Luchot

These two plates bear the engraved text of one of Natan Alterman’s most beloved poems, Od Chozer haNigun – The Tune Returns Again. The poem reflects on the cyclical nature of human experience: how melodies, memories, and emotions resurface over the course of a lifetime. Alterman’s words suggest that life is less a linear path than a spiraling movement, where the past reemerges in unexpected ways – as music, as memory, as haunting echo.

In its lines, the poem evokes a return not just to familiar moments, but to one’s own emotional roots – the inner landscape shaped by early encounters, joys, and wounds. The repetition of the “tune” becomes a metaphor for the enduring imprint of what once was, insisting gently, or sometimes forcefully, on being remembered.

For me, this poem has been a quiet companion for over two decades – especially through Berry Sakharof’s 1990s recording, which gave the text a new, raw intimacy. I carried that version with me like a thread. Over time, I too experienced that inevitable return: to language, to family, to longing, to origin.

And yet, in recent years, that same return feels obscured – buried under the weight of rubble, restlessness, and modern anxiety. The tune still plays, but now it’s muffled, echoing from beneath layers I’m still trying to sift through.