News at Eleven: It's one of the hardest poems in the book for me.

There are definitely poems that still feel very charged for me even though I've read them a lot. One of the things I hear a lot from Palestinians--they use the phrase the Nakba when they talk about 1948, which they call "The Disaster," which is hugely painful to me as a Jew, specifically as the granddaughter  of Holocaust survivors. For me the formation of Israel is like--"Oh my god, the dream. It can happen!" That's this example of these two narratives. What for me is one of the great triumphs in my personal family history is an absolute disaster for somebody else. And can I hold those two things to both be true?

from Heeb: Elana Bell on Israel, Palestine and Poetry

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