Chapter & Verse: Poems of Jewish Identity, edited by Sim Warkov with an introduction by Jane Miller (Oakland). 10 poets: Dan Bellm, Rose Black, Chana Bloch, Rafaella Del Bourgo, Margaret Kaufman, Jacqueline Kudler, Melanie Maier, Murray Silverstein, Susan Terris and Sim Warkov. Cover and book design by Tania Baban-Natal. (Conflux Press, Prescott, AZ: 2011, ISBN 9788-0-9826024-3-0), 92 pages, $16. To order: www.confluxpress.com or simw1@comcast.net.
From the Well of Living Waters: Voices of a 21st Century Synagogue, edited by Lenore Weiss, with preface by Rabbi Burt Jacobson of Kehilla Community Synagogue (Piedmont). 25 poets, mostly affiliated with Kehilla. Illustrated by Hannah Sarvasy, with cover by Richard Miles. (Lenore Weiss and Kehilla Community Synagogue, Piedmont, CA: 2011, ISBN 978-0-615-42959-5). $15. To order: www.kehillasynagogue.org.
Poets from Chapter & Verse will be reading on Thursday, March 24, 7-9 p.m. at Temple Sinai in Oakland (Webster & Summit streets). The event is wheelchair accessible, free and open to the public.
In the Jewish community there is a joke that if you have 10 Jews in a room, you will get 10 opinions; by extension, you would also get 10 definitions of what it means to be a Jew. There is, however, an older tradition that holds it wasn’t Jews who kept the Torah, but the Torah that kept the Jews. Norman Cantor in The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews asserts that if it were not for the more conservative, orthodox elements within Jewish communities, Judaism and eventually Jews themselves would be a thing of the past.
Tensions surrounding Jewish “identity“ frequently boil down to a kind of ‘nature vs. nurture’ dialectic between ethnic and religious cultures. At the heart of these tensions is the real loss of identity that occurred during times of historical persecution and continuing dissipation during periods when Jews embraced rather than eschewed assimilation.
In two new books of Jewish-American poetry by (mostly) Bay Area poets, the heart of Jewish life from the time of the destruction of the Temple throughout the diasporas,The Synagogue itself, is featured on the covers yet plays a strikingly insignificant role in the poems. The cover of Chapter & Verse: Poems of Jewish Identity uses a photograph of a beautiful rainbow-colored stained-glass from San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El; in From the Well of Living Waters, the word “synagogue” is used in the subtitle and many of the book's poets are affiliated with a local Jewish Renewal synagogue.
This said, however, the poems are nearly devoid of in-depth explorations of Jewish spirituality, mentions of Torah, Judaism and Jewish religious practice, depictions of synagogue life, or dare I say it, conversations with or about God. There are few poems tackling the elephant in the room--Israel--and, fewer still confronting contemporary anti-Semitism. With attacks on synagogues happening all over the world, one wonders why no poems about this?
As a passionate Jew-by-Choice, a convert to the faith and the tribe, I offer this caveat to the following review. To me Jewish identity is not about gefilte fish, zayde’s yiddishkeit, or remembrances of an alienated Jewish childhood. When I saw the covers of these two books, I anticipated getting some good spiritual food, poems that grappled with Torah, Talmud, and poems that argued wtih God in the manner of the heroic contenders of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Scriptures). The only poets who really step up to the plate at this level were Dan Bellm--himself a convert who, in Chapter & Verse delivers six gorgeous and complex poems about the demands and responsibilities of faith--and David Shaddock who offers two Jewish-inspired nature meditations in From the Well.
My other criticism has to do with the unevenness of the poems that were selected in the two volumes. Both Chapter & Verse and From the Well of Living Waters remind me of those community and regional cookbooks put together as fundraisers for churches and synagogues, sailing clubs and schools. There are a lot of wonderful recipes alongside some rather mundane ones: chicken kiev next to macaroni and cheese. I wish the two editors--Chapter & Verse’s Sim Warkov of Marin and From the Well’s Lenore Weiss of Oakland--had worked together to produce a larger, richer anthology. One wonders if the net had been cast a little further than who knew whom in gathering the poets for these collections, there might have been a wider range of voices. Chapter & Verse is lenient with its 10 poets, allowing each to present several poems; From the Well of Living Waters, represents poets of a specific organization.
In his preface of Well, Kehilla Rabbi Burt Jacobson writes that “the poems found in this precious anthology testify to the central Jewish calling of uncovering the sacred hidden in the mundane,” while Jane Miller describes Chapter & Verse as an unflinching “record of the ordinary.“ Each book’s introduction does get something right: the Jewish identities that are presented are offered through the lens of personal relationships, families and family histories, and encounters with a somewhat mute or pantheistic Nature. There are some wonderful poems of Jewish family history, the requisite selection of poems about the Holocaust, and poems mentioning Eastern European shtetl life. There are poems about life in the Jewish “ghettoes” of America, and meditations on the dynamics between parents and children, adults and grandparents, and questions about Jewish identity that result from intermarriage. Of the two books, From the Well is more inclined toward exploration of Jewish spirituality; it is intriguing that nearly half of the poems mention breath or bird-life, images that have long resonated with spirit/soul/nefesh in literary iconography.
To take these two books at their word of showcasing poems of Jewish identity, let’s look at some of what made it in.
Chana Bloch is represented in both books with several poems that have been previously anthologized or printed. I particularly thought the choice to begin Chapter & Verse with her poem “Flour and Ash” was a good one. It echoes Paul Celan’s brilliance of being doggedly literal and symbolically cryptic at the same time, and like his "Todesfugue" (1944), the Holocaust hovers over Bloch’s image of an artist mixing her materials:
Inside, on the studio wall, a heavy
particulate smoke
thickens and rises. Footsteps grime the snow.
The about-to-be-dead line up on the ramp
with their boxy suitcases,
ashen shoes.
From the Old World to Flatbush, there is a natural arc created in the selection of these first few poems in Chapter & Verse. They are followed by poems by the book’s editor, Sim Warkov, whose biography mentions a traditional Jewish upbringing but whose poems show a decided turning away from the faith of his ancestors. The poet/narrator has turned his “back on the Book of Leviticus.” Judaism is “baggage,” and references to Torah lace his poems on their way to being discarded for an ultimate secularism. In “Tetragrammmaton,” God’s name causes anger, rebellion, rejection, and defiance, yet the poem ends with a nearly Kabbalistic yearning:
I turn inward, burning with the four Hebrew letters
my forefathers would never have forsaken,
would never have spurned.
As we move through the other eight poets in Chapter & Verse, we are treated to poems that express elements of Jewish cultural and family identity but there are also quite a few poems that seem to have nothing to do with Jewishness, or at least it wasn’t clear to me what the connection was. Margaret Kaufman’s “Tawny Avatar,” about the death of her father, is a beautiful lyric poem but its relevance to this volume of Jewish verse is obscure.
Rose Black’s anguished poems about her validity as a Jew in light of mixed parentage represent a real issue for many who are born of a Gentile mother and Jewish father, or who “feel” Jewish but do not feel legitimized. (Hitler would not have had a problem identifying them as Jewish.) Black’s poem resonance with ones written by Hedy Straus in the Kehilla anthology. For comparison:
half of me from pickled herring in New York
half of me from fields of corn in Indiana
all my mother’s ancestors from Poland
all my father’s from Alsace-Lorraine
all the Jews who came before my mother
all the Catholics who came before my father
-- from “Invitation” by Rose Black (Oakland)
I am from the sacred Heart of Jesus
buried deep inside a kreplach
I am from jelly donuts after mass
on the way home from shul
I’m from matzoh
and the Irish soda bread of affliction
I’m wandering in the desert
looking fro my catechism class
I’m from my bubbe in Tereisenstadt
and my zayde in Auschwitz
My first holy communion dress is stained
with bloody magenta borscht
I’m Police Chief Callahan’s great-granddaughter
I’m the shiksa at the bar mitzvah
the kike at the communion rail
-- from “I Am” by Hedy Straus (El Cerrito)
These poems are what I liked best about the two volumes; precise in detail, facile in their language about language itself (balancing English, Yiddish, Hebrew, inherited immigrant tongues), and culling rich memories of recent European and American Jewish history. But, as my friend Ken Blady has taught me through his magnificent research on Jews in distant lands, Jews have looked like, sounded like and reflected whatever far-flung cultures they have landed in and I wish the two books had searched out Jewish poets of African, Chinese, Latin ancestry (perhaps a future volume?). Aurora Levins Morales, a Puerto Rican Jewish-American poet, was one exception to the mostly northern European mix in the two volumes.
In books devoted to European-Jewish ancestry, of course, there will be poems of the Holocaust. It is a further tragedy of that disaster that Jewish literary culture has been dominated by poems on the theme of the Holocaust and less concerned with Jewish spiritual renewal. The wounds will remain open for ages especially as the world’s despots recreate the systematic annihilation of human beings.
Stewart Florsheim’s “Statement Recording the Property of Jews” (From the Well) and Susan Terris’ “Holocaust Museum: Crematorium II” (Chapter & Verse) are two extremes of a type of Holocaust poem where the facts and figures of methodical genocide are chillingly juxtaposed with the physical presence of individuals about to be murdered.
Of the poems in the two volumes, certain ones stand out. Yiskah Rosenfeld’s “A Lesson in Fractions” (From the Well) about a man perpetually dividing a small bit of casserole to stave off memories of starvation has a music in its repetitiveness and a surprising power in its apt use of multisyllabics:
And so he halves and halves, dutifully eating,
seditiously bequeathing a crumb of solidarity
to all other children of children of immigrants,
meticulously sacrificing the minute remains to the god of waste.
Rafaella Del Bourgo bravely tackles the subject of sexual liberation in two distinctive poems in Chapter & Verse. The Jewishness of the poems is organic in the Israeli backdrop of “The Queen of Sheba Hotel, Eilat, Israel, 1966“ in the first poem, and in the subject matter of a conservative rabbinic student tempted by his Lilith in the second poem.
Melanie Maier’s quiet shorter poems (Chapter & Verse) are a refreshing contrast to longer, more expository verses.
There are poems in each volume that seem to have nothing to do with Jewish identity except that they are written by Jewish poets. This is more true of the poems in From the Well, especially those by Teri Gruenwald, Roy Mash, or Leah Korican’s meditation on the Ganges (“Sight Seen”) and Barbara Rhine’s bland mountain-climbing poems.
I am sure these books will find their readership; with anthologies, an audience grows exponentially through the numbers of poets represented in the book. For me, there wasn’t a lot that was new here or that inspired as the best of what poetry can offer: intellectual challenge, emotional spark, and aesthetic pleasure through music and form. For Jews whose identity comes via family and bloodline, there will be familiarity, sympathy and recognition in these pages.
For those interested in Judaism and its dense and fascinating history and passageways, there are only a handful of poems to satisfy, most notably those by Bellm. In one of Chana Bloch’s poems, “The Converts,” the poet watches six converts praying intensively during a Yom Kippur service, and worries that if they keep it up “we’ll be here all night.” The poem ends:
The converts sway in white silk,
their necks bent forward in yearning
like swans,
and I covet
what they think we’ve got.
In terms of contemporary Jewish-American identity, the magic is in that “yearning.” What I’d love to see is a book by those who are working within Jewish faith tradition, making alive what was nearly destroyed through centuries of pogroms and cultural destruction. Perhaps this has to come from those who have found what the secular Jewish population seems to have lost.
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