Description :
Bringing together a wide selection of contemporary poets, essayists, and fiction writers, this vivid collection demonstrates the continuing vitality of Jewish American writing.
Featured are well-known Jewish American writers alongside fresh, emerging talents. A collection that embraces tradition and innovation, and that is as diverse as it is consistently stimulating, this anthology will be required reading for enthusiasts of contemporary American literature.
Excerpt:
Earth receive an honored guest
William Yeats is laid to rest
Let the Irish vessel he
Emptied of its poetry
It was the beat that got me. I first encountered Auden’s “In Memory of William Butler Yeats” in my aunt’s back room. I loved my aunt, but conversation couldn’t compete with the lure of the room behind the kitchen. Feeling strange and shy, I made my way through pungent cooking smells, across a slippery linoleum floor to her seldom-used room. My aunt had left behind a card table with a stack of paper, a folding chair, and a shelf of books. each time I returned, I took down the anthology that held Auden’s elegy.
The trochaic tread, stately, processional, seemed to usher in a meaning that I didn’t hear in the lyric lilt of iambs. That I knew the difference between poetic measures was due to Girl’s Latin School where I learned to scan poetry, diagram complex sentences, translate Cicero, and commit to memory the diameter and circumference of all the islands in Boston Harbor. I also memorized comparable figures for all the then-known planets in the solar system during a year long course whose semesters neatly paired geology and astronomy. While I can’t remember any of these measurements, by now probably much-revised, I do retain a sense that islands in my hometown waters are hinged to planets in space.
When I was in the corridors and classrooms, I didn’t feel strange. I was at ease with my love of trochees and my lesser love of iambs, and my fondness for their relatives, the dactyl (which made me think of vast wings attached to a lizard body) and anapest (which I imagined as a city in Eastern Europe). When my family moved away, I transferred to a large high school where I wanted to fit in. I hid my absorption of poetry but when I came home after school, I made up writing assignments for myself. Janet, compose a poem in a formal verse on a randomly chosen subject. With my eyes closed, I ran my fingers back and forth along our set of Collier’s Encyclopedia and drew out a volume. Keeping my eyes shut, I opened the book somewhere in the middle, which turned out to be an entry on Vermont. I read until I came to the legend of the native son Ethan Allen, who returned on moonlit nights in the shape of a white horse. In my poem, I set farmers on a porch, talking of humdrum things, until their vision was illuminated by the apparition of a horse made of light. Now that I had a subject, where was I to find the music? There, in the paragraph on Vermont’s principal products, I found Lumber, eggs, and hay. Once again, I responded to that trochaic beat.
Until then, history was either too close or too far away. It was much too close when I was four or five and my mother befriended a Polish refugee who had been an inmate at Auschwitz. After she was released, Mrs. Landsman had walked across Europe in search of her family. Eventually she found her husband and daughter, but her three other children had been killed. Through an arrangement that I still don’t understand, Mrs. Landsman cleaned our house, although we were not in a position to afford a cleaning woman, and besides, my mother always worked alongside her. My mother was pretty and stylish. Mrs. Landsman wore a housedress that smelled of steam and sweat; over her hair, she tied a scarf as red as her face; her Yiddish was guttural and shrill. She and my mother bent down into a soapy bucket. Later that evening my mother would say, “We washed the floor with our tears.”
History, when it took shape in Mrs. Landsman, seemed full of sorrow unredeemed by beauty. I knew that I should pity Mrs. Landsman for what had happened to her, but instead I though if this is history, get me away from its smell, its suds, its mournfulness. History was too distant when war appeared on our Zenith television screen. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I did feel a pang for an old man who seemed sad. When I heard him say, “I shall return,” I knew somehow that, unlike Jimmy Durante who walked sorrowfully away from the audience as he said goodnight to his long lost Mrs. Calabash, this man would not reappear on our screen next week. One thing I understood history was able to make people disappear.
Poetry, though, brought the past alive. When I read and reread Auden’s elegy, I envisioned cold bridges over curved rivers, people huddled in dark coats as they waited for streetcars that would take them out beyond the city limits where they lived in “ranches of isolation.” This Europe was overrun by murderous hordes that only a bardic voice could keep at bay.
Follow, poet, follow right
to the bottom of the night.
I heard the imperative in the trochee. Do it. Make it.
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
Somewhere there were vineyards. Mrs. Landsman’s tragedy might be met by song, trilling in the arbors of hope. No dying fall; instead, an emphatic beat at the end of a line, “rejoice”. The palm of my hand came down onto the last stressed syllable, which I heard not as an iamb but as the conquering chord of the trochee. In that back room, I was conducting an orchestra of language.
At those moments I also sprung free of my own history. I was for a brief time not a solitary little girl, not sickly, not Jewish. I was part of a great line, in which I myself might become “an honored poet.” But “Mad Ireland”; what did that mean? And what about “Paul Claudel”? An asterisk below a stanzas directed the reader’s eye to a footnote. Where the asterisk appeared, it turned out there had once been another stanza: “Time will pardon Paul Claudel/Pardon him for writing well.” Paul Claudel had done something wrong, something connected to the war that spilled out in Mrs. Landsman’s tears. At one point, Auden must have believed that this man’s gift would absolve him, then Auden changed his mind. I was face to face with another aspect of history: revision. But the evidence of the poet’s change of mind hadn’t been erased; the stanza had survived, in a footnote that I went back to each time I shut myself in the back room. I felt surreptitious, as though the reference to Claudel were tinged with erotic scandal.
I knew that the madness of Ireland was very different from what I saw in the state mental hospital where my mother took me to visit her brother. In a ward for catatonics, he was eventually lobotomized and released to my grandmother’s apartment where for ten years, he sat silently in front of the television screen turning the pages of Life magazine. One day, standing on the back porch with my aunt, he casually remarked on the hair ribbon of a little girl playing below; it was, he noted, the same one she had worn the day before. Once he had broken back into speech, he had a decade’s worth of jumble to tell. Eleanor Roosevelt whispered secrets in his ear; the downstairs neighbor had built the atomic bomb; Harry Truman followed him to the barber shop. But Yeat’s Ireland was a place were passions were not extinguished. They ruled, and their sovereign was a poet who could “survive it all.” Was it words, then that offered people relief from their history? If the seas of pity were “locked and frozen in each eye,” was poetry the heat that liquefies pain, letting it roll down Mrs. Landsman’s cheeks?
History. Elegy. Poetry. The words ask for one more syllable. They need time in order to see beauty in other measures. As I now see Mrs. Landsman, scrubbing away at the stains, her hand circling again and again over that enveloping soapy floor.
Review:
Excerpt from Humanities and Social Sciences Online:
“Much of the fiction in Raz’s anthology is distinguished by a lyric clarity and intensity and by a mature vision, while many of the poems are not. I particularly like Eileen Pollak’s fiercely realized tale, “The Pool,” a delectable exploration of the need for identity and dignity that is razor-sharp and tender at once; Rebecca Goldstein’s “Gifts of the Last Night,” a lovely story of chance meetings on the last night of Chanukah that leaves us aching for more work written in this vibrant, economical style; and Janet Sternburg’s two short-shorts, “Trochaic” and “His Regular Fare,” the first a beautifully rendered meditation on personal and cultural history and the liberating power of language, the second a memory piece that reveals the complexities that underlie human character and relationships. There is a sense in these stories that the writers are reporting to us from the inner landscape of experience where what has been continues to shape and move us.”
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