Israeli songwriter rewrites Dylan: ‘It might be dark, but it’s not late yet’
How do you move past despair and resignation to find resilience and hope?
Veteran Israeli rocker Si Himan sings out an answer in her latest album, Yalda Barzel (Iron Girl) — in part by pointedly rewriting Bob Dylan lyrics.
Himan debuted in the 1980s with a punk look and songs that were pointedly feminist and political. A song sympathizing with the Palestinian intifada was banned from Israeli radio. (She also got into trouble for lapses from proper Hebrew syntax; she had spent formative childhood years overseas.)
She marked the 36th anniversary of her first album with a festive concert — on October 5, 2023.
Himan, raised on a kibbutz in the Galilee, had old friends who were murdered when Hamas attacked the southern kibbutzim two days later, and young family members who were killed in the subsequent war.
The next month, she released a song, “If Ever I Die (Before I Reach My Time),” with lyrics written by Adi Odaya Baruch. Baruch, who was 20, was killed in a rocket strike on Sderot on October 9; her mother discovered the poem when she went through her daughter’s computer after she died.
“If ever I die before I reach my time / Don’t mourn my death… Watch the world for me, too / Smile at clouds occasionally / I’ll be there,” Himan sings in Hebrew.
Of course, it’s one thing for a 20-year-old to ask not to be mourned; it’s another for those who knew her not to weep, or for those who hear her words not to tear up at each listening.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that the title song on Himan’s 11th album is not about clouds, but about a gritty determination to keep going — in part by arguing against the forces of despair as embodied in the songs of Bob Dylan.
You might imagine, as you listen to the song “Iron Girl,” that Himan put together a downbeat Dylan playlist and set it on endless repeat in those months of immediate mourning, until she determinedly summoned the strength to argue back.
One of those Dylan songs would have been “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which begins with a wordless chorus, before Dylan sings, “Mama, take this badge off of me, I can’ t use it any more. It’s getting dark, too dark to see. I feel I’m knockin’ on Heaven’s door.” Those are words of resignation.
“Iron Girl” begins with similar choral notes, and the word “Ima” — “Mother.” But where Dylan’s song embraces the oncoming doom, Himan summons a gift her mother gave her in childhood of resilience: “Ima says / Be an iron girl. / If you succeed / You can overcome.”
And then the Israeli songwriter takes up her argument with Dylan, who had declared “my soul turned into steel” in “Not Dark Yet” on his 1997 album “Time Out of Mind,” which was seen as the former face of youth culture confronting mortality at age 56.
But it was a steel of despair.
“It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” Dylan had sung.
Himan borrowed elements of Dylan’s tune for her rejoinder: “It might be dark, but it’s not late yet.” Another of her verses similarly reverses “It seems like I’m moving, but I’m standing still” into “It might appear that I’m standing in place, but I’m moving a bit every day.”
How did she manage the transformation? How do you avoid despairing, as Dylan expressed in “Not Dark Yet,” that “my sense of humanity has gone down the drain / Behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain”?
Outside the context of her songwriting, in the real world of post-10/7 Israel, Himan found meaning by showing up as a volunteer supporting the hostage families rallying for the Israeli government to cut a deal to free them, and by singing her songs at funerals and for freed hostages.
It reflects a rootedness in family, place, and self that eludes Dylan’s lost ramblers — and arguably the peripatetic Dylan himself — who, in the words of another Dylan song Himan alludes to, “are tryin’ to get to Heaven before they close the door.”
I learned some of the context of Himan’s mother’s words of support when I interviewed her in Tel Aviv back in ’89. Her parents — her father Nachum was a leading Israeli songwriter during Israel’s first decades — had moved the family to London when she was 9. And she hated it. The shift from a rural kibbutz to the city would have been tough enough, but antisemitic classmates called her “dirty Jew” and her teacher in mandatory religious education class liked to talk about how “your people crucified our Lord.”
And so when she was 12, she convinced her parents to let her go back to the kibbutz without them.
She sings to her mother: “The letter you wrote that girl / I treasured and lost when I was a lone soldier / But I wouldn’t want to be another girl / That iron girl was the most wonderful girl.”
And now that wonderful girl has grown up to write a song for our times, one that promises hope amid the darkness: “The path chose you / Now go straight / In the end you’ll see / The light remains.”
Thank you. We needed that.