The Shadows of ‘The Blue Butterfly’:
Homage to Richard Berengarten
A blue butterfly emerges from the darkness, from its own shadows, waving fast its wings, always in movement, shaking the air gently, rejecting never-ending violence, bloodshed, atrocities, casting heavenly colours upon them, projecting hope and reminding us of the immortality of the soul and the Power of Poetry.
In these harsh days for Israel and for the Jewish world, while we and the Palestinians contend with the terrible consequences of the massacre on October 7, 2023, I, as a “second generation”, whose family members were murdered in Auschwitz, feel the return of trauma trembling inside my body, and am left almost speechless. And the war continues.
Therefore, I, painter and poet, prefer to express my tribute to Richard Berengarten@80 visually in a painting rather than verbally in a poem, letting colours speak for me, trying to catch motion in two dimensions, in still life. I made this attached aquarelle especially for Richard following our correspondence a few years ago.
I never met Richard in person. We “met” in the spiritual sphere where ideas, arts and awareness come together. It happened during the time I translated his wonderful poem Tree into Hebrew, which was followed by a productive, fascinating and on-going discussion about languages, meaning of words and their connotations through different cultures, synchronicity, and the blue butterfly as a symbol.
This blue butterfly that sat on Richard’s writing hand at the memorial site of a Nazi mass massacre in October 1941 in Serbia, and metamorphosed into words, crystallised as a poem, symbolizes for me the emotions, knowledge and revision of the significance of being a Jewish writer and scholar in this unbearable turmoil.
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