And at home in these wasted paradises after the invasion and the raising of the flag and Cain after the ousting of one dictator and the installing of another the carcasses will be gnawed white – Kwame Dawes Thirty-three days after we left Egypt, the manna started dropping from heaven. It lay on the ground…
Translated from the Hebrew by Ariel Resnikoff and Rivka Weinstock Kisses to the wall Kisses to the alphabet that hung there & the trash-man asks me: You still haven’t conquered The alphabet? – No Still no! First Knowledge fear of heaven, in the first Letter, aleph. Secrets of secrets In aleph! Kisses to the wall…
They stand among the stones as though not knowing where to turn. The fathers, their faces melting, memory-weary like broken branches hanging from the tree. The wives pity-less, their eyes as wide open as the owl’s. The mothers are emptied as if they’ve swallowed an abyss. Others shudder as though wanting to shed their bodies…
I am a member of the third generation, a term that is relatively new and refers to the children of the children of survivors. My mother’s father, Moshe Nemeth, is a Holocaust survivor, and, growing up, my grandfather was a very important part of my life. I was born in Bloomington, Indiana and my family…
we pray to pray to be able to not a matter of if but a matter of when in hard times in tough times sing the blues to the ones you love begin with the love at hand begin by listening begin by saying we pray to pray to be able to…
Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous laws — Psalm 119 Canonical hours, hours according to law when the world stops for a pause that sometimes befalls us. Remember, it was the ancient Jews who made these hours, hours that were old before Calvary, those oldest matins, lauds and terce. Dante invoked…
Near the house, next to the woodpile, lies a dream too weak to enter. I hold my shadow down as it tries to escape, shut the windows, bar the doors, imagine myself bright and shiny. I am Joseph in the bor, the pit, empty of water, but full of scorpions and serpents. There is no…
Photograph courtesy of Jehanne Dubrow The Arranged Marriage is Jehanne Dubrow’s powerful new volume of poetry, and it bears witness to her Jewish Honduran mother Jeannette’s complicated life story. Her family left Germany in the late 1930s for Honduras, and Jeannette was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1946 for medical reasons. Immediately after the…
