Selected Letters of Langston Hughes By Langston Hughes Edited by Arnold Rampersand Knopf, 480 pages, $35 These missives written by one of the most limpid African-American poets are self-concealing in the extreme. Langston Hughes was so discreet that when he was hospitalized for gonorrhea in 1941, he told intimate friends that the problem was arthritis….
Aurora, the daughter of Rosario. Lesléa, the daughter of Florence. The mothers are invoked; their names are eternal. Aurora Levins Morales and Lesléa Newman came together on a recent Sunday afternoon in Boston under the auspices of Keshet—a national organization dedicated to the inclusion of LGBT Jews in all aspects of Jewish life — to…
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…
