The adoptive son

It isn't every day that a native-born Israeli decides to spend his days and nights hanging out with Russian immigrants and then to study their language and culture, and then begin to translate literary works from Russian into Hebrew. What could motivate an Israeli high-school kid to pass on the Israeli experience, to be drawn into a different culture?

Ro'i Chen, 25, one of the most successful Russian-to-Hebrew translators and an interesting creative talent in his own right, was born and raised in Tel Aviv's Nahalat Yitzhak neighborhood to a mother of Moroccan descent and a father from a veteran-Israeli Sephardi family. As a child, he studied in the theater track at the School of the Arts. In 10th grade, Chen dropped out of the Dalet Municipal High School. He got to know young people from Russia in Tel Aviv, and through them became friends with more and more young Russians - at first in the Lifta area of Jerusalem and later, back in Tel Aviv. He fell in love with them, lived with them in communes, rebelled against the bourgeois world, drank alcohol, wrote songs and admired Lermontov. After taking stock, Chen began to learn Russian, on his own.

To date, Chen has translated into Hebrew books by Daniil Kharms - "I Like to Break People's Faces" and Varlam Shalamov - "Kolyma Tales", and his translation of a Dostoyevsky novel is scheduled to be published soon.

Chen also belongs to the Malenki fringe theater group, established by Russian-immigrant theater people.

He recently published a novel of his own, "Ink Horses," published in Hebrew by Hakibbutz Hameuhad. The book is peopled entirely by colorful characters directly taken from the rootless, rebellious, talented, desolate Russian-Israeli world. A surrealistic atmosphere pervades the novel, which is clearly influenced by Russian literature.

"I connected with Russian culture through people I met, some of whom studied with me at school, some outside of school, some who hung out at Dizengoff Square," says Chen. "To begin with, you say your first words in Russian, thank you, please, and all sorts of curses, and then you start to say sentences. Back then, I heard a ton of [Vladimir] Wissotzky, without understanding a word.

"I knew that Wissotzky's wife, who was an actress, wrote a book about him, and I very much wanted to read it, so I walked into a Russian book store in Tel Aviv and asked the salesman, in a crummy Russian, for the book. The salesman, a very special person, asked me, `Do you speak Hebrew?' I said yes, so he said to me, `Sit down' closed up the shop, made tea, sat down and said in a serious voice, `What do you want?'

"We spoke for a few hours, a lot of poets were gathering in this shop. I began sitting there until two in the morning. These people, with such utter joy, told me about themselves and included me. They imparted their culture to me, the food and the music and the literature. All you have to do is take one step in their direction and all of them come to you. They saw that I was truly interested."

It isn't often that veteran Israelis enter the world of new immigrants.

"In general, it isn't often that people enter any world not their own. But you benefit enormously by doing it."

Why did it happen in your case? Youthful rebellion? Rebellion against Israeliness?

"In a sense, yes, and it seems that I was looking for historical and cultural support, a sort of support that I did not find in Israeli culture. I was drawn to them out of curiosity. So many people have come from there - they set up theater, radio, newspapers, book shops. I have read a lot of translated Russian literature in my life, and it connected me with what I had read. I went for the first time to Russia and expected to find there the Russia of the books - and I kind of found it.

"I came back to Israel, worked a little at the Gesher Theater (the Russian-language repertory company), studied a little at that Alma College, learned a little Italian and a little Talmud and philosophy, went back to Russia, and later to Paris, writing the whole time. I translated plays, worked at Beit Zvi (the theater school in Ramat Gan), worked as an editor at the Maariv Library Press, but mainly translated from Russian and from French."

Not your routine fellow, this Ro'i Chen. Like the protagonists in his book, he drinks a lot of tea and is growing sideburns a la 19th century - "a gesture to Pushkin," he says. He lives with his significant other, Paulina Adamov, a woman ten years older than he. Adamov immigrated from Moscow and is working as a set and costume designer for a theater. They have a six-month-old boy named Adam - same as the hero of Chen's novel.

Life in a commune with the Russians he met was not simple. "That was my bad period," he says. "You eat bad and you sleep bad. You look bad because it isn't good to look good, you're emotionally confused because you're in love with everyone, men and women, you want to be brilliant and smart, and you have no idea how to do it.

"I met the poet Anna Gorenko who committed suicide - in other words, she died of an overdose, but I call it suicide. I once translated a poem of hers, and we met and talked. In Tel Aviv, I lived in these sort of circles, and I was in it up to my neck. There is a wall between these people and the world. They live without any property and without anything at all, even though they have a fondness for certain objects associated with poets, like pipes and inkwells.

Living with them means putting on makeup, growing your hair long, walking barefoot at night on Dizengoff with a bottle of wine and a shirt that has a question mark you drew on it, and feeling that you're kicking the world in the head.

"It's very easy to laugh at these kids or to feel pity for them, but basically they are very sincere. This behavior emanates from a very real desire to stop the train for a second and to say. `hold on, how much more can I take, is there anything else in this life?' Some of them became addicts and ended their lives, some drank themselves to disgust, some simply stopped and went to study in university, some went back to Russia."

After a year or two of this, Chen decided to get out. He understood that they were talking a lot and writing a lot, but they were not publishing a lot. They remained outside the world. Besides which, he says, "I hate literary gangs. As soon as the manifestos begin, I am cautious. Once, I thought it was a dream - that all of us would be together and write and talk - but then I realized it was impossible, that when you write you have to be alone with yourself, and you have to dig.

"It's funny, because I recently published a short story in the journal "Ho!," which is identified with a certain agenda, but when I met the editor, Dori Manor, he really did not impress me as being a literary dictator with a manifesto. He is talented and his translations are wonderful, but all of the debate that springs up around the journal have nothing to do, as far as I can see, with writing.

"Why do people always have to ask, `who are you, what color are you?' To my good fortune, I write prose, and therefore have no stand on the question of rhyme-weight. Apparently, they needed an agenda to attract people. It's easier to attract people when there is a headline: An evening of rhyme and weight, an evening of avant-garde poetry."

A promise called mother and father

Chen's "Ink Horse" is about a young man whose parents have died and who goes out on a journey to find himself. Along the way, he meets an eccentric and creative circle of people. Why is the protagonist an orphan?

"There is a sort of promise that is called mother and father, and even though they are wonderful and give everything, orphanhood is nevertheless something that you experience," says Chen. "The feeling that there is no support, no understanding, no link to the people around you. I went through a lot of internal revolutions, I was a rebel, I was hysterical, I was manic-depressive - not in the clinical sense but in the everyday sense. Most of my subsequent experiences, like the crews I hung out with in Jerusalem, derived from this.

"I wanted my hero to go through experiences like I did. I admired extremism. Like anyone who feels alien in society, I tried to be more extreme than the extremists, until I realized that the lifestyle is merely a childish lie. The wish to live above reality, the confidence that you are a genius, without showing any proof. The people I hung out with wanted to throw the quill up against the paper and to write like geniuses. The word `work,' in the context of writing, seemed almost obscene to them."

Chen learned to find the cultural support he was searching for in Israeli culture as well. Leah Goldberg; Natan Alterman. "Through alien eyes, I learned to see the good things," he says. And after the Russian and the French, he began learning Moroccan. "It is the language of my childhood," he explains.

	Translator and novelist Ro'i Chen. He rebelled against his Israeliness and found himself in 19th century Russia. (David Bachar)