"I grew up with the spirit of pioneering, of not fearing the unknown, of
daring. It sounds like such a cliche but I dared to follow my interests."
That kind of daring has pushed Marom down many artistic roads and left success
in her wake. As a child, she found media fame. In her 20s she was part of the
sensational Canadian folksinging duo, Malka & Joso. Their dramatic good looks
and artful arrangements landed them a national TV show, made them international
stars, and produced such a following that now, after 35 years, EMI is releasing
a collection of the best of their albums.
In her 30s, Marom won acclaim for the CBC radio documentaries she wrote and
produced. And now, true to characted, Marom has changed directions yet again:
She is the 50-something author of Sulha
, a novel that has already received literary acclaim because of its unusual
subject matter and distinct voice.
Sulha
is about expatriate Israeli Leora who returns to "The Land" from her adopted
country Canada. She is searching for an answer to give to her son who wants
permission to become a fighter pilot there: in "The Land" where Leora's husband
died, as a pilot defending his country. Leora's search takes her to the
forbidden domian of the Bedouin women of Sinai. There, in their world of
oppressively hot desert days and bone-chilling nights, in their handwoven tents
shared with woman, beast and insect, Leora discovers that exile is a state of
mind as much as it is a political label.
The strength of the book lies in its descriptions of desert life. So evocative
are they that the reader can almost feel the unrelenting wind whipping through
the stark landscape, can taste the grit of sand in one's mouth, can feel the
itch of too many insect bites. Marom's picture of life in the desert resonates
so powerfully because it is like seeing the desert through a lens; a lens that
has captured the way it really is in the Sinai. Marom spent many long months
living with five different desert clans at different times throughout the 10
years of research that went into the writing of her novel.
"The desert is a very purifying place," she says. "Maybe because really it's a
place where life and death are so tightly bound, like flint stones almost; when
you strike one against the other, they spark fire, inspiration, not only for
the ingenious ways to survive or the prophetic poetry but for the full power of
life.
"What's so wonderful about the Sinai [desert] more than the Negev even and the
Judean is that it dwarfs the living and the dead and then it puts everything
into perspective. It gives you the illusion that nothing ever changes. That
there is an Almgihty, maybe. There is a sense of new beginning. I think there
is no coincidence that the [Israelites'] journey from slavery to freedom took
place in the desert: and that's the best part of it and the worst part of it."
After months of living with the Badawia, Marom would return to her Toronto home
in a state of shock; culture shock, and it was severe. Her furniture was more
alien to her than familiar. She couldn't adjust and took to living by her
fireplace. That's also where she started writing Sulha
. And as she wrote it, she pictured a Japanese fisherman in her mind's eye -
someone who hadn't a clue about the Middle East and its complicated politics,
someone who had never heard of Israel or the Bedouins and knew nothing of the
desert.
"I could just tell him the story like it happened on the moon; out of the
context of time and place and politics that keeps changing from minute to
minute," she says.
One of the things Marom is most proud of in this, her very first novel, is that
it maintains political neutrality even while it presents all the arguments.
"I tried to show all the sides," she says. "It's like a kaleidoscope. Just when
you think you know it, I turn it around because I believe that really, in the
Middle East, it's so complex and has been so complex for such a long time, for
thousands of years, I think it's rather arrogant to say, 'Oh well, I know it is
like this or like that'. Politics changes so quickly in the Middle East.
It's not surprising that is you ask Marom to personally offer an opinion about
Israeli politics and the breaking down of the peace process, she will decline.
"I'm a poet, not a politician. I think peace is always better than war. That's
all I can offer."
"Look, if you rule over your friend, do you think it's good for your
friendship? The solution is sulha, really; reconciliation."
"I think in the Middle East there is room for peace. I mean, I hope. I like to
think so. Tomorrow I don't know what I'll think. This is the honest truth."
And she doesn't offer very much about her personal life, either, except to say
that she came to Canada at 17 newly married to a Canadian, was a mother at 19,
remaried a Canadian who has been her spouse for 30 years, has two sons, and
lives half the year in Canada and the other half in Israel.
"I like to keep my personal life very private," she says. "I've been in the
limelight for so many years but I've always managed to keep my personal life
personal. It is fertile land and because I haven't really talked about it
publicly, I can really mine it."
How much of her personal life has she mined for Sulha
? Like Leora, Marom grew up in Kfar Sabba. She, too, could look across at
Qalqiliya, an Arab town not particularly partial to Isarelis. And, like Leora,
Marom was an outcast, despised by her fellow Israelis for having left the
country. She says she understands bereavement and loss only too well.
"I think any person who grows up in a war-torn country, even if they didn't
lose anybody, they lost a part of themselves and in this case, it's easier to
understand a war widow because you can really understand her bereavement easier
than if I were to tell you I lost my childhood. It's easier to explain it that
way.
"Sulha
gives voice not only to a dropout who's been virtually gagged for 20 years but
to Bedouin women whose way of life kept them not only veiled, but voiceless for
centuries. And I hope it give voice to all the people who are voiceless, not
only in the Middle East, but here, too. There are people who are voiceless even
today for ereasons of country, of an inner censor, fear. Especially women."
It's almost like my karma to give voice."
Marom is not kidding. In 1963, she met Joso Spralja in a Toronto coffee-house
in Yorkville. He was the transplanted son of a Dalmatian coast fisherman and
barely spoke a word of English. Yet Marom and Spralja were able to communicate
thought the one language the both shared - music. Malka & Joso were born. They
gained a steady international following for their refreshingly new
interpretations of authentic folksongs from all over the world. Thorugh Malka &
Joso, Malka Marom gave voice to "the ethnic".
"I didn't know that I would change the perceptions of the ethnic, the
immigrant." she says. "People really looked down on immigrants."
So how does one describe Malka Marom? It's kind of hard to pigeonhole her. Just
when you think you've got her pegged, she goes on to something new. Her life
has never been static. Her passion to create has driven her to kepp reinventing
herself. SHe's now working on her second novel but who knows where her
wanderlust will take her next.
"I'm just very curious. 'Where will that lead to? Let me just go around this
curve'. Once you set the pattern - that 'I can try this and I can try that' and
'Let me try it and if I bomb, what the hell; I am entitled to bomb once, you
know' - it gives you tremendous liberty.
"But I really cannot take any credit for setting out to do this because I
didn't say, 'Oh now, well, let me be a write' [or a singer, etc.]. I said, 'Oh
my God, why can't I stick to this one thing?
"There is something that I find common in almost everything that I did - an
exquisite tension that is created by two opposing poles; the striving to attain
the mythic dream of the New World - the pursuit of personal happiness and peace
- and the longing for the mytyhic innocence of the Old Country. I think this
informs almost everything I've done - this tension, this pull. I think it also
dictates the way I dress, the way I talk, everything.
"Israel is a work in progress. That is what I call my life."
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Fear is no match for her passion
by Kinneret Globerman
Most of us tend to run from our fears. Or be incapacitated by them. Not Malka
Marom. She has spent a lifetime embracing them.
"Wherever I was scared to go, that's where I went," says the Israeli-born
actor, singer, documentary-maker and writer who has made Canada her home for
about 40 years.
"Sometimes I look at my friends who are not so driven and I say, 'Ahhh, I wish
I could really just relax.' This desire, this curiosity inspires me to try
something: I'm driven to create to drive the fear away."
Fear has kept Ms. Marom busy creating for most of her life. As a child in
Israel, she found fame on the big screen. In her 20s, she switched to singing.
Her sultry voice and stunning beauty catapulted her to stardom as half of the
hit Canadian fold-singing duo, Malka & Joso. Her four year stint with Joso in
the 1960s won the pair an international following and their own TV show in
Canada. Even today, 35 years later, EMI has released an anthology of their best
songs.
By the time she was in her 30s, Ms. Marom was still winning accolades, only
this time for the CBC radio documentaries she wrote and produced. And now, in
her 50s, Malka Marom has plunged herself into something else entirely.
Her recently published novel, Sulha
, is being celebrated as much for it's provocative subject matter as for its
lyrical writing.
Sulha tells the story of Leora, an Israeli war widow who emigrates to
Canada. Years later, she must decide whether to give her son permission to
become a fighter pilot back in "The Land". She returns to Israel where she
embarks on a journey of self-discovery that takes her into the forbidden world
of the Bedouin women of the Sinai desert. Much of Sulha
's power lies in its vivid descriptions of desert life. Living with the Badawia
in their tents of woven goat hair, Leora suffers through the buzzing flies and
the blowing sand in the merciless hot days and numbing cold desert nights.
Reading Ms. Marom's novel, you can taste the sand, smell the scorched and smoky
firewood that permeates everything. It's evident she knows what she's writing
about. For months, Ms. Marom lived with the Bedouin women in their tents.
"I learned that the desert is a place where good and bad are wedded like sun
and shade, a place where a stranger is always received and always shut out,
where the horizon is wide and the boundaries narrow, where the language is
often silence or guns."
Leora's experiences as an outcast, vilified by her Israeli friends and family
for leaving Israel, might as well have been Ms. Marom's. Forty years ago,
Israelis who emigrated were considered traitors and that attitude hasn't
changed much, she says, "For so many years, it was instilled in me that a
'dropout' has no right to utter anything that is derogatory about Israel, so I
didn't really say anything for many, many years. And even when I started to
write Sulha
, it was a struggle over every word and every sentence."
The struggle lasted 10 years, resulting in a novel nearly 600 pages long.
"Maybe it's so long because I had to be gagged for so many years and once I
opened my mouth...boy!"
Why go to the desert and share the Bedouin's hardship? If you're Malka Marom,
you do it because nobody else has done it. And you do it for the same reasons
you've done everything else: a passionate desire to overcome your fears.
When Malka & Joso entered the musical scene in 1963, there weren't many other
"ethnic" foldsingers bold enough to sing about the immigrant experience. Malka
& Joso's renditions of Russian, Brazilian, Israeli, Mexican, Spanish, and
Italian songs made ethnicity fashionable. "It changed the perception of 'the
ethnic' people who have a foreign accent, from the derogatory connotations to
something that was elegant, wise; that was very sophisticated and avant-garde."
she says.
Being ethnic was not easy. Ms. Marom was just 17 and newly married to a
Canadian when she left Israel for a new life in her husband's homeland. She
suffered severe culture shock and soon realized that the bluntness of Gebrew
did not translate well into the civility of English.
"We don't say 'would have been, could have been.'"she says. "It's like 'pass me
this,' not 'please, would you mind passing me the butter.' When I came here and
I said, 'Excuse me, I have to to go the toilet,' I was told 'Well, a lady
doesn't say 'toilet', She says 'powder room'... It was this kind of Canada that
I came to."
That culture shock was nothing compared to what she experienced decades later,
returning to Canada following her time with the Bedouin. She couldn't adjust to
chairs and took to living in front of her fireplace, cooking on it, sleepign by
it.
"My family had a fit." she exclaims. "They thought I went comletely mad! They
were scared."
"I talked in a very quiet voice, the way you talk in the desert. Because the
air carries sound so far, you talk in a whisper. Which is very alien to me: I
have such a big voice."
It was during those days and nights by the fireplace in her Toronto home that
she began to write Sulha
. The cracling fire was her link to the desert.
It's hard to say how much of Leora is Malka Marom. She certainly won't tell. In
fact, she refuses to divulge much about her private life except to say that she
has two sons, that she was only married to her first husband for five years,
and that she's been married to her second husband, also a Canadian, for 30
years. Period. What she will say is that, like Leora, she knows what it's like
to suffer grief.
"I wrote what I know. I know bereavement. Like any child who has grown up in a
war-torn country, you suffer loss. Your loss of childhood, loss of innocence,
loss of friends, of relatives. I know what it's like to live near an Arabic
town. You have neighbours who are enemies. I know the desire to have peace and
forgiveness and reconciliation, not at the national level but personal. And the
question arises: What price, personally, for individuals? Where doesn heroism
begin and where does it end? How far may a perons go -- too far -- in quest of
redemption?
"The novel is called Sulha, which really means a forgiveness, a
reconciliation, making whole in both Arabic and Hebrew. The theme of Sulha
- it's not only reconciliation between Arabs and Jews or Diaspora Jews and
Israeli Jews, but it's really like a bridge between hope and anguish, between
cultures old and new, men and women, you and me, really. Anybody outside of
your own skin.
"I hope that the readers will learn from Sulha
to explore not only the consequences of history but the possiblities of
transcending them."
Sulha
may also be an allegory for Ms. Marom's own life and her ability to always move
beyond her past; her will to transcend being labelled. Just when she's honed a
craft, she has moved on, rejecting complacency, impelled by her passion and her
fear.
"I've never done just one thing. Usually, I've stayed for a bit in each place.
I sang quiet a long time; I did a lot of documentaries, and now I'm in the
midst of writing another novel. I grew up with the spirit of pionerring, of
daring. I wonder if this really is why I was successful, because I was really
passionate about what I did."
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Now she's Malka Marom -- author
by Sid Adilman - Toronto Star
Another popular Toronto folksinger of the 1960s is back in the national spotlight. Malka of the folksong duo, Malka & Joso, which broke up in 1967 after 4 1/2 years together, will have her first novel in bookstores this month.
It's title Sulha, which means forgiveness in both Hebrew and Arabic, and it's being published by Key Porter.
And by a coincidence of timing, EMI-Capitol Canada will reissue Malka and Joso's three albums in a single CD package this fall as part of the company's 50th anniversary celebrations.
It took Malka 14 years to write the multi-layered Sulha, a process that began in 1985, after nearly three years of researching the subject.
The main character, the narrator of the novel, is an Israeli woman who was widowed when her pilot husband was killed in the Six Day War, leaving her with an infant son. She marries a Canadian and moves to Toronto, unable for 20 years to emotionally confront the loss of both her first husband and her home country.
Her son, now 20 and still an Israeli citizen, is called to serve in its army and he wants to go back and be pilot like his father.
But Israeli law forbids an only child from high risk war duty unless his birth parents - in Sulha's case, his mother - give written consent.
Trying to decide what to do, the mother travels back to Israel for the first time since moving to Canada and she also visits Bedouin villages in the desert to try to understand the Arab view of the Middle East conflict.
Sulha also tracks another journey - that of the mother's immigration to Canada, where, like many immigrants, she is patronized and not always made welcome.
Malka has now begun writing another novel, "But I've learned my lesson. It's going to be short. It's not going to take as long as Sulha did."
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A book for Japanese fishermen
by Pearl Sheffy Gefen - Toronto Star
Malka Marom wrote her just published first novel Sulha
for "readers who don't know about the Middle East and couldn't care less. I
felt a tremendous need to impart what I had learned."
So Marom left her comfortable Toronto home to live for months with nomads in
the Sinai desert, sleeping in squalid, lice-infested tents, defecating in
ditches, and losing 40lbs in the process.
The former folk-singer and documentary maker, born in Israel but living mostly
in Canada (once of the popular Canadian duo "Malka and Yoso"), sought the
experience to write Sulha
, but she still doesn't know quiet why. "Maybe it's the longing for roots. The
Beduin live like my Israelite ancestors did when they fled Egypt and spent 40
years in the desert."
The book has received good reviews in Canada, and has been selling well. One
reviewer called the 560 page book the "surprise hit of the literary season."
"The Beduin accepted me as a 'stranger-no-stranger' with great respect and
affection," Marom says. "They called me Malika, which means queen. They believe
they're of noble blood and lineage, so the Beduin man has self-esteem, he's
built to be the protector, the voice and face of his people. The women are
veiled, and can be divorced by their husbands merely repeating 'I divorce you'
three times (and he gets to keep the kids). but they are proud because they
give birth to noble men and women."
Marom is chatting beside the fireplace in the Toronto home where she brewed tea
the Beduin way as she wrote her first pages (which won her an Ontario Arts
Council award for the most promising work of fiction in progress), surrounded
by an eclectic mix of art works from east and west: Iroquois masks, Beduin
sculptures, Eskimo and Egyptian carvings, Canadian, Israeli, French and Spanish
paintings. And a piano.
She's wearing a handsome Beduin gown, embroidered on hand-woven cloth. "When
I'm with the Beduin, I wear jeans, in Toronto I wear Bedouin dress," she
shrugs. "I'm always the outsider everywhere. Only in Israel do I wear normal
clothes." She laughs, a deep, rich laugh.
Sulha
is passionate, poetic and never preachy, exotic and contemporary, ancient and
today's news. It tells of Leora, an Israeli war widow living in Canada, whose
husband was killed in the 1956 Sinai war. Most of the long novel is set in the
Sinai when Israel is about to return it to Egypt, as Leora seeks the spot where
her husband's plane was shot down.
Rare in the avalanche of books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, most of which take
a stand, Sulha
gives every side its say in the infinitely complex situation. "I refused to
make it simple. Life is not simple, love is not simple, nor is forgiveness,
reconciliation and peace, especially in the Middle East. To just present one
aspect is irresponsible." Israelis debate hotly, the Sinai Beduin weigh the
merits and demrits of Israeli and Egyptian rule, the Israeli Beduin argue about
Israel's attempt to urbanize them, to stop their goats from gobbling up the
crops planted with much sweat and little water in the Negev desert - and to
provide space in tiny Israel for army training after they leave the Sinai.
The book, published by Key Porter, won advance endorsements from artists as
disparate as Leonard Cohen ("crucial human questions, passionately addressed"),
Joni Mitchell ("a multi-cultural adventure... told in a unique new voice") and
Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel ("one of the most poignant and inspired novels
to have emerged from modern Israel's harrowing yet exultant experience").
Germany has already bought the rights for all German-speaking countries.
The word sulha means forgiveness and reconciliation in both Arabic and
Hebrew. The book reflects many kinds of sulha
: between a dovish intellectual Israeli father and his hawkish, pro-settlement
son, between Leora's parents and the deity who did noth ing to prevent the
Holocaust, between Beduin clans involved in a blood fued over a breach of
female chastity.
Sinai Beduin, always politically neutral, are canny interpreters of the
Israeli-Arab conflict. In the novel, clan elders meet amid the desert's
majestic mountains to discuss the bride-price a groom's family must pay for his
bride. It's a choice between ceding rights to their water holes or to their
secret smugglers, so these routes are useless if Israel stays in Sinai.
Egyptians don't bother.
On the other hand, Israel supplies schools, clinics and water tanks, and the
Egyptians don't. The Beduin leaders vote to keep their water rights because
they think Israel will lose in the long run: "Egyp values land more than honor,
and Israel values life more than land." The Israelis, one Beduin elder growls,
"do not know their enemy. That is their biggest failing. 'Aywa,' had the Arab
'fellahin' conquered Israel in six days, they would have slaughtered every
Yahodi...and stuffed his belly with sand." Israel is not ruthless enought: "For
the Yahud did not kill the children of the Arabs who killed their children in
Ma'alot" [where a school was brutally attacked by terrorists]... Spare your
enemy and he will wait, gather strength to attack you again - even a woman
knows that." An Israeli says "the minute they [the Arabs] see us as vunerable
or weak, they'll pounce.. But who can hang tough forever? who wants to hang
tough forever?"
Marom's fascination with the Beduin began with a CBC radio documentary, The
Bedouins
, which won the Ohio State Award. She studied Arabic, bought a jeep, outfitted
it with everything needed for desert survival, and hired a guide to introduce
her to the Beduin, "which he wouldn't do until I have him three characted
references to prove I was reliable, because he respected the Beduin."
The book's language, in the Beduin passages, is lyrical: "I heard it as music."
But it's often punctured by discordant swear words spoken by Leora "because I
didn't want it to be only a romantic vision. I wanted to bring in the
skepticism and irony of modern life." Born and raised in Israel, Marom has been
married to a Canadian for 30 years. In the 60's and 70s, first with Yoso and
then on her own, she sang folk songs from 40 countries in 14 languages on the
world's stages, radio and TV. She sand at a Royal Command Performance in London
in 1967, and appeared on the Johnny Carson show.
"Many people came to me and said, 'You make me feel so proud to be Greek, or
Italian, or Jewish.' We made it fashionable to be ethnic." (Malka and Yoso
recordings on Capital EMI label will be re-released this year.) Then it was
time to move on. She told a friend at CBC that "I'd like to try my hand at
interviewing, and he said no, he didin't want to waste my singing talent. I
told him, 'Don't play God'. He made me start from scratch as a gofer, thinking
I'd be discouraged, but I din't mind at all. I was learning." She went on to
make numerous radio documentaries.
Marom, now writing a new novel set in Canada, says Sulha
is "about knowing. I hear people say, 'Oh, the Middle East, I know everything
about it.' But do you? does anyone? I think of readers who don't care about the
Middle East. My nephew is married to a Japanese girl, and she told me her
mother had known nothing about Israel, so I thought I must write the book
partly for, say, a fisherman in the most remote part of Japan who never heard
about Israel."
She is disturbed by verified reports that schools run by the Palestinian
Authority use blatantly anti-Israeli textbooks. But "if there is no war, I am
happy: to me, that's peace, even if the next generation might attack Israel
again. I hope that if they have a good life and their own identity and
independence, there will not be a need for bloodshed, because they will have
more to lose."
Marom's parents and two sons live in Israel. She visits often, and says she's
constantly torn, like Leora in the book, between the two countries. "I love
Canada, but miss the sense of tribe, the belonging, the language I spoke as a
child, my family and friends."
Sulha is probably the first novel about Israel written by a yoredet.
"Exile from Israel is a form of suicide," she says, " and Israeli yordim
are not your usual immigrants. We are sitting on a suitcase with one leg in
Canada and the other in Israel."
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