For an interview with Aliki in this issue. For Aliki’s paper on A Poetics ofWitness This talk was originally presented at the Associated Writing ProgramsConference in Vancouver, B.C. March 31, 2005

How Eva Victoria Perera Learned To Fly with Chagall byAliki Barnstone My language is the eye. —Marc Chagall       You may think what I am about to sayis a strange way to begin. Aliki Barnstone did not write this talk. Herheteronym Eva Victoria Perera did. Perera is an imaginary poet whom I,Aliki, created. My friend Eva, a Sephardic Jew, was born in Thessalonikiin 1917. Until 50,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, Thessaloniki oncehad a large and thriving Jewish community. For more than 2000 years thecity was so shaped by the Jews that it was known as the “Mother ofIsrael” and “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Paul lecturedthere in the Roman Synagogue. It also was the seat of the Sephardim, whosettled there after their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Eva will speakabout her friendship with Marc Chagall—who was a Russian Jew and aHolocaust survivor—and how his painting generates her poems. Here’sEva’s talk. * * *       I first met Chagall in 1952when he visited Greece, three years after the end of the Greek CivilWar. He gave a talk to the Jewish Community in Athens, and I attended.Some us from Thessaloniki survived the Shoah by buying false Christianidentities and leaving our city. After the occupation, my family and Icould not bear to live again in Thessaloniki—what was there toreturn to? At the talk Chagall read a poem that &#147appeared in hismind,” on June 4, 1946, when he walked off the ship that carriedhim from America to liberated France. Only that land is mine, which dwells in my soul. Like a native without papers, I walk into it. It sees my sadness andmy loneliness. It puts me to sleep and covers me with afragrance-stone. Orchards blossom within me, my invented flowers, My own streets. Only: there are no houses. They were ruined since my childhood. . . Their inhabitants stray in my air. They seek a dwelling؏they live in my soul. Hence I smile when my sun shines a bit, Or I cry, like a quiet rain at night. Once both faces Were covered with a love-shine Night and Space. . . Now I imagine: Even when I walk back I go forward to the road of high gates— Beyond them, wide steppes spread out, Where exhausted thunders spend the night And broken lightnings. ( Tr. Barbara and Benjamin Harshaw) Then when there was peace, goingabout my daily life, walking to the market, smelling the bounty from theGreek soil freshly harvested, the eggplant and zucchini, greens andlemons, peaches and oranges, or when I was cooking a meal, or sweepingthe floor, I found myself listening to the silence of the dead. Theyspoke to me through the scents of food because they had starved. Orperhaps like the gods they were nourished by the steam of our meals. AsI cleaned, I saw them in dust and ashes because the beloved dead weredust and ashes, with no tombstones or graves. Slowly I began to writepoems again because as Chagall put it, the inhabitants of the ruinedhouses, “stray in my air / They seek a dwelling—they live inmy soul.” Here are some lines from my poem, “1949,” intowhich some of Chagall’s angels flew:            Too often in the aftermath, when I opened the shutters in themorning, angels crowded the sunlight. I had to turnmy face and close my eyes for a moment— how could I help it?They were too bright and too thin, striped cloth fluttering againstthe blue numbers on their skin. Sometimes when I bent to put on my shoes, I’d find them inuneasy sleep. There between the tongue and the laces, there betweenthe ground and the wire fences, they were chilled and curled up,knees to chin, among their crumpled wings, their translucent wings. How could I put my shoes on then?        Chagall, a painter of witnesswho celebrates life, creates an iconography of a Holocaust survivor’spsyche. Chagall said, “Concerning the so-called ‘literature’ in mywork I sometimes feel that in the use of pictorial elements I am moreabstract than Mondrian or Kandinsky. . . What I call ‘abstract’ issomething that rises spontaneously from a gamut of psychic and plasticcontrasts, bringing to the picture and to the eye of the spectatorrealizations of the unknown objects” (78). To enter his painterlyrealm is not necessarily like reading literature in the narrative sense,for his canvases—replete with color, panorama, surreal visualjuxtapositions—unite the internal and external worlds, memory andthe present moment, which is full of loss. I want to say that in hiswork I dwell in the architecture of dream, which is out of time, butthat is not exactly right. I agree with Chagall when he says, “I amagainst the terms ‘fantasy’ and ‘symbolism.’ Our whole inner world isreality, perhaps even more real than the apparent world” (77).       In our conversations he pointed outthat “the war . . . destroyed not just cultural and material values,but also internal humanism” (112). While he expressed his fear, healso exhorted me to be brave and to counter evil with our creative power“that can first save the human . . . then rebuild the ruinedcities” (112). And when I rolled my eyes and clicked my tongue, theGreek gesture for no, and turned my head toward the wall, he said,“there is too much calm among us, people have got quiet and arehiding in the corners . . . Let us light the lanterns and illuminate ourfaces” (112).       His image ofthe illuminated faces made me recall with anger that when the GreekOrthodox Christians light candles before the icons, and kiss the imagesof Jesus, Mary, and the saints, they kiss the faces of Jews. We bothgrew up in Christian orthodox countries, where the icon is omnipresent,not just in churches, but in homes, shops, and restaurants. The icon,with its flattened and disproportionate images, eschews verisimilitudein favor of portraying the spiritual. In “White Crucifixion,”as Jean-Michel Foray observes, surrounding the crucifixion are“events from Jewish history: the destruction of the temple, theburning of the scrolls, the lamentation of the elders . . . the figurespopulating the work [are] Jewish . . . As in Christian crucifixions theLatin inscription INRI (an acronym for ‘Jesus of Nazereth, King of theJews’) appears in above Jesus’ head, but a Jewish prayer shawl takes theplace of his loincloth and a menorah burns at the foot of thecross” (178).       As Marc andI talked, I saw I wanted to honor the memory of the dead by creating withwords the plasticity of the people, the culture, and the Jewish citythat was obliterated by the Holocaust. Later I wrote a poem about thedestruction of the two-thousand-year-old Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki. Everypiece of marble and brick was used as building material: the marble ofthe tombstones was used to repair churches damaged in the Italian airraids, as doorsteps of homes, to construct roads, and to build swimmingpools for the Germans. I use the Christian icon, as Chagall does, tounite Judaism and Christianity by showing that Christianity is adevelopment of Judaism, and to criticize Christian anti-Semitism. Hereare a few lines from that poem: In the churches with ourtombstones mortared in the walls, let the priests speak in tongues andlet them sing Greek prayer in Hebrew. When the pious kiss the icons, let their lips touch the lips of great-grandmother Miriam, while, haloed in gold-leaf and hammered silver, Uncle Isaac smiles his gentle half-smile. Let the painted wood, the polished and sweet flesh of baby Jesus be the image of cousin Jak ateleven months, son of Anna and David, born and died in 1912. My poems arise from a descent into wordlessness, into the sensory andvisual, which can be as fearful and painful as it is joyful. I have come toregard naming the physical world as preservation and as memory. I wrotethis homage to Chagall in part to ask, How else can we survivors beredeemed?             Red Picnic, 1946 We spread our picnic on a red blanket on the beach and ourdaughter plays in the shallows where Chagall’s paintbrush mixesultramarine with sand. You hold my hand and I feel my body rising like a kiteabove us, above you and me and our Elefthería’s joyous whitesplash and the red tile roofs of the village grouped across thehills that embrace the beach. There are no eyes peering out from theeaves. There are no houses turned upside down. There’s the carafeof burgundy on the red blanket And just a little food. A tomato. Anend of bread. So much beauty, to name it feels almost like peace, like sorrowto name it, too, as if my words could save the picture of yousmiling at us or the wine warm in my throat, making my hip curve upwardjust like your red grin, or my violet dress fluttering against myskin like many wings, or our daughter Elefthería in a ruby bathing suit, her pale fingers waving from the sea, the deep paint still shiningblue and wet.        In the poem, I have tried todepict ordinary, domestic life as beautiful and strange and to create anominous quality in the negatives, “There are no eyes peering outfrom the eaves // There are no houses turned upside down.” Thesefrightening images come from several of Chagall’s paintings,particularly “The Green Eye,” a pastoral twilight landscape,with a bright yellow moon shining above a woman who milks a grinningblue cow. In the eaves of the farmhouse the evil eye of surveillancedominates the canvas, as if to say even the most peaceful scene can beinvaded and destroyed. In my “Picnic” I am trying to reassuremyself that this scene of simple familial happiness is safe. I also wantimplicitly to ask the questions, “Why them and not me? Why do I getto have a picnic after the war, when others were taken away, their homespillaged?” I worry that too much beauty may diminish theHolocaust. But I also worry that the images of the sick and starving,the piles of corpses objectify those who suffered by erasing theirsubjectivity—which is precisely what the Germans sought to do withthe Final Solution. Those who were sent to the death camps were robbedof life and the pleasures of life, to which they had a right. In mypoems, I want to paint a full picture of an annihilated life, people,and city, and such a portrait includes not just the terror and death ofthe Shoah, but beauty and love. In Chagall’s work I find a way to mourn,witness, and celebrate. In his painting, “Around Her,” thelovely Bella, looks out with dark eyes, which somehow are both profoundand vacant, as I suppose memories of the dead must be. She sits on acloud. Beside her the city hovers in a bubble. Above Bella, gliding onbowers, are the bride and groom. The bride’s veil slashes the canvas ina white diagonal, like a shaft of light or a sign of danger. Everythingis floating, unstable, except the artist’s body which is grounded in theshadowy blue corner. His cocked head is upside-down. The psyche isupside-down when I see the dead, “stray into my air,” seekinga dwelling in my soul. Then my hand moves. *** Works Cited Jean-Michel Foray on“The White Crucifixion” in Marc Chagall, SanFrancisco        Museum of Modern Art,published on the occasion on view at       the SFMOMA from July 26 to Nov.4, 2003. Benjamin Harshaw, ed. Marc Chagall on Art andCulture. Stanford, CA:       Stanford University Press, 2003. *** Biographical note on Eva Victoria Perera, An Imaginary Poet createdby Aliki Barnstone Eva Victoria Perera (1917-2001) was the daughter of a well-to-do jewelerand importer, Jacobo Angel, and a pianist, Sophia. Jacobo was adescendent of the Sephardic Jews who came to Thessaloniki after 1492. Hemet Sophia in Vienna where she was studying piano. Jacobo traveledwidely and was passionate about the arts and intellectual inquiry. Anunconventional man, he rejected subservient roles for women and wasattracted to Sophia’s strong will, humor, and musical talent. Bothparents were ambitious for Eva, their only child. With theirencouragement, Eva began to write and paint when she was very young. Shedevoted herself to poetry and considered herself only an amateurpainter. Yet she was greatly influenced by the visual arts; she felt aparticular kinship to the iconography of Marc Chagall. In 1927 the Angel family hired a governess for Eva, Hope Parker, agrand-niece of the fiery Transcendentalist preacher and reformer,Theodore Parker. Fascinated by ancient Greek culture, Hope had came toGreece on a spiritual quest and as a rebellion against her New Englandroots. While in Thessaloniki, Hope fell in love with a charismaticRembetis, who abandoned her when she became pregnant. When the Angelfamily took her in, she had an infant daughter, Ariana. As a result, Evawas trained in classical Greek and European literature, and moreunusually for a Greek, in American literature. Through her mother, sheheard classical music; through Parker, the underground music ofRembetika. Eva was fluent in Greek, French, Ladino (old Spanish), andEnglish. In 1937, Eva married Isaak Perera, a piano student of her mother’s. In1939, their daughter, Elefthería was born. Isaak became an architect,but he was a talented pianist. The young couple lived with Eva’s parentsafter their marriage. As Eva writes in her poem “The Piano,” their homewas filled with the music of Isaak and Sophia, until the family fledThessaloniki. When the Germans invaded Greece in 1942, Jacobo had the wherewithal tobuy the immediate family false Christian identities. He took them all tothe island of Andros, where they were taken in by Christian friends, theHaralambos family. Andros is a green island, full of gardens. Though allof Greece was pillaged of food by the Germans, and many starved todeath, the families managed to grow and keep enough to stay alive andrelatively healthy. After the war, Eva’s family returned to Thessaloniki. Nearly all theirfriends and relatives were dead; 50,000 Jews from the city known as “theMother of Israel, ” perished in Auschwitz. Eva, Isaak, and Eleftheríafound the ghosts too painful and they left Thessaloniki to settle inAthens, where Isaak established his practice. Eventually, they boughtland on Andros, and built a home there; the island that had been theirrefuge during the war became their sanctuary from the city. Eva wrotepoetry all her life, though like Cavafy she never printed her work forthe public, only for her friends (who included some of Greece’s greatestpoets of the twentieth century, George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos). AfterElefthería grew up, became an architect, and joined her father’spractice, Eva spent most of her time on the island, though she traveledoccasionally. She met and befriended Chagall in 1952, on his first visitto Greece. She spent her last years devoted to “growing an Eden” in hergarden, where she loved to have outdoor dinner parties for her familyand friends. She died among her fruit trees and flowers on August 15,2001. In 2003, a volume of her collected poems was published in Greece,edited by her daughter, Elefthería, and her granddaughter, Sophia.