More than one hundred and ten poets are included in this survey of Jewish American poetry from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, reflecting the realities of American Jewish life both in the varied biographies of the poets and in the themes of their poems. The collection’s breadth is astounding, with some familiar names and many lesser known as well. The editors are intentionally generous in their definition of what it means to be a Jewish poet, and this openness is reflected in the selection of the poetry itself, not all of which deals with overtly Jewish motifs. The powerful, well chosen poems form a strong whole. This anthology is a rich feast of imagery and language, from the formal to the inventive.
There is no one overall theme and some poems are more obviously Jewish than others. Some deal with lost worlds, like the fleeting glances of Jewish life that was in Poland in Bruce Lader’s “Ode to Klezmer Musicians” or Afghanistan in M.E. Silverman’s “The Last Jew.” Some touch on memories of grandparents and parents, like Lori Desrosiers’s “Grandmother’s Hands” or Ira Sadoff’s “My Mother’s Funeral.” There are Biblical references, as in Eve Grubin’s “The Buried Rib Cage” about Eve, or Dan Bellm’s “Practice,” based on a line from Deuteronomy. Not surprisingly, some poems are about growing up Jewish in America, like Robert Cooperman “Planting Trees in Israel: 1956,” and nostalgia for the Jewish American past (Erika Meitner “Yiddishland”) but many are rooted firmly in the present day Jewish experience, as in Yvette Neisser Moreno’s “Rosh Hashanah 1998/5759,” Yehoshua November’s “Baal Teshuvas at the Mikvah,” and Leslie Neustadt’s “The First to Go” about children intermarrying. Some play with the weaving of Biblical and contemporary, creating a modern midrash, as in Lynn Levin’s “Eve and Lilith Go to Macy’s” which imagines a sexual relationship between the two women. Israel features in a number of the poems, including Liat Mayer’s evocative “Jerusalem Desert.” And it wouldn’t be a collection of Jewish poems without the presence of rabbis and God as both characters and motifs, as in Jane Shore’s “Last Words,” and in Rachel Zucker’s “Alluvial.”
Including an essay on American Jewish poetry and a glossary, this collection of poems veers from sadness to hope, from the sensual to the prayerful, from deep longing to celebration. It is a rich, significant anthology full of discoveries.
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