When the award-winning Bukharan-Jewish poet, writer, barrister and translator Yvonne Green stood up to read her poem The Farhud at London’s Lauderdale Road Synagogue on June 2, 2016, she was greeted with palpable empathy. An elegant figure dressed in black with a simple brooch, Green read with impassioned yet contained emotion. She had written the poem to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Farhud, the violent pogrom that took place in Baghdad against Iraqi Jews on Shavuot, June 1 to 2, 1941. Though British born herself, she was descended from Bukharan Jews in Central Asia, and introduced her poem as a secular prayer, describing how her experience resonated over the last 100 years.
The poem graphically portrayed another Holocaust in Central Asia, one for which the Israeli government had recently pledged to compensate victims on the same scale as European Holocaust survivors.
Prior to the Farhud, Jews, who first came to Baghdad as captives from Jerusalem between 597 and 586 BCE, were living on good terms with their Muslim and Christian neighbours in Bustan al-Khas, a fashionable suburb of Baghdad. They spoke a Judeo-Tajik dialect of Persian. But after a coup overthrew the government in Iraq in 1941 a pro-German regime took power and a wave of antisemitism, fuelled by Nazi propaganda, spread through the region culminating in the riots in early June that saw about 165 Jews murdered and hundreds of Jewish women raped. Green also read her poem to the Knesset in Jerusalem and in Australia, at Sydney’s Sephardi community. It does not shy away from violence, and its concluding stanza has a bitter poignancy:
Since the funerals our children/ remember with new knowledge/ and their picnics of beith-bla’ham,/ timman-ahmar, and kahi, never go south/ for the Shabuot pilgrimage, sing/ Shirit Hagvarim at its seven/ waystations, or hear the tomb/ of Yehezkel cry for its Jews.
Yvonne Green, who has died of leukaemia aged 67, was hailed as a “force of nature” by the Sephardi group Jewish Refugees from Arab and Muslim Countries, which went on to say that “the Sephardi community has lost an original and effective voice”.
Born in Finchley, Green was of 100 per cent Bukharah descent on both sides. Her maternal grandparents had settled in Alexandria, Egypt in the early 20th century but her parents were expelled from there after 1956. Her paternal grandparents had settled in France and were persecuted during the War (her father and grandfather were interned in Gourse and St Denis) and came to the UK immediately after it. She lived variously in Hendon, north-west London, and Herzliya, in Israel.
She studied at Henrietta Barnett School, followed by law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was called to the Bar in both New York and London, and practised first with Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy and the Legal Aid Society and later at the Inner Temple in London.
But a change of direction came in 1999 when Green retired as a commercial barrister and, despite family reservations, opted to focus on publishing the poetry, which had been her first love.
“I always loved poetry but it took me a while to dedicate the time it deserved,” she said. “My mother always tried to put me off because she knew how consuming it can be. She was right!”
She described herself as a “tuning fork picking up movement through your senses… you then interrogate these things which make you tremble.”
Green's Bukharan heritage clearly prompted some deep, inner questioning. Her first pamphlet, Boukhara was published in 2007 and won the 2007 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. Other awards included the 2012 Buxton Prize Commendation for Welcome to Britain. She went on to publish four full-length collections with Smith/Doorstop; The Assay, (2010) Honoured (2015) and Jam and Jerusalem (2018). She translated and published Russian-language literature, notably her volume After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin, which was a UK Poetry Book Society Translation Choice in 2011. Two new translations of his work were published in 2023, Testimony and A Close Reading of Fifty-three Poems. She gave several readings and talks on translating his poems.
Honoured was acclaimed by Alan Brownjohn for its “telling detail and great emotional power”. It calls to mind one of her important literary themes in which she blends an almost messianic vision of Israel with the diaspora’s experience of Zionism. An award from Lord Gavron and Celia Atkin facilitated a Hebrew translation by Am Oved in 2013 under the title Hanisu Yi.
Exile, dispossession and memory were all important components. Her work offers a perceptible link between Jewish culture and poetry. She once explained: “My family were expelled from Egypt in 1956 and many of my poems express that sense of connection to and disconnection from the culture, music, cuisine, manners of a not-so-distant past that often creates a sense of both longing and alienation in children of the diaspora. My poems talk about holidays, festivals, tradition, food; but also war, hatred and intolerance against Jews, both here in the UK and the Middle East. My translations of the poetry and memoirs of revered Soviet-Ukrainian poet Semyon Lipkin also highlight the Judeo-Christian metaphors at the core of his work.”
She said she “ventriloquised” the experiences of Jews who had been forced to leave their Arab homelands.
Yvonne Green was Poet-in-Residence to Spiro’s Ark from 2000 to 2003, Norwood Ravenswood in 2006, Casa Shalom from 2007 to 2008, Jewish Women’s Aid from 2007 to 2009 and from 2013, to Baroness Scotland of Asthall’s Global Foundation To End Domestic Violence.
On July 3, 2017 Green read out Bejan Matur’s poems at The Kurdish Sisterhood event organised by the Exiled Lit Cafe at the Poetry Café. She also convened two monthly groups, one at Hendon Library called Wall of Words and the second at JW3, Taking the Temperature In Our Food, in which she expressed that connection between the cooking memories of her childhood and a sense of alienation:
The smell of rice cooking is/ The smell of my childhood/ And a house devoid of cooking/ Smells is no home./ Sometimes I visited other/ houses which smelled like our house,/ Heavy with the steaming of/ mint or dill/ And tiny cubes of seared liver/ All seeping into rice,/ Which would become green/ And which was called bachsh./ We felt foreign, shy of our/ Differentness/ Unable to explain/ The sweetness of brown rice/ Called osh sevo/ Where prunes and cinnamon/ And shin meat had baked/ Slowly/ Melting into the grains of rice / Which never lost their form.
Yvonne Green was an Orthodox Jew who regularly visited Israel. In an interview with the JC, she recounted her trip to Gaza in January 2009 where she wanted to witness for herself the terrible scenes she had seen in the media. Armed with a press card and a Palestinian guide, Green entered Gaza through the Erez checkpoint and on her return described the reports she had seen as “wholly exaggerated”.
She said that the IDF were careful to issue warnings via phone, leaflet and megaphone to urge civilians to evacuate some 35-40 minutes before each attack. She also found no support for Hamas among the Palestinians she interviewed. They had repeated the fact that the Israelis had issued warnings prior to an attack.
Yvonne Green is survived by her husband Brian Green KC and their four children, Charlotte, Jasmine, Bertie and Rachael.
Yvonne Green: born April 8, 1957. Died April 15, 2024
