girl in a scene which takes place in Ezekiel’s dream (see Figure 10). In his dream, Michal, possibly his daughter, commits suicide, and ignores his desperate crying: ‘Michal, no!!!’. The atmosphere is dreamlike due to the use of shades of blue and the ambiguity of the scene (Michal is seen climbing a staircase – did she jump from the roof?). The poem and pictures share in creating a sense of loss that is not clearly linked with any identifiable character.

Another segment from this poem is quoted towards the end of the work (Kovner, 2015: 281). In this segment, Abba Kovner evokes the memory of his mother whom he left behind in the ghetto when he joined the partisans. He states that he alone will carry his mother’s bier, which possibly means that no one will share or even understand his grief. The segment ends with the words ‘my mother, my mother’, which the translator, Shirley Kaufman, left in Hebrew: ‘imi, imi’, perhaps because she wanted to retain the rhyme ‘with me [in Hebrew: imi written in a slightly different way] – imi’. The composition (a reversed triangle) has been retained in the translation. This has been achieved by ending the poem with two very short lines, each of them containing just one word, imi, which is shorter than ‘my mother’ and thus fits better into the triangle vertex.

Standing by itself, the repeated call imi sounds like a desperate cry.

Although the poet’s pain can be clearly felt, the mother has no name and thus she, too, can be interpreted as a generic figure. The poem has been printed on a picture of a dark apartment house, with no people and only two bare trees at the front. It could be one of the buildings in the ghetto (‘block’) (see Figure 11). The dominant colour is brown, but each of the many windows, which are organized in symmetrical lines, has a frame that seems to be lighted.

Given the context, each window can be understood as a symbol of one lost individual soul. Thus, Michael Kovner’s painting creates a balance between the individual and the collective, which characterizes the poem quoted as well as other poems by Abba Kovner.

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Figure 10. ‘My Little Sister’ (1). © Michael Kovner and Shirley Kaufman. Reproduced with permission.

The play with sounds in this poem is interesting because Kovner also makes use of the kind of onomatopoeia typical of comics so that the work is filled with sounds derived from different sources. One can also imagine the sounds of Yiddish though it is only present through its script, and Hebrew, which is the language used by the characters, even though the graphic narrative is written in English.

6 . A C o l l ag e of C o l l ag e s

The act of remediation, which involves the conversion of paintings, poems, photographs and Lego parts into the building blocks of the graphic narrative, has led to the creation of a collage-like work whose origins can still be

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Figure 11. ‘My Little Sister’ (2). © Michael Kovner and Shirley Kaufman. Reproduced with permission.

detected – ‘hypermediacy’ in the terminology of Bolter and Grusin (2000).9 In addition to Abba Kovner’s poetry, the graphic narrative also includes poems and quotes from other sources, such as a poem by the Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg (‘Our Back to the Cypresses’, originally ‘Gabenu la-Broshim’, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back); a quote from Chaim Nachman Bialik, the Hebrew national poet; and from Albert Camus (Kovner, 2015: 189, 250, 136, respectively); each of them supports the content and atmosphere of its surroundings.

Visual borrowed materials include a map and photos from Vilnius; a segment from the San Francisco Chronicle announcing the Gulf War (p. 42); and photos from Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), which Na’ama and Yvonne watch together (pp. 215–217). The film accompanies the growing intimacy between them, which verges on lesbian love.

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Each page or a couple of pages, too, can be described as a collage. The collage is comprised of panels which ‘convey information in both vertical and horizontal movements of the eye, as well as in the analogue of images implied by the entire page appearing in the background of any single panel’ (Young, 1998: 672, based on Spiegelman, 1988). The movement is also from the surface inward – every picture, poem and artifact evokes memories and past experiences, and leads into the soul of the artist. It is a movement from the postmemory manifested in his art to the traumatic events that live on in his father’s poetry. The following are some examples illustrating the multimedial collages created by Kovner.

During a visit of Na’ama, Ezekiel tells her about his son, Amos, whose character is partly based on Michael Kovner. Amos is an architect, a profession which involves art and creativity. His mention triggers memories which are actually those of Michael Kovner (Kovner, 2015: 109). The artist, like a person browsing his photo album and reflecting on his life, creates a collage from a photo of himself as a child; paintings based on other photos from his childhood (one of them – with Abba Kovner); a picture of a cow he drew as a child (as he explained in a personal interview held on 22 August 2016); and a painting of cows he created as an adult painter. Through these photos and pictures, he seems to be trying to reconstruct his childhood in the kibbutz (see Figures 12 and 13). The blending of real and fictitious characters, reality and memories, photos and paintings, past and present, throws the reader into the inner world of the artist and raises questions that have no definite answers: What was it like to live with a father whose private life was overshadowed by his position as a mythological public figure? Was the Holocaust a constant presence in his early life? How did it affect his life as an adult? Michael Kovner served in Sayeret Matkal, an elite commando unit, and - like Amos, the fictional figure named after the Biblical prophet who preached justice – became a critic of Israeli politics and militarism. Did his biography affect his political stands?

The relations between fathers and sons (Ezekiel and Amos, Abba Kovner and Michael Kovner) become the main issue on the next page (p. 110).

Again, the collage evokes childhood in a kibbutz: the father and son are seen spending time together, they walk among trees, entertain themselves with wordplay (which is part of one of the pictures), watch the cows in the cowshed and row a boat. On this page, however, Kovner also inserted a poem by Abba Kovner (from ‘Sounds Nearby’, originally – ‘Tslilim mi-Karov’ in Parting from the South, originally – Preda me-ha-Darom, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back): I bought for my son a little bell.

My son, my left-handed boy, held in his grip the little bell ringing it with his left hand.

There are bells all over the world.

The frogs croak, not hunting.

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When my son rings his little bell the violets sigh with evening.

And at night I saw a strange wood – how radiant the ram’s bewildered eyes!

Around his neck a bell is ringing and ringing – Behind him the barbed wires rise.

All the walls are sealed. And the houses are as mute as books.

Maybe the blue sea hears how the ash buds in the desert.

Don’t cry, my son, the ram would be proud

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Figures 12 and 13. Childhood in the kibbutz. © Michael Kovner and Rachel Tzvia Back.

Reproduced with permission.

Ring the little bell with your right.

I am with you all night.

In the poem, the speaker talks about his son, who is left-handed – just like Michael Kovner (as he noted in the personal interview).10 However, the poem goes beyond the biographical. It evokes the Holocaust by mentioning ashes and barbed wire fences, and alludes to the binding of Isaac in the Bible (Genesis 22: 1–19) through the reference to a ram. The ram – an innocent victim - is the link between the binding of Isaac and the Holocaust, and the son laments it rather than rejoicing in his own rescue. The landscapes in this poem are a mixture of Europe and Israel, and there is no clear distinction between day and night, wakefulness and sleep. The blue sea can be easily affiliated with

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Israel. In the graphic narrative, it serves as a background for the poem, and one can discern two small figures, perhaps father and child, on the shore. The beach is also the place where Na’ama and Yvonne spend time together and get closer to each other.11 However, in the poem the sea listens to the ash budding in the desert – which associates with the Holocaust. Thus, each image has to be read twice, in (at least) two different contexts, contributing to the richness and complexity of the work.

7 . C o n c l u s io n

Despite the elusiveness of the storyline and the gaps left (see section 3), the entire multimedial collage and the local mini-collages (discussed in section 6) join to create a narrative – the life story of Ezekiel whose figure is explicitly based on Abba Kovner. Michael Kovner, an artist with no previous experience in creating comics (see sections 2–3) makes Ezekiel live longer than his father, changes the location from Kibbutz Ein Ha-Khoresh, where he used to live with his family, to Jerusalem, and presents Ezekiel/Abba Kovner as an old man. Shattering the image of Abba Kovner as a larger-than-life figure, Michael Kovner presents him without protective layers – weak, in need of a walker, and literally naked (when Na’ama helps him to take a bath). Interestingly, the singer and songwriter Ariel Horowitz made similar decisions in his song ‘Sloan Kettering’ which refers openly to Abba Kovner’s operation and imagines his confusion and helplessness when he wakes up from the anaesthesia.

Actually, during his hospitalization, Abba Kovner wrote forceful poetry which was published in Sloan Kettering (1987). Although this work is not devoid of personal elements (he mentions his mother Rosa by her name), he does not expose his private life as Michael Kovner and Ariel Horowitz do. Both of them show empathy and compassion, but this possibly required turning the national hero into a vulnerable human being.

More implicitly, Ezekiel’s World tells the story of the author, even though Amos – his representative in the graphic narrative – is only a minor figure. As he told his interviewer, the graphic narrative was for him an opportunity to get closer to his father and conduct with him the dialogue that they did not have when the father was still alive (Enderman, 2015). Moreover, in the graphic narrative, Amos confronts Ezekiel with his anti-militaristic political stands which Abba Kovner, a zealous patriot, would have probably opposed. As a member of the second generation – children of people who were in the Holocaust (Hass, 1990) – Michael Kovner carries the postmemory of the Holocaust and copes with it through his art. On the one hand, he shares his authorship with his father by quoting his poems (section 5), a combination realized through remediation and hypermediacy. On the other hand, in a reversal of roles – given the dominance of Abba Kovner in his life - he becomes the leading author. He is the one who has collected, selected and organized the materials that comprise the graphic narrative, including Abba

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Kovner’s poems. Taking advantage of this authority, he could also choose what to elaborate on and what to leave out. Thus, he included in Ezekiel’s memories and nightmares some of Abba Kovner’s most unbearable experiences in the Holocaust, such as sharing in the collective decision that Yitzhak Wittenberg, the former commander of the underground movement, should hand himself in to the Gestapo; leaving his mother behind in the ghetto; and mistakenly shooting a group of Jews who escaped the ghetto to join the partisans. However, in this work in which he empathizes with his father, Michael Kovner does not mention the Nakam (revenge) group, which was established under the leadership of Abba Kovner just after the war. Its members planned to kill as many Germans as possible by poisoning German waters (Porat, 2009: 210–237). This implies that, as a member of the second generation, Michael Kovner offers his own version of history. This also applies to the absence of any mention of the militant ‘battle pages’ which Abba Kovner wrote as the ‘culture officer’ of Giv’ati Brigade during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 (section 5). The first one from 9 June 1948 was extremely offensive and caused a scandal: Kovner wrote it after Nitzanim, a kibbutz on the southern front, surrendered to the Egyptian army. Kovner condemned the Giv’ati fighters and kibbutz members who made this choice once they realized that their situation was hopeless. Those who survived did not forgive him to his last days (Porat, 2009: 250–256). Unsurprisingly, it was Michael Kovner who came to Nitzanim in 1988 with his mother, the former partisan Vitka Kempner-Kovner, to light a candle in memory of Nitzanim defenders.12 Gergen and McCanney Gergen (1988: 34) explain the notion of ‘nested narratives’, that is, narratives within narratives. As they note, people often ‘come to see themselves as part of a long cultural history; but nested within this narrative they may possess an independent account of their development since childhood’. The life stories of Abba Kovner and Michael Kovner are their own, but they are embedded in Jewish history and the history of the State of Israel – the Holocaust, the Israeli–Arab wars and the conflict with the Palestinians. As artists, however, they have the unique capacity of using their art – poetry, painting, and storytelling - to give expression to traumas and memories that they share with other members of their collective, the first and second generation and Israeli society at large. Whether for its own good, or not, the third generation, too, inherits this memory. This is evident not only in the Lego scene in which the grandfather builds a miniature ghetto with his grandchild (section 4), but also in the choice of introducing Michael Kovner’s son into the graphic narrative through the figure of Amos, Ezekiel’s son.13 Art Spiegelman, the creator of Maus, defied the attempt to categorize his work as either fiction or non-fiction (Spiegelman, 2011: 150). This ambiguity characterizes Ezekiel’s World as well. Although the graphic narrative is not in the first person and the story that it tells is partly fictitious, the presence of Abba Kovner and Michael Kovner gives it an (auto)biographical dimen-

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sion. One can also offer a link with autoethnography, a research branch which makes use of writing (-graphy) about the self (auto) in order to shed light on a collective cultural experience (ethno) (Ellis et al., 2011). In Ezekiel’s World, the artist – Michael Kovner - takes upon himself the role of the autoethnographer in that he collects and assembles materials and evidence - from poems and paintings to photos and maps - and adapts some characteristics of a research work, such as the numbered historical notes at the end. The fusion of a work of art with a scientific-like investigation makes it possible to better understand the past and its implications to the present.

F u n di n g This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors and there is no conflict of interest.

Not e s

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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The abundance of terms in itself is indicative of a dynamic and quickly changing field of studies. For our own needs, we find the terminology of Bolter and Grusin (2000) most fitting because it is semantically transparent and refers explicitly to media. ‘Hypermediacy’ in particular evokes the idea of non-linear movement (among media, in this case) which is at the basis of hypertexts.

In the documentary film dedicated to Michael Kovner (Feder, 2016), he confirmed Hirschfeld’s interpretation. In his landscapes, he said, he paints ‘the soul of nature’. He grasps nature as a whole which encompasses shapes, colours and feelings, and tries to distil from it an essence that can be communicated to others.

Engagement in play and physical activity as a means to deal with posttrauma or protect oneself from a possible trauma has been developed in the framework of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET). For its application see, e.g., Safir et al. (2014).

Available at: http://art-in-process.com/he/2010/12/korot-haim-kovner (accessed 23 January 2017).

Available at: http://www.idoabramsohn.com/works/majdanek/ (accessed 25 January 2017).

Available at: http://www.designboom.com/art/christian-boltanski-chanceat-venice-art-biennale-2011/ (accessed 25 January 2017).

Abba Kovner’s poetry has been collected in six volumes, five of them were edited by Dan Miron, and the sixth by Dan Miron and Rachel Frenkel-Medan (Kovner, 1996–2011).

The decision to publish the poems and the entire graphic narrative in English is a result of the marginality and small readership of comics and graphic narratives in Israeli culture and is not peculiar to Kovner.

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Interestingly, Ezekiel’s World itself has undergone a process of remediation when it was adapted into a play. Parts of the graphic narrative, turned into video-art by Yoav Cohen and Adam Levinson, were screened during the theatrical performance, creating ‘hypermediacy’. See: http://khan.co.il/show/%D7%99%D7%97%D7%9 6%D7%A7%D7%90%D7%9C/ (accessed 3 March 2017).

Kovner reads this poem in the last scene of the documentary film dedicated to him (Feder, 2016). On the eve of its screening at the Jerusalem cinematheque on 1 January 2017, one of the viewers noted that Michael Kovner read the poem in the voice of his father; it seems that the two voices, that of the poet and that of the painter, merged, if only momentarily, in reality as in the graphic narrative.

In the documentary film (Feder, 2016), the reading of the poem is preceded by scenes from the graphic narrative, performed on the beach.

From the archive of Kibbutz Ein Ha-Shofet. Available at: http:// einhashofet.blogspot.co.il/2015/04/blog-post.html (accessed 17 February 2017).

In the film dedicated to him (Feder, 2016), Michael Kovner said that he based the figure of Amos on himself but also on his son who - like Amos - chose to live abroad, in New York. The son is called Amikam, literally – my people have risen. The symbolic name, which evokes the picture of the Jewish people rising from the ashes, implies that the third generation, too, inherits the memory of the Holocaust.

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Biograp h ica l Not e s

Ayelet Kohn is a Senior Lecturer at The David Yellin College of Education, Jerusalem, and a former Chair of the Department of Photographic Communication in Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem. Her main area

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of research is the mutual relations between images and written texts in their sociological context. Her work looks into political graffiti, tourism posters, iconic photography, visual propaganda in social media, talkbacks and short documentary reportages. She has published in Visual Communication, Computers in Human Behavior, Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture, Convergence and more. She is the co-author with Rachel Weissbrod of the chapter ‘Illustrations and the Written Text as Reciprocal Translation: Two Illustrated Versions of Anonymous Belfi ha-Gadol’, in Judith Woodsworth (ed.)

The Fictions of Translation (John Benjamins, 2018).

Address: Department of Communication, David Yellin College of Education, Ma'agal Beit Ha-Midrash Street, Jerusalem, Israel. [email: ayeletkohn@gmail. com] Rachel Weissbrod is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her areas of research include theory of translation, literary translation into Hebrew, film and TV translation and the interrelation between translation and other forms of transfer. Her book Not by Word Alone, Fundamental Issues in Translation (in Hebrew) was published by The Open University of Israel in 2007. She has published in Target, The Translator, Meta, Babel, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Translation Studies and more. She is the co-author with Ayelet Kohn of the chapter ‘Illustrations and the Written Text as Reciprocal Translation: Two Illustrated Versions of Anonymous Belfi ha-Gadol’, in Judith Woodsworth (ed.) The Fictions of Translation (John Benjamins, 2018).

Address: Bar-Ilan University, Max and Anna Webb Street, Ramat-Gan 5290002, Israel. [email: Rachel.Weissbrod@biu.ac.il]

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