The poet Yisroel Shtern (1894-1942) was reluctant to publish his own work, once writing about the “over-proliferation of books on this planet.” Nonetheless, in a 1929 dictionary of Yiddish writers, Zalmen Reyzen called him “one of the most important young Yiddish poets in Poland today, though for a full appreciation of his poetry… we must…
Your presence in darkness: in your mother’s belly, at night as you sleep beneath the blanket, in a military guard post, in a prison hole, in the belly of the earth. In the shadows your body’s movements are hidden, but so are the movements of your enemy (you might rub your nose, he might pull…
The young girl, who looks no older than seven or eight, her black hair draped on her arms, leans out of the bus window as if she were sleeping. Only her turquoise and black shirt, ripped open, and the blood streak down the side of the bus tell you she is dead. In Jerusalem, workers…
המשרתים…נותנים באהבה רשות זה לזה להקדיש ליוצרם… — Shacharit liturgy I can’t see ghosts by myself. I need help, from partner or stranger, like once when I lay awake with a friend in a cabin in Connecticut and we told each other about each creak, how we would put salt on the sills tomorrow because…
Blessed landlords of the language Blessed era of the language Blessed villages of the language Bless the child on a winter’s-eve In the town, who learns the language in all her chapters her genealogies, her nuances, her grammar Blessed people of the language who fought For her, as a minority, bless he who totters with…
Over rooftops and forests, rivers, domes and the belfries of Vilna, the magic carpet in my mind flies to a small maze of buildings where the ghettos used to be. Near the river flats, and that green bridge Milosz writes about in a poem — the bridge where my mother was almost arrested for being…
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…
דאָס ביכל נעמט אַרײַן אַ גלאָסאַר, שמועס־פֿראַגעס און קלאַנג־רעקאָרדירונגען פֿון די דערציילונגען.
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