Ronny Someck
Fulbright Visiting Scholar from Israel
Award-winning Poet and Artist

Seeing America’s Roots
An Interview with Ronny Someck

…There’s no hurry. The cornfields have
A yellow leotard and a stalk that knows
The language of the wind’s tango.
So come, Iowa, a city that looks like
A girl with windblown hair who has left it.

Thus wrote Ronny Someck, a much-admired award-winning poet and artist, in his poem to his personal America, which he encountered fifteen years ago.

The Fulbright scholarship he was awarded in 1992 enabled Someck to take part in the University of Iowa International Writing Program, which brings together writers and poets from all over the world. “It was a seminal journey”, Someck told Fulbright with fresh and profound enthusiasm in a small Tel Aviv café next door to the Ironi Yod Aleph High School where he teaches communications. “Since then I’ve traveled to dozens of festivals and poetry events all over the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, but you never forget the first time. That’s when I was given the keys, and you can open locks with them.”

“It was the first time I had emerged from the Israeli bubble,” he says. “Previously I had known writers and texts from all over the world, but here I was given the opportunity to meet writers of my own age, not in formal encounters, but to actually live with them. During the three or four months of the program we had breakfast together, drank whiskey together at night and debated at literary symposia. I was able to see from close up how the writing processes I wrestle with in Hebrew take place in other languages.”

“I realized that I’d come to the Tower of Babel,” he says of the encounter with 25 writers and poets from 20 countries. “It made me understand that the world is bigger than I’d thought but that in the end it’s a kind of matchbox I’m happy to be in. I was able to talk with people who dream my dreams in other languages.”

Someck, who has published nine books and whose poems have been translated into 39 languages, would like to see a program reunion wherein he could meet again, in a literary framework, with the friends to whom he became so close. In the meantime, on more than one occasion he has invited people he met in Iowa to lecture and attend conferences in Israel. In contrast, the Iranian writer he met, for instance, whose anonymity he wishes to maintain, became very friendly with his family, but asked not to appear in any photographs with them. The scholars from Albania and Malaysia, both Muslim states, had no hesitation in befriending the Israeli of Iraqi extraction.

“It was the program’s 25th anniversary, and Americans know how to celebrate,” he adds. “I knew something about American culture previously, but only the leaves and branches. It was in Iowa that I got to know the roots too. Since then I’ve felt very connected to America.” That year the dorms at Iowa University were being renovated so the writers and poets were housed in a senior citizens’ home whose residents were mainly former governors and judges. “The writers were very happy with their accommodations, and the residents were pleased with the bohemian activity that had come into their lives,” says Someck. “For me it was an opportunity to get to know America from its more Faulkneresque viewpoint. I quickly realized that the Iowan corn growers were more America than people holding glasses of red wine at exhibition openings in Manhattan.”

Someck feels lucky to have had the Fulbright experience he enjoyed. “The United States-Israel Educational Foundation takes people, each of whom plays a specific instrument, in this case language, and tells them: come and be an orchestra for three months. Let’s see if we can create harmony, listen to other instruments and know that their players are listening to you as well. And that orchestra compels you to sharpen your unique sound even further, because you want your own instrument to be heard even better.”