Poetry And Novels I
MACKENZIE BREAKUP AND SUMMER MADNESS
Jean Kadmon learned that she was a poet when a friend, who had read her first novel “Mackenzie Breakup,” told her so. The friend had noticed prose with a poetic undertone and poems based on the northern seasons:
“Except for the trading posts, then, there were no houses, no people, and most of the hours of flight were over "muskeg" - swamp of a peculiar green with a few scrawny spruce. Sometimes there were dead trunks, but usually that green pattern below of lake and muskeg and twisted clumps of darker trees as well as meandering rivers. Many minutes were spent over a gray Great Slave Lake, not yet free of ice except around the edges, while later, the plane flew over low lying mountains couching tiny lakes. Altogether the long hours of flight were above an untouched and watery land, sculptured by the ice sheet and left without drainage except for the the Athabaska-Slave-Mackenzie water system. It was a new sort of land - wistful, delicate, and big.”
Mackenzie Winter
who sighs today
“the West! the West!
the great open spaces,
ah! ...the West!”
unless a cowboy at the
soda fountain?
who out there in South knows
frontier?
but invaders into North
of Athabaskan Indians-
fur men, voyageurs, missionaries,
Eldorado seekers, prospectors for uranium -
whether as of old in canoe and dog sled
or in river steamer and airplane -
have been mosquito itches.
and the new swarms after oil?
Betzune Yeneca,
spirit of the caribou,
will swat them.”
“Mackenzie Breakup” was written in the 1950’s under the eye of Sara Dvoretsky. One day, while both mothers and housewives were mending socks in Jean’s Jerusalem garden, Sara said it was time for Jean to write about her wartime experience as a typist in the far North of Canada when she was twenty.
“I will help you,” Sara, said, she who in any language except Chinese had read whatever was literature.
Though Jean had expected to find work as the Anthropologist that she had become after graduate studies in Chicago, she began to write. Since her main endeavor was raising two boys while becoming part of the newly established Israel, she learned to get up at four in the morning to type out sentences. Sara went over every one. Eventually she told Jean that her novel “Mackenzie Breakup” was better than she had expected.
A few years later, Jean’s economist husband left his job in the Israel government to run chemical works in Haifa. Jean, in the desperation that being “A Society Lady on the Carmel” caused her, drove to nearby Ein Hod to visit Simon Halkin, an elderly professor of Hebrew Literature and a poet writing in Hebrew. He, during his summer vacation in the artist village, was busy with an introduction to a translation of Thoreau’s “Walden Pond.”
“You are of the same spirit” he told Jean.
Afterwards, Jean Kadmon began writing poems. Fifty years later, there are over three hundred in her main collection. A few, translated into Hebrew by Simon Halkin, appeared in the newspaper àì äîùîø