Editor's Note – Conflict
Having chosen to make our home in Israel, no one at The Ilanot Review is a stranger to conflict on a political level, but when we chose conflict as a theme for this issue, we wanted to think about it in a much wider sense. In the sense that conflict describes the human condition. That the nature of life is struggle. That life without conflict might be a kind of death.
As always, we sought to create a collage of writing. This issue offers a multi-voiced look at how we experience and cope with situations of challenge, anger, threat and frustration. These works, which come out of a variety of places and cultures, examine aspects of marital, familial, social, political, and psychological conflict, and portray the complex underlying mechanisms that create the dynamics of strife. Truces are rarely reached in these pieces. Solutions, if they are found, come at a heavy price.
We are reluctant to single out pieces from this unique collection, but we will mention a few of note. We are very happy to offer a preview of Tony Barnstone and Amin Mansouri’s text and art collaborations from Barnstone’s forthcoming Pulp Sonnets. We are also very pleased to be publishing three wonderful translations: Anna Maria Nowak’s translation of the acclaimed Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz, who recently passed away, Maia Evrona’s translations of Yiddish poetry by Abraham Sutzkever, and Maya Klein’s translation of Israeli poet Shlomi Hatuka.
Heraclitus, writing in 2500 years ago in ancient Greece, believed that the element of fire best conveys the true nature of the world and that in opposing tensions there is harmony. We invite you to consider this collection of current writing with these thoughts in mind.