Poet and Holocaust survivor  Walter Hess will read from his book Jews Harp (Pleasure Boat Studio 2009) with three other small press poets tonight at a reading sponsored by Babbos Books that will take place a few doors down from the bookstore at Fez Art Cafe located at 240 Prospect Park West in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn tonight September 6th at 8:00 PM. Your New York Jewish culture examiner has eaten at Fez Art Cafe several times; their middle eastern dishes are delicious. 

Walter Hess was born in Germany and emigrated to the U.S. in 1940, via Ecuador. Educated in New York City schools with a BA from CCNY in 1952 and an MA from CCNY in 2003. He is a retired documentary film editor. Films on which he collaborated have won numerous awards; among them two Peabody’s and three Emmy’s. Metamorphoses has published his translations from the German of the poetry of Hans Sahl. In 2001 he received an award from The Academy of American Poets, and in 2003 a cash award from the Nyman Foundation for a portion of his memoir.

Poet and critic Barry Wallenstein has written, "Despite the extreme pain and loss that s recalled so vividly, Jews Harp is a celebration of family, tradition, living through terrible and wonderful times, and memory itself. This story is about the journey from Germany to Ecuador to the ultimate settling of these German Jewish immigrants in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. The controlled lyric and narrative voice of the poems is that of a son, and grandson, speaking about his father, mother, children, grandchildren and assorted relatives. Many of these are survivors, as is the speaker, and some poems address those who perished in the holocaust. The obvious themes are love and surviving. We come to know his family, notably Oma, the much loved grandma (who didn't survive) through imagery that is so powerful one almost wants to look away. In one poem he says I want it back and this it includes lives that have ended and memories in danger of fading. He does bring it all back through dazzling free verse poems; and those using formal patterns include a wonderful Ghazal. Walter Hess had a long career as a film documentarian and the poems are enriched by his keen eye and ear for sensory perceptions. These are poems of reverence and of an open spirit toward God and His people the poet s people too. The tendency towards form, even in free verse poems, creates the feel of ritual, a distancing required by the extremity of the subjects and emotions."

Jake Marmer's review of Jews Harp in the Forward includes several poems from the book, including "Stephanie’s Question": 

“Suppose you weren’t here, Would I be here?

Suppose that like your Opa you had…?”

A shadow slickered down her face, a fear

That stopped. She then edged closer to my side

and took my hand as if to solace me.

He held my hand when I was Stephie’s age.

Praise and instruction in our step, we walked

a rhythm like the singing of a page

of psalms in Shul. Call and response. We talked.

he held my hand and solaced me.

Dear Steph, Survivors have no other task

than being who and what they are. You ask

what you already know. You are where you are meant to be.

Your very question solaced me.

Other poets on the program include Jason Schneiderman who will read some of his own poems and some from LATE AUGUST,  a posthumously published chapbook which he edited and designed containing poems by Barbara Brackney, a former student of his who passed away from cancer a couple years ago; Emily M. Haines who will read from her book The Right to Live Poetically (Pleasure Boat Studio 2009), a collection of poems that vacillate between the contradictory emotions of enchantment with and fear of a world beset by international conflicts and incalculable beauty, and in which she looks into the eyes of her public school students, her host family in China , an imam in Darfur , and her grandmother, and she finds the brilliant sparks to ignite a profound hope for peace and justice; and Austin Alexis, author of two chapbooks, both published by Poets Wear Prada: Lovers and Drag Queens (2007) and For Lincoln and Other Poems (2010). George Held writes of the latter book, "Austin Alexis contemplates the way time's passage alters our sense of artists such as Chopin, Haydn, Poe, and Martha Graham as well as, among others, grandparents, Einstein, and presidents Lincoln and Obama. The way the poet cultivates sound, sense, and form, he grows, as he writes George Sand did for Chopin, 'the branch he needs / in order to soar.'"

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