Flowers in the Rifle Barrel

The Israeli folk singer Dudu Barak was born in Jerusalem. He often returns to his childhood in his art, sprinkling remembered phrases from his school days into his music. Fitting grand themes into small forms, Barak’s lyrics deal with all of life—“from love and hate to the Holocaust,” as he put it. In addition to music, Barak also writes poetry; his nine poetry books attest to his skill as a wordsmith. Barak’s music is part of the tapestry of Israeli life; his song “Flowers in the Rifle Barrel” was a fixture of Israeli radio after the Six-Day War. Shuttling between forms—penning lyrics with the density of poems, and poems with the beauty of lyrics—has long been his modus operandi.