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Neri Livneh / Is that you, Pooh?
By Neri Livneh
Tags: Neri Livne

Rina and Dina - that's what our distinguished biology teacher, Miki Drezner, with a little scientific humor, used to call RNA and DNA, the two basic elements of genetics. Unlike RNA and DNA, which had the slightly threatening cast of a foreign language, Rina and Dina conveyed a feeling of optimism and happy-ever-after.

I ended up taking biology as my elective subject by process of elimination. There was no subject I despised more than history, and so I stayed away from the literary track; Fatma the Arabic teacher was not fond of me at all, to put it mildly, so that crossed off the Orientalist track; my grades in math were hardly worth mentioning. But Miki Drezner, a salt of the earth type with a special knack for sarcasm, the mother of my sharp-witted classmate Ruthie, became the homeroom teacher for my class. And together with her compadres, my beloved art teacher Medezini and Adar the composition teacher, became a lone beacon of hope in those dark days of my 11th and 12th grade years at the Reali School.

Obviously, I really did get something out of biology. I stirred from my daydreaming trance in biology class just once in order to ask an urgent question: Why, if my grandfather and my mother's sisters had blue eyes, did my mother and I not have them? "In any case, it's a little too late for you to do anything about this problem," Drezner remarked dryly, and I sank back into my twilight zone. Every so often, terms like "Krebs cycle" and "double helix" somehow stuck in my unconscious. My capacity for bewilderment coupled with Drezner's sense of humor made these classes a pleasant experience, but I knew there was no chance I'd ever pass the matriculation exam in biology.
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Back in those days, the Education Ministry allowed students at certain (expensive and prestigious) high schools to substitute a term paper on any approved subject for a matriculation exam, and so I decided to avoid the biology exam by writing a paper on "Social and Class Stereotypes in the Child's Outlook as Expressed in the Works of A. A. Milne in their Original Version."

The topic was chosen by the coordinator of my grade, Foyggy we used to call him, an intimidating teacher who took an unexpected liking to me just when I yelled at him in front of the whole class, and who was also an English teacher. He introduced me for the first time in my life to "Winnie-the-Pooh" and the rest of Milne's writings, which up until 12th grade, I swear, I had not so much as glanced at. For one simple reason - my mother believed exclusively in poetry.

Works by Alterman, Leah Goldberg, Shlonsky, Fania Bergstein - these were the things we came to know by heart. And instead of reading us stories, she would make up her own, most often starring a boy named Zecharya Pimpernutter and his friend named Ilana Suissa who, wonder of wonders, had experiences every day that were incredibly similar to those of my brother and me. Having learned to read before I started school, I didn't waste my time on children's books, and from "Gone with the Wind" I went straight to "The Stars Look Down" by A. J. Cronin, which I borrowed from the library, and "Doctors' Wives" by Frank Slaughter and all kinds of other cultural treasures that were to be found in abundance by my mother's bedside. And so I reached 11th grade without having read "The Little Prince," and I only got to know "Where's Pluto?" when it was read aloud to me with much emotion and in very un-childlike circumstances - in our secret place on the lawn behind the big cafeteria, with the neighborhood houses spread out below us painted pink by the twilight, along with the post-coital cigarette.

All of which is to say that I was completely unfamiliar with Orland's and other translations of Winnie-the-Pooh before I read the original, and to this day I'm still wary of them. And by the way, the only positive thing I have to say about the "sequel" to Winnie-the-Pooh is that Atara Ofek's translation is excellent. Not better than Avirama Golan's new and very worthy translation of Winnie-the-Pooh from five years ago, but still, a good translation is always cause for celebration. But anyway - in this case, Milne's language wasn't a part of it, for it wasn't my beloved A. A. but one David Benedictus who wrote "Return to the Hundred Acre Wood," while the illustrations by Mark Burgess are just a colored-in version of the E. H. Shepard originals, so what it amounts to is pretty much just a work of imitation, "imitation out of self-effacement," as Ahad Ha'am called it, otherwise known as "kitsch."

For more on this subject, see Thomas Kulka's book "Kitsch and Art," in which he argues that kitsch is comprised of very loaded symbols through which we can recognize an entire world of information and emotion that does not in the least enrich our world of images and associations. Want an example? Winnie-the-Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Owl and all the other characters that appear in the sequel and are a pointless and empty reproduction of the Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga, Roo and Owl who were the products of the imagination of the man who twice fathered Christopher Robin - once as the real Christopher Milne who despised his writer father, and once as a literary character, or at least that's how it was until the greedy folks responsible for the rights to the original stories and the people at Walt Disney decided to pluck these characters from the immortal world of literary characters to give them new "life" like zombies or androids or the Lubavitcher Rebbe who continues to advise us even after his death, from somewhere in the depths of a jar of formaldehyde.
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