“The Silver Platter”

"Sixteen years after Bialik described the “City of Slaughter”, Natan Alterman arrived in Kishinev. Nearly 95 years later, his grandson, also called Natan, Natan Slor, has arrived in the capital of Moldova, as a guest artist at the opening of the Limmud FSU conference in Kishinev.

Natan Alterman was one of the leading Hebrew poets of the modern era. He grew up in Kiev, then part of Romania, but left it with his family at 1919 following the annexation of it by the Bolsheviks. He arrived at Kishinev and lived there until 1925, when his family decided to move to Israel. In Israel he had a daughter – Tirza Atar, a well-known songwriter, singer, poet, writer, actress and translator on her own. Tirza started her career at the entertainment troupe of the IDF Armored Corps. In 1961 she married Oded Kotler and they moved to New York to study acting. There she started suffering from depression, and her father came to take her back home. That was the end of her marriage. In Israel she was treated at Tel Hashomer Hospital and her condition began to improve. Aged 23, she acted in Yehuda Amichai’s “No Man’s Land” and met and married Benjamin Slor. The two had two children – Yael and Natan, and when Natan was 5 his mother died tragically in unclear circumstances. Yael and Natan were taken care of by their grandmother, the actress Rachel Marcus, who lived opposite them. Natan too is an artist. At the age of 36, his mother already had a long history of cultural creation behind her. Slor at the age of 34 has produced his first CD called “25 hours”. He says he decided early on to break the barrier and to give shows with family connections. Now at the age of 44, he tries to forge a dialogue with what could be seen as an oppressive weight. And he still feels guilty that he doesn’t do enough with own materials."