Stewart Florsheim
Stewart Florsheim's book The Short Fall from Grace (Blue Light Press, 2006) was the winner of the 2005 Blue Light Award. The book is an intimate selection of poems with worldly themes: first and foremost, this son of a Holocaust survivor grapples with the devastating legacy embodied by his parents and his caring for them as they age and pass away, but the book isn’t weighed down by these somber themes.
We also encounter an idiosyncratic yet vaguely familiar American childhood and adolescence as the book grows up with the poet. Beyond the coming-of-age themed poems, there are views of foreign places, evolutions within relationships, parenthood, and meditations on art. In less skillful hands, such a panoply of topics might lack cohesion. Florsheim somehow— whether through narrative style or that elusive strength of "Voice"—pulls it together most satisfyingly.
Suspended behind the poems like a burlap scrim is the trauma of escaping Hitler’s Europe and becoming another batch of the "poor and humble" immigrants who land in a New York City tenement. For many children of Holocaust survivors, there is both a strong need to know what happened and an aversion on the part of survivors to discuss it. Florsheim’s "Mother to Son" captures this:
On Kristallnacht,
your grandfather had his bag packed
and was ready to go.
The Gestapo beat me up too
but back then they left little girls
with their mothers.
Hoppe hoppe Reiter
Wenn er fällt dann schreit er
The author pushes for more detail, and the poem ends:
And then what happened
I keep asking, pushing through
one dark velvet curtain after another.
That beautiful image conjures scenes of European sitting rooms, post-Victorian in their heavy accoutrements, along with the psychological barrier between a parent’s horrors and a child’s sense that something is wrong, a child who knows he only lacks the details behind a mysterious yet visceral alienation. The theme intrudes again when the grown man feels compelled to share the family’s stories with his own child:
Sixth grade: my daughter wants me to test her
on Darwin’s theory, how the only species
that survive are those that adapt
and we think about examples—
the birds that develop longer beaks
so they can pull their food out of the marsh,
humans and their ability to walk.
What I want is to tell her
the other face to survival:
How my grandfather had his bag packed
ready to go to Dachau on Kristallnacht
because he believed das Vaterland
would come through for him.
Just as hard experiences form the man, he is also softened and alert to the toll of hardship on others: an Afghani immigrant woman hairdresser, a figure in a painting, the younger version of himself, a butcher‘s son. In "The Elevator," the 7-year old author is sexually molested in his apartment building elevator; paradoxically, a room full of refugees becomes his own best refuge from a personal drama:
I pray that the elevator is not empty
so when he pulls open the door
and Mrs. Duddel shuffles out demanding
in her wonderful Hungarian accent, Where is your mother,
I promise God I will not be angry with mom
for being late again as the man rushes out
into the heart of the city beating wildly
along with the souls of frightened little boys.
Reading this poem, I found myself holding my breath, hoping that it would end all right. But, of course, all traumas, no matter how severe, leave scars. The intertwining images of the boy’s shocking encounter with the molester, scenes of survivors who inhabit his building, and his own imagination are powerful.
Tensions between the parents are explored yet the poet’s voice (in spite of the sometimes harsh material) is embued with tenderness and acceptance, rather than complaint or rebuke. The book follows the death of both parents and serves as a gritty yet loving elegy to them both: the deaths were not easy for either one. I felt total trust in the narrator, however, who seems not to be grinding an ax or writing these poems therapeu-tically. Instead, they represent a hard-won maturity and spiritual triumph.
Many poems in The Short Fall from Grace achieve an odd levity on subjects that would otherwise be crippling as in "The Psychiatrist," Florsheim produces a studied send-up of someone paid to pay attention:
. . . he wants to hear my dreams.
I read them from my journal
and he doesn’t say a word until I finish,
a whole week of the unconscious,
You’re doing much better.
He struts to his desk for a phone call
and returns. Where were we?
Your dream about Tunisia . . .
No, I say, Morocco . . .
Finally, Florsheim gives us poems of art and travel, filled with sensory details and provocative vignettes. Here’s the beautiful conclusion of "The Turkish Baths, Fez" which provides the book with its title:
An old man appears with a bucket of soapy water
he sits behind me and without a word
scrubs my back, then chest, legs.
His sweat drips onto my body along with
condensation from the cracked ceiling.
He gives me a massage and I know
he has been doing this for years, his hands drawn
to the tension in my neck. Before he moves
to the next man I want to praise him
but know the words would begin
the short fall from grace.
What makes this a powerful book is the knowledge of where the author has been emotionally; while the poems of travel, of growing through relationships, of encountering art are all strong in their own right, the echoes from genealogy and history make those seemingly unrelated topics all the richer. The act of the attendant in the Turkish bath is humble and dignified; he is both a simple servant and redemptive angel at the same time, salving sorrows, giving healing.
This is a layered triumph of a poetry book. In addition to The Short Fall from Grace, Stewart has published a chapbook, The Girl Eating Oysters, in 2004, and edited a collection of poems: Ghosts of the Holocaust: An Anthology of Poetry by the Second Generation (1989). He recently was nominated for a Pushcart Award and had a poem selected for “The Pedestal,” an online poetry magazine; he is putting the finishing touches on a new manuscript.
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