The salon will be held at 1 CST/ 2 EST/ 9 Israel time.

Chess and Kahn are both interested in the natural world, Judaism, healing, and the eternal challenges of continuity versus change.

You’ll notice that a Kahn painting is on the cover of The Loneliest Monk by Rick Chess. The final poem in The Loneliest Monk is written after that painting, titled NOAPHA II and dated 2018. When poet Rodger Kamenetz suggested that I pair poets and painters, I knew this was the perfect pair to start with.

Richard Chess is the author of four previous books of poetry, Love Nailed to the Doorpost, Tekiah, Chair in the Desert, and Third Temple. His poems have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry. He is Professor Emeritus at UNC Asheville, where for more than three decades he taught courses in English, Creative Writing, and Jewish Studies. He directed UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years and he was active in The Association for the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education. He recently completed five years of service as a founding board member of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

Poet Rick Chess

Tobi Kahn’s work can be seen in major museum collections including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and The Jewish Museum, NYC. His traveling museum exhibitions include Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses; Avoda: Objects of the Spirit; Microcosmos; Tobi Kahn: Sky & Water; and Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces for the 21st Century. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts for many years.

Painter and sculptor Tobi Kahn.

LYJE (1991), atThe Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Stay tuned for newsletters with more about Rick Chess and Tobi Kahn. I hope you will join us on Zoom on August 30th at 2 EST.

These salons are a chance to get to know writers, thinkers, and artists, and hear about how work is made. You will also have the opportunity to ask questions.

Here is the Zoom info:

Aviya Kushner is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Read more

It is undoubtedly an art form all its own.

One theme of the many interviews with Kahn is the sense that his life and art are intertwined. As Rosh Hashanah approaches, I found myself returning to a comment he made about his sculpture HYYLAH, which uses a real shofar as part of the piece. It strikes me as a good place to start, because it describes how Kahn sees, and how he begins.

“To make it, I looked at the contours of a shofar and created a setting to match,” Kahn told Chabad online in a conversation on "Art as Avodah" “The dark shapes underneath remind me of the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, and the Jewish people beseeching G-d to forgive our iniquities, but it’s fine if you see something else.”

I liked that openness, and I wanted to know how Kahn described himself. It’s the kind of question some artists hate, but I found Kahn’s answer helpful.

Art as a Holy Act

“I am a painter, a sculptor, a creator of Judaica. I create meditative and healing rooms, interfaith spaces and Holocaust memorials. Art is a holy act. I’ve always felt that,” Kahn said in an interview with Diane M. Bolz for Moment magazine.

“For the rites of passage in our family, I created the chuppah that my wife and I got married under, and our daughter just got married under the same chuppah. I’ve also created baby naming chairs for our son and daughters,” Kahn explained in the 2022 interview.

Tobi Kahn, AHMA, 2008 (Shalom Bat Chairs), baby naming chairs by Tobi Kahn.

Interestingly, I feel that same intertwining in conversations I have had with Kahn’s wife, the writer Nessa Rappoport, whose latest novel is Evening. (It is a beautiful novel that explores the nature of attraction and the discoveries that can surround the death of a loved one It reads quickly, as if in one breath.)

Kahn is the rare artist who has been written about in both Chabad online and The Brooklyn Rail. One piece that particularly moved me was a 2024 review essay by curator and writer Susan Harris in The Brooklyn Rail of Kahn’s one-man show at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, which was his first show in New York City in a decade.

Harris followed Kahn’s work for decades, and her perspective on his influences and creative process helped me approach the paintings.

Yyrah C, 2012, Acrylic on wood by Tobi Kahn

Ethya, 2019, Acrylic on wood by Tobi Kahn

“I met Kahn in the early 1980s as he was coming into his own as a painter of quiet, contemplative landscapes characterized by interlocking, archetypal shapes denoting land, water, and sky,” Harris wrote. You can see those archetypal shapes in the Kahn painting Rick Chess chose for the cover of his new collection, and you can sense the continuity in Kahn’s body of work.

Photograpahy as an Influence

“The unusual cropping and arrangement of forms that still characterize his compositions might be explained by his study of photography at Hunter College before continuing on for an MFA in painting at Pratt Institute. Kahn’s own photographs are the source of all of his paintings,” Harris observed.

The painter and sculptor Tobi Kahn.

I found myself returning to that observation of photography as source. I kept thinking Jewish text, ritual, and history were sources.

But that’s not the entire story; as Harris pointed out, a wide range of visual artists influenced Kahn too.

“I was struck then, as now, by the range of his artistic influences, from Cycladic art and Stonehenge; to early American modernist painters such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe whose explorations of organic abstract shapes as potent equivalents for the beauty of the natural world informed his search for a contemporary language of landscape painting; to New Image painters of the late 1970s (Lois Lane and Susan Rothenberg, in particular, who heralded a return to painting when the focus in contemporary art had been on conceptual and minimal art); and to Myron Stout, Eva Hesse, Martin Puryear, and Agnes Martin for the personal mysticism with which they infused their austere vocabularies.”

Lake George Reflection by Georgia O’Keeffe

But there is a limit to what reading about Kahn—and his influences— can reveal. At a certain point, you have to see it, and see what you can within it.

The Omer Counter

One of his most famous works of Judaica is a piece made for counting the omer, the 49 days between Passover and Shavuot that are traditionally a time of mourning, in memory of the yeshiva students who died during those weeks Looking at this piece, and others—here I am reminded of Baudelaire’s famous comment that “everyone can look, but not everyone can see”—and trying to see it, I realize that so much of Kahn’s work is about memory. And perhaps, so much of Jewish practice is about preserving memory.

Saphyr (Variation V) omer counter, 2005, wood, acrylic, pigmnent, by Tobi Kahn. (The Minneapolis Institute of Art)

Once you grasp the role of memory, you can see it everywhere in Kahn’s work. After all, what is more of a way to remember than to count days, as they have been counted for thousands of years?

About Those Titles

And yet, when it comes to paintings, Kahn’s often have titles that can be hard to understand at first. He explains that “as my work is abstract, so are the names. Titles are abstract distillations that bear the same allusive relationship to language as my images do to representation. The titles are meant to evoke a thought or a memory. They’re often based on Hebrew, but not always.”

He adds that he and his wife “work together to create the titles, to come up with a name that tells that story without being explicit. I’m interested in the elusiveness of what a word can be.”

My sense is that poet Rick Chess was also attracted to this idea of the “elusiveness of what a word can be.” To my ear, that is also something that the mefarshim, the Torah commentators, are often interested in, as they parse the literal and figurative meanings of words.

Last but not least, just as The Loneliest Monk by Chess is steeped in personal history, and especially family history, Kahn’s work is clearly connected to the specific Jewish history of his family.

He grew up in Washington Heights, the child of Holocaust survivors.

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“I’m named for my uncle, Arthur Kahn. My middle name is Aaron, which was his Hebrew name. If you Google Arthur Kahn, you’ll see a book by Timothy Ryback called Hitler’s First Victims, which is about my uncle and three others—the first four Jews killed by Hitler in 1933. “

This photograph of Arthur Kahn appeared in The Atlantic along with a piece by Tobi Kahn’s daughter Mattie about her murdered great-uncle.

I did look this up, and I found an op-ed in The New York Times by Ryback which explained: “The extermination of European Jews…began nearly nine years earlier, during Easter Week 1933, a few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, April 12, when four Jews — Arthur Kahn, Ernst Goldmann, Rudolf Benario and Erwin Kahn — were executed in precisely that order at a Nazi camp in the obscure Bavarian hamlet of Prittlbach.” (You can read the op-ed here.)

On Memory and Commitment

“I think one of the reasons I’m so committed to doing interfaith work and healing work and hospital work is that he [Kahn’s uncle] was an artist and a medical student. He was killed in his early 20s, and it’s very important to me that I’m not only representing my life, but I’m also representing his life. I am very committed to making sure that the world is left a better place than before I was born.”

That sense of tikkun olam can be seen in the painting, the sculpture, and the Judaica; to my eye, it is the subtitle of all of Kahn’s work.

Hope to see you Sunday at 1 CST/ 2 EST/ 9 Israel time for a special salon featuring Tobi Kahn with poet Rick Chess! Zoom details below. Shabbat shalom!

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The salon will be held at 1 CST/ 2 EST/ 9 Israel time.

Chess and Kahn are both interested in the natural world, Judaism, healing, and the eternal challenges of continuity versus change.

You’ll notice that a Kahn painting is on the cover of The Loneliest Monk by Rick Chess. The final poem in The Loneliest Monk is written after that painting, titled NOAPHA II and dated 2018. When poet Rodger Kamenetz suggested that I pair poets and painters, I knew this was the perfect pair to start with.

Richard Chess is the author of four previous books of poetry, Love Nailed to the Doorpost, Tekiah, Chair in the Desert, and Third Temple. His poems have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry. He is Professor Emeritus at UNC Asheville, where for more than three decades he taught courses in English, Creative Writing, and Jewish Studies. He directed UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years and he was active in The Association for the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education. He recently completed five years of service as a founding board member of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

Poet Rick Chess

Tobi Kahn’s work can be seen in major museum collections including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and The Jewish Museum, NYC. His traveling museum exhibitions include Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses; Avoda: Objects of the Spirit; Microcosmos; Tobi Kahn: Sky & Water; and Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces for the 21st Century. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts for many years.

Painter and sculptor Tobi Kahn.

LYJE (1991), atThe Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Stay tuned for newsletters with more about Rick Chess and Tobi Kahn. I hope you will join us on Zoom on August 30th at 2 EST.

These salons are a chance to get to know writers, thinkers, and artists, and hear about how work is made. You will also have the opportunity to ask questions.

Here is the Zoom info:

Aviya Kushner is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Read more

“I am not the loneliest monk. I am fortunate to live among many caring and supportive others: family, friends, communities; cashiers, physicians, and nurses, pharmacists, baristas, and more—men and women, boys and girls I know well or know only through an exchange of thank yous and smiles.”

I found myself breathing a sigh of relief. That’s the Rick Chess I know, the warm, friendly person many in the world of poetry—and especially Jewish poetry—have interacted with over the years.

But these poems came out of somewhere. And so there is a bit more to say on this subject.

“And yet..,the poems in The Loneliest Monk,” Chess writes, “arrived within my actual lived experience thought hey do not necessarily reflect the details of that experience.”

I would add my own “and yet”. These are poems that mine the experience of loneliness, but they also explore love, family, belief, and non-belief—and the impulse to create both within and outside a community. They are also about the impulse to create as a response to loss, and they reflect how something in creativity is a reaching-out to others—including other artists.

The Influence of Music and Art

The cover of The Loneliest Monk features a painting by Tobi Kahn, a New York painter and sculptor whose art has been shown in over 70 solo museum exhibitions, and can be found at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Phillips Collection in DC. Kahn often lectures on the importance of visual language and on art as healing—and you can hear that view of poetry as healing in this collection.

Painter Tobi Kahn.

And of course, there was a famous TIME magazine profile from 1964 about Thelonius Monk, titled “Jazz: The Loneliest Monk.”'Anyone who has seen Rick Chess singing or drumming will not be surprised at this musical reference. So right on the cover, with the painting and the title, Chess includes other artists.

Thelonius Monk.

Rick Chess is the author of four previous books of poetry: Love Nailed to the Doorpost, Third Temple, Chair in the Desert, and Tekiah. For three decades he taught at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, where he directed the Jewish Studies Program. More recently he was a founding board member at Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. All of this made me wonder about the “loneliest” line, and so I was relieved to read the acknowledgments.

Poet Rick Chess.

I usually choose poems on the shorter side for the newsletter, but in this case that’s impossible—almost all of the poems here are at least one page long. So what I am going to do is feature Chess’s poems over successive newsletters, as we get closer to the August 30th salon with Rick Chess and Tobi Kahn. Zoom details are at the end of this newsletter.

“From Generation to Generation” appears early in the collection, and it is a nod to the Hebrew phrase l’dor va’dor.

From Generation to Generation

The poem asks a question many of us ask, which is, what happens to belief? The Talmud considers what happens when a person finds a lost item in the street. He should look for signs. But what if what has been lost is belief? What are the signs? I once heard a Chassidic rabbi in Tel Aviv say that the mitzvah of hasheivat aveidah , or returning what is lost, is not about returning the item at all. It is about returning hope.

The rebbe mentioned that sometimes we don’t even realize what we lost—belief, family, friendship, hope—and the return of an item can spark a hope, a faith, that things can change for the better. The mitzvah, he said, is not only about what we know we lost, but about what we didn’t know we lost.

I thought of all this as I read Chess’s poem“From Generation to Generation”. The opening combines the patriarchs with a salesman’s route, and a destination of North Carolina. It starts with a question, and with a a wondering about loss.

When the poem moves forward, it does so with questions, such as— “what could his father make of a boy/ who would never sell a thing in his life?”

“Let’s call it a wish” is one way to avoid the do-you-pray question, the kind of question pervasive throughout the American South.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is definitely the last. It’s titled “Field of Vision” and it is after Kahn’s painting “NOAPHA II”. To my ear, it connects to “From Generation to Generation” because it is also about prayer, and other ways to call whatever prayer is.

And note the opening line—”To get here, forget the prayers you’ve learned.”

To my eye, this poems evokes the opening of Genesis. But it’s also a talking-back to the dedication of this collection, to Chess’s parents. “Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? To breathe, / Even if only your dying breath/ the unbleached salt air of the one place on earth/ where there is no need for God.”

You can hear a lifelong interest in faith, in breath—in this last poem. You can also feel

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You’ll notice that a Kahn painting is on the cover of The Loneliest Monk. The final poem in The Loneliest Monk is written after that painting, titled NOAPHA II and dated 2018. When poet Rodger Kamenetz suggested that I pair poets and painters, I knew this was the perfect pair to start with.

Richard Chess is the author of four previous books of poetry, Love Nailed to the Doorpost, Tekiah, Chair in the Desert, and Third Temple. His poems have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry. He is Professor Emeritus at UNC Asheville, where for more than three decades he taught courses in English, Creative Writing, and Jewish Studies. He directed UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years and he was active in The Association for the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education. He recently completed five years of service as a founding board member of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.

Poet Rick Chess

Tobi Kahn’s work can be seen in major museum collections including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and The Jewish Museum, NYC. His traveling museum exhibitions include Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses; Avoda: Objects of the Spirit; Microcosmos; Tobi Kahn: Sky & Water; and Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces for the 21st Century. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts for many years.

Painter and sculptor Tobi Kahn.

LYJE (1991), atThe Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Stay tuned for newsletters with more about Rick Chess and Tobi Kahn. I hope you will join us on Zoom on August 30th at 2 EST.

These salons are a chance to get to know writers, thinkers, and artists, and hear about how work is made. You will also have the opportunity to ask questions.

Here is the Zoom info:

Read more

It’s also impossible not to notice hints of sadness that come through all the noise, but it’s easier to see these remnants of the past in daylight. In moonlight, the graffiti becomes less visible, and Jerusalem’s ancient city walls glow, as you can see below.

But night only lasts for so long. In the daytime, I found myself coming across graffiti with names of murdered hostages, though the huge posters of two years ago were gone. Hersh Goldberg-Polin grew up not far from this corner. It’s easy to miss this nod to him, but once you see it you can’t unsee it.

In my mind, I kept moving between night and day, past and present. I lived in Jerusalem in the past—but that was a past cycle of violence. Or was it the past? In Faulkner’s words, the past is not even past.

I lost track of time in a haunting night-time concert given by the Greenglick family, which has responded to grief with music. A sister and a brother sang a song along with a recording of their dead brother, singing the same song. He was a soldier who volunteered after October 7th, and he paid with his life.

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He was 26, an aspiring singer. (That was the age I was when I last lived in Jerusalem.) Now his entire family—parents, brother, sister, brother-in-law—is continuing his dream. There was no one listening to this duet of the living and the dead who was not crying.

The Greenglick family, singing, dressed in white. Here you can see the parents and one brother.

More of Jerusalem at night.

Back to daylight. Everywhere, there are touches of what makes Jerusalem into Jerusalem, like this quotation from the Book of Isaiah (Chapter 17, verse 5) on a barrier along a construction site along Emek Refaim Street, which is named for the Valley of Ghosts, featured in Isaiah.

In case you haven’t read Isaiah lately, here is the verse in the 2023 Jewish Publication Society revised, gender-sensitive trarnslation:

After being like the standing grain
Harvested by the reaper—
Who reaps ears by the armful—
He shall be like the ears that are gleaned
In the Valley of Rephaim.

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The Library That Reminds Us of What Matters

I was lucky, amid many good and necessary conversations, to have time to visit The National Library of Israel. Its new building (if you haven’t been to Jerusalem in a while, you will be amazed) features an exhibit whose wall text begins with mahu ha’adam?—which I might have translated “what is man?” But the wall text read: “What is the essence of existence?”

I suppose it’s the question we all ask, especially in Jerusalem.

Here is the Hebrew, followed by the English.

The wall text was in three languages—Hebrew, Arabic, and English—like all signage at the National Library, and all street signs in Israel. Another writer in our group pointed out the prayer room in the library; it’s for Muslim prayer. Next door is a synagogue. As always, I was confronted by the gap between the image of Israel in many corners of the world, and the reality.

But something about Jerusalem brings out delusions. “Jerusalem syndrome”—where people who visit the city experience religious hallucinations, such as suddenly believing they are the Messiah— is just one example. At its best, and most intimate, the city has a combination of holiness, intellectual pursuit, and unique personalities. At its worst, there is hatred, intolerance, and violence.

And you can always find evidence of prior Jewish intellectual giants, most of whom lived through times at least ast difficult as ours. Isn’t it wonderful to see a gorgeous edition of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, from Spain or Provence, in the 1300s?

In Jerusalem, you can also see the deep interest in Judaism—and in particular, in the Hebrew language—among giants who were not Jewish. I wish we had more of that right now. Look closely at this page of Isaac Newton’s writing, and you will see some Hebrew words. (The National Library provides a moveable magnifying glass for this purpose—you can enlarge the image to replicate the experience.)

Salon on Poetry & Art: Rick Chess and Tobi Kahn

Whenever I am in Jerusalem, I think of Richard Chess and his poetry, which often returns to Jerusalem. I’m excited to host Rick and the painter Tobi Kahn in an upcoming salon devoted to The Loneliest Monk, Rick’s new collection, out now from Orison Books. The cover is one of Tobi’s paintings, and there is a poem in the collection about this painting.

You can see some of Tobi’s work here. My special gratitude to poet and prose writer Rodger Kamenetz for suggesting that I invite poets and painters to future salons.

Salons are a chance to get to know writers, artists, and thinkers spotlighted in this newsletter. They are a thank-you to paid subscribers who help keep this newsletter going.

Stay tuned for details!

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Hope you found this newsletter meaningful. Thank you for your support of writing with depth!

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. —Cicero

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere. —Mary Schmich

Reading brings us unknown friends. —Honoré de Balzac

Books are a uniquely portable magic. — Stephen King, On Writing

Happy News—A New Book

I’m delighted to share that I have signed a contract with The University of Texas at Austin Press for my translation of Yudit Shahar’s fantastic collection of poems, It’s Me Speaking, which won many awards and was a poetry bestseller in Israel. We expect it to be available for purchase within 18 months.

I’m grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for a translation fellowship that helped me finish this book, and I’m excited to share these gorgeous poems—and a critical introduction to Yudit’s work—with you. Thank you to all the literary magazine editors who published individual translations, to the friends who read drafts—and to the many readers who wrote encouraging notes about this project over the years when they saw individual translations in literary magazines!

If you would like ts see a few of my translations of Yudit Shahar’s work, here are two, published by World Literature Today.

Poet Yudit Shahar

Fingertips

Can you feel how the tips of my fingers
vibrate in a scream?
I am a simple woman of autumn,
flesh tanned from the end of summer
leaves me longing for the first rain.
Flowers of delight burst
when my daughter’s hand leans into mine,
as she toddles with little toes
next to me on the pavement.

Do you know, we are children of luck,
saved from the fall of pain
that spread in the world.
A new poem pushes its way to me,
asking, where do screams blow to?
And I push into the poem, say, go,
no more delicate words.
I want a scream,
a scream.

Yudit Shahar’s debut collection IT’S ME SPEAKING. Translation coming soon!

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On the Day You Came

On the day you came to me I stripped off my clothes
and drew on my scars:
a Madonna lily, rare birds
and a lone brown dove.
The dove opened her mouth and said “Go”
but the lily rushed to burn the flesh
and the birds flew away and screamed,
rubbing their wings against each other,
raining on me and on my eyes
purple and gold feathers—
on the day you came to me.

**You can read more here: Four Poems from Israel in World Literature Today.

Speaking in NYC on Monday, July 13th

I’ll be in NY on Monday, July 13th for the wonderful Scribblers on the Roof series, where I will be in conversation with writer and editor Dan Friedman, the former executive editor for The Forward. Doors open at 6:45 for schmooze and wine, and the program begins at 7. Details and registration here.

If you’re in NY, hope to see you there!

New Language Column in The Forward

Last but not least, we have all been hearing about the Strait of Hormuz for months, but what does “strait” mean, anyway? I wrote about the intriguing history of the word in my latest langauge column for The Forward, which you can read here.

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Happy reading, everyone, and happy hot summer days!

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Hope you enjoyed this newsletter! Thank you for your support of writing with depth.

And hope to see you next time!

Poet, editor, and curator Aviva Dautch,

Merle Bachman, editor of The Selected Poems of A.C. Jacobs.

Eve Grubin, poet, scholar, and author of Boat of Letters

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My hope is to spotlight editors and curators along with writers, translators, and thinkers.

In case you missed it, you can read about the Scottish Jewish poet A.C. Jacobs and Merle’s important work bringing his poems to us in two newsletters devoted to Jacobs, one as a poet and one as a translator.

You can read Eve’s work here, in newsletters on poetry inspired by Maimonides and Aviva’s here in a poem about British-Jewish identity.

Poet Eve Grubin.

Eve Grubin is the author of the book of poems Boat of Letters (Four Way Books). She is also the author of Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press), The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press) and Grief Dialogue (Rack Press).

Eve holds a PhD on the poetics of reticence from Kingston University London where she was a recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship, and previous degrees in from Smith College (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA) and the Bread Loaf School of English (MA). She is currently a lecturer at NYU London and a tutor at the Poetry School. Eve also teaches online poetry courses on zoom throughout the year.

Poet, editor and translator Merle Bachman.

Merle Bachman is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, two poetry chapbooks, and one book (with co-editor Anthony Rudolf, in London) featuring the selected poems of Scottish-Jewish poet A. C. Jacobs. Her translation, So Many Warm Words: Selections from the Peotry of Rosa Nevadovska, a bilingual Yiddish-English edition, was recently published by Ben Yehuda Press.

Recovering “Yiddishland”: Threshold Moments in American Literature. her dissertaion, was published by Sytacuse University Press. Her latest book is a hybrid-genre memoir, Thank You for Being: A Poet’s Memoir of Home. She retired as Professor of English at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky where she directed its BFA program in Creative Writing.

Poet, educator, and curator Aviva Dautch.

Aviva Dautch has been Poet in Residence at the Jewish Museum in London and The Separated Child Foundation. Her sequence about clearing her mother’s home was chosen for the Poetry School / Nine Arches Press Primers prize for emerging voices in 2017 and was published in Primers Volume Three in May 2018. Her forthcoming first full collection, We Sigh For Houses, which was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 poetry programme.

Aviva’s translation of The Eighth Crossing, by Afghan poet Suhrab Sirat, was published in January 2021. She is the resident poetry expert for BBC Radio 4 series ‘On Form’, presented by Andrew McMillan.

I appreciate your support which makes this newsletter possible!

Here are Zoom details:

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In this difficult moment for British Jews, including the Manchester synagogue attack on Yom Kippur, and the stabbings in London in April, I have found myself drawn to writers who examine British-Jewish identity. Dautch’s poem “Habonim” considers “whether we felt British, Jewish, like British Jews or Jewish Brits. “

The poem has an epigraph which explains the Hebrew word habonim. Ha’Bonim (heb): lit. ‘The Builders’. ‘Habonim’ is the nameof an international Jewish youth group.

Habonim

The day the Wall fell we played the identity game –
had to run to a corner of the room depending
whether we felt British, Jewish, like British Jews
or Jewish Brits. On camp that winter we acted out

the journeys our grandparents made from Russia,
Poland, Lithuania, fleeing pogroms. The Holocaust
should have been next but perhaps they thought
we were too young. Instead, we became refugees

negotiating Checkpoint Charlie, winning points
for our team if we smuggled ourselves safely across.
Back at school in January, studying The Tudors,
I’d switch off, daydream, remembering how we built

the Berlin Wall with our bodies, one on top of the other,
rejoicing, limbs flying, when we came tumbling down.

Poet, curator, and publisher Aviva Dautch.

Hope you will join us on Sunday for a special salon on Jewish poetry in the UK—featuring Merle Bachman, discussing A.C. Jacobs; Eve Grubin; and Aviva Dautch at Sunday, June 28^th at 11 PST/ 1 CST/ 2 EST/ 7 UK time/ 9 Israel time. Zoom details below.

Shabbat shalom!

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Here’s a very short video about the salon and what you can expect. Passcode: rbeGN!7&

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/aZwHC1LHHvMQulMOjANeoomBhZXOzHcp5GRuSI8shwvonBKHxWH3MwBBKmF5wT91.bVHG4ETNM3TPTpRW

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Hope you enjoyed this newsletter! Thank you for your support of writing with depth.

The great sage Maimonides makes several intriguing appearances in Eve Grubin’s new poetry collection, Boat of Letters, published by Four Way Books. While many readers are familiar with The Guide to the Perplexed, perhaps the best-known work by the Rambam, Grubin focuses on The Book of Love, or Sefer Ahavah in Hebrew.

Maimonides (1138-1204) is known in Hebrew by an acronym formed from his full name, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon. The Book of Love is the second volume of the Mishneh Torah, the famous 12th-century code of Jewish law compiled by Maimonides. But The Book of Love is not exactly about romantic love.

The statue of Maimonides in Córdoba, Spain, where he once lived.

Instead, it’s about the obligations and rituals involved in life that involves a connection to God, including the laws of mezuzot and tzitzit. It so happens that Maimonides married late in life, at age 48, and I sometimes wonder about what he possibly discussed in his early dates with his wife.

Can you imagine the Rambam making small talk?

Boat of Letters is about the opposite of small talk. It is about the unsaid, about getting closer to the ancient, to Jewish practice and text, and to real love as opposed to mere common interests. And what the poems—and the collection as a whole—mean take time to absorb. You might need to reread before you advance.

For example, though the collection’s first section, “The Book of Love,” borrows its title from the Rambam, the epigraph is from the Kotzker Rebbe. Here it is—in both Yiddish and English:

I. The Book of Love

אז איך בין איך ווייל דו ביסט דו, און דו ביסט דו ווייל איך בין איך, דעמאלס בין איך נישט איך, און דו ביסט נישט דו. אבער אויב איך בין איך ווייל איך בין איך, און דו ביסט דו ווייל דו ביסט דו, דעמאלס בין איך איך און דו ביסט דו.

If I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you. But if I am I because I am I and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you.

—The Kotzker Rebbe

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But back to Maimonides, the main star, at least of the first section. The poems that mention him here are among the collection’s strongest.

Two poems that feature Maimonides appear back-to-back in the collection. The first has that same title, “The Book of Love,” and it directly mentions some of the Rambam’s ideas. It’s worth noting that it begins with a question, because Boat of Letters is powered by questions; in fact, one of my favorite poems here—which I will highlight in a bit—is entirely one question.

As for the shema mentioned here, Grubin, who will be featured in this Sunday’s special salon—details below—is referring to the famous “Hear O Israel” prayer, proclaiming the oneness of God. Here is the poem:

The Book of Love

How to stay close at times of distance? In The Book of Love,

Maimonides wrote that the commandments done with the forces of the body

help express and stimulate love for God: the shema prayer

is spoken daily

—in the morning

after waking

and at night, just before sleep.

Even more constant is the law of circumcision: the mark

a body carries at every moment as a reminder of the covenant.

In marriage, the forces

of our bodies articulate love and kindle it:

the hand offers soup, and the mouth withholds words of disrespect.

Our limbs are close

or distant in the marriage bed.

If you are close when you are meant to be far,

then you will be far when you are meant to be close.

Cheek against chest is not always a necessary balm.

Once on the summer bench, sitting close enough

to feel the heat radiate

off your arm, I leaned down

to adjust my sandal strap, we did not touch, I listened

to your voice, drinking it in.

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Poet Eve Grubin.

The next Maimonides poem of Grubin’s that gripped me feels more rooted in the contemporary. Doritos make an appearance, and it takes a while for Maimonides to get in there, but he does. For translation nerds, there is a discussion of something translators worry about a lot—do I italicize? Do I explain cultural references? Do I footnote?

But does it really take the Rambam a while to show up? He struggled with despair and depression, especially after he lost his older brother to shipwreck. His brother had supported him financially, and after that, the Rambam’s entire life changed—he had to support himself. But perhaps, until he accepted that, he considered giving up, which is the title of Grubin’s next Rambam poem.

Giving Up

I’ve been thinking about giving up.

When something seems impossible, do I have to complete it?

Let the fault be.

I can’t seem to slide

across the tennis court—I never learned how to skim the surface

without falling. When writing a poem,

I often fail, not following a thread to its finishing point,

letting the poem remain almost great.

I can’t get my children to stop eating Doritos or learn to tie their shoes

or turn off the lights when they leave a room. Sometimes there is no solution to a problem.

A struggle, dormant in marriage, can reappear years later

in another form.

In the forward to The Book of Love,

Maimonides’s translator writes that Hebrew words assimilated into English

are neither translated nor italicized.

This leads to inconsistencies

in the translation. Holiday names,

for example, passed into English are cited

in that language.“Rosh Hashana” is Hebrew, yet “Day of Atonement” English.

He accepts,“There seems to be

no good way of solving this problem.”

This last sentence is followed by white space, letting the problem bloom, unsolved.

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I will end with a one-line poem that exclusively features a question. And perhaps, in this collection powered by questions, that is also a nod to Maimonides, who wondered—what is the best way to give charity? Is anonymity a better way, and if so, who should be anonymous—the giver, the recipient, or both? (If you haven’t read his laws of charity lately, I recommend.)

In any case, one of Grubin’s strengths is how she melds dailiness—the kids with the Doritos, interactions with her husband—with the divine and the sublime. Here is one of the daily moments that struck me.

Question

Why do you need to tell your husband to take off his coat?

Yes, that’s the whole poem! Hope you will join us on Sunday for a wonderful salon devoted to Jewish poetry in the UK with Merle Bachmann, Eve Grubin, and Aviva Dautch.

Speaking in Evanston, IL and New York

I will be speaking about Hebrew literature in translation in a time of trouble at the AJL conference in Evanston, Illinois today at 10:45 a.m. on a panel with several esteemed translators and scholars. You can find the schedule here.If you’re there, please feel free to say hello!

And on July 13^th, I will be speaking at the wonderful Scribblers on the Roof series in New York; I’ll be in conversation with Dan Friedman. I would love to see you there! Join us for a pre-talk schmooze too. Details here.

New Essay in The Forward on a Wonderful New Memoir

I was delighted to write about Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic while working on a review essay for this beautiful memoir. You can read my piece in The Forward here: when a Jewish language is lost, we lose more than words.

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Salon Sunday June 28th on Jewish Poetry in the UK

I’m so thrilled to host a salon this Sunday with a special focus on Jewish poetry in the UK. Merle Bachmann edited the Selected Poems of A.C. Jacobs, Eve Grubin—featured here—is the author most recently of Boat of Letters, and Aviva Dautch is a poet and curator who I will write about next. This salon will be a mix of poets of the past and present, and it will also offer a chance to think about the role of an editor in the continuation of Jewish poetry. Salons are a chance to get to know the wonderful writers, translators, and thinkers featured in the newsletter, and are a special thank-you for paid subscribers. Zoom details are below—hope to see you there!

Poet and curator Aviva Dautch,

Poet, translator, scholar and editor Merle Bachman.

Poet and scholar Eve Grubin.

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In case you missed it, you can read about the Scottish Jewish poet A.C. Jacobs and Merle’s important work bringing his poems to life in two newsletters devoted to Jacobs, one as a poet and one as a translator.. Stay tuned for future newsletters on Eve Grubin’s work and Aviva Dautch’s work in advance of the salon.

Here are short bios for these three fascinating guests:

Poet Eve Grubin.

Eve Grubin is the author of the book of poems Boat of Letters (Four Way Books). She is also the author of Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press), The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press) and Grief Dialogue (Rack Press).

Eve holds a PhD on the poetics of reticence from Kingston University London where she was a recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council fellowship, and previous degrees in from Smith College (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA) and the Bread Loaf School of English (MA). She is currently a lecturer at NYU London and a tutor at the Poetry School. Eve also teaches online poetry courses on zoom throughout the year.

Poet, editor and translator Merle Bachman.

Merle Bachman is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections, two poetry chapbooks, and one book (with co-editor Anthony Rudolf, in London) featuring the selected poems of Scottish-Jewish poet A. C. Jacobs. Her translation, So Many Warm Words: Selections from the Peotry of Rosa Nevadovska, a bilingual Yiddish-English edition, was recently published by Ben Yehuda Press.

Recovering “Yiddishland": Threshold Moments in American Literature. her dissertaion, was published by Sytacuse University Press. Her latest book is a hybrid-genre memoir, Thank You for Being: A Poet’s Memoir of Home. She retired as Professor of English at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky where she directed its BFA program in Creative Writing.

Poet, educator, and curator Aviva Dautch.

Aviva Dautch has been Poet in Residence at the Jewish Museum in London and The Separated Child Foundation. Her sequence about clearing her mother’s home was chosen for the Poetry School / Nine Arches Press Primers prize for emerging voices in 2017 and was published in Primers Volume Three in May 2018. Her forthcoming first full collection, We Sigh For Houses, which was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 poetry programme.

Aviva’s translation of The Eighth Crossing, by Afghan poet Suhrab Sirat, was published in January 2021. She is the resident poetry expert for BBC Radio 4 series ‘On Form’, presented by Andrew McMillan.

Here are Zoom details:

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A new translation from the original Yiddish by Giovanna Truong and Ruthie Davis was adapted by director Catherine Rouvnov-Kats, who spent two years on the process of moving Peretz’s words from page to stage. It is now playing in Chicago in a performance by the Cunning Folk Theatre after a successful run in Boston. If you’re anywhere nearby, consider seeing it, and stay to talk through it afterwards. It’s a short run, and remaining performances are Thursday May 28^th at 7 and Sunday May 31^st at 2. I’m writing this quickly to allow readers near Chicago to snag a ticket.

The director and actors in a post-performance discussion.

The play stars Noah, a young man from a religious family in the shtetl who moves to the city and works as a writer; he meets a non-Jewish Polish seamstress named Clara by chance in the street, and he falls in love. All he can give her are stories, so he invents more and more stories, and these stories allow her to escape the harshness of her life, which includes her father’s abandonment, her mother’s physical abuse, her near-illiteracy, and her abject poverty. But these stories within stories, which he is using to try to get her interested in him, also give us a window into Noah’s life—the home he grew up in, the world of Jewish writers, the café where his friends sit for hours but don’t pay, and the tension between peasants and the better-off, and for that matter, peasants and royalty.

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But the charming young man is a Jew, and it’s shocking to hear Clara say that her mother won’t let a stranger into the house, especially not a Jew.

I confess—it reminded me of a story a neighbor in Chicago recently told me about becoming friendly with a third neighbor, only to be told, quite casually, that her parents did not allow Jews in their house.

The great Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz

More shocking is a scene in the Peretz play in which a dead baby is planted underneath the Seder table of the young man’s parents. When the authorities come knocking at the door, the father instructs his wife and daughter to each eat a piece of the baby, and he eats a piece himself.

“But we can’t,” his wife and daughter protest. “Jewish law does not allow us to eat blood.”

They have been framed, but they outwitted the blood libel and saved their lives. It’s depressing to watch cannibalism as the only response to Jew hatred, but incredibly, that’s only the first of two very bloody scenes.

The second involves a dead man, a non-Jew, raised from the dead to come to a Seder. This story, I thought, was much darker than some of Peretz’s other famous stories, like “If Not Higher.”

But what really got me were some of Peretz’s individual lines. You can feel his struggle with Judaism, with faith and doubt, and with the draws and dangers of modernity. For example, he describes Shabbat as a day with no creative work so that you can focus on God’s creativity.

That stuck with me.

Solomon Bergquist in last night’s performance, from the Cunning Folk Theatre’s Instagram page.

It was also moving to see Peretz use the Book of Ruth as a way to explain the role of converts in Judaism, and how there is a path, through halacha, or Jewish law,—which the actor pronounced haluhcha, in the Yiddish way, in keeping with the text—to become Jewish. Peretz made sure to describe the dangers of doing so, including harassment by the government.

At the audience discussion afterward, a teenager expressed gratitude for the depiction of a Jewish artist, seen as too Jewish by non-Jews but not Jewish enough by Jews. It captured the in-betweenness many contemporary Jews feel, and that Peretz must have felt in the 1890s.

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It was also chilling to watch a blood libel on the stage, complete with a baby planted under the Seder table.

In this era when lies and libels are supercharged, watching it dramatized in a shabby family home, spiffed up for Pesach, felt very now.

I was also struck by the young cast, both Jewish and non-Jewish. The lead actor, Bergquist, said that this was the first time they had played a deeply Jewish character, and that they based some of their performance on their own father and their father’s anxiety.

Bergquist is a juggler, mime, and magician who can be regularly found performing on the streets of Chicago, according to their bio. “Theatrically, they’ve previously and acted in productions including Pippin, Cabaret, Man of La Mancha, Julius Caesar, Much Ado About Nothing, and Hamlet. In their spare time, Solomon is currently getting their Masters at the University of Chicago, where they study Yiddish Folktales. “

Another actor, Luis Avila, who the theatre’s Instagram account described as an emerging Mexican-American actor from Justice, Illinois, said he was Catholic, and that this was his first time in a Jewish play and that he was excited to learn more about Judaism, and to enter the world of his Jewish friends. The dramaturg expressed concern that she was not Jewish enough for the play—but related that someone told her that asking questions, and feeling not Jewish enough, is in fact very Jewish.

Director Catherine Rouvinov-Kats. (Source: Cunning Theatre website).

That’s what Peretz captures. What is Jewish? What is Jewish enough? Does the outside world care about any of these gradations? And—most contemporary of all, perhaps—though the outside, non-Jewish, urban world can be scintillating, there is something in Jewish text, tradition, and life that is hard to escape, and hard to let go of completely. That tension was there in 1898, with all the lure of modernism, and it is here now, with all the lure of technology and contemporary culture. Yet the Seder—and ideas like six days of labor and one day to rest, and in Peretz’s words, observe God’s creativity—remain.

“Stories” is playing at the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture, 2936 N. Southport Ave, Chicago, IL. Tickets can be purchased here.

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Hope you found this newsletter meaningful! Thank you for your support of writing with depth.

Manny’s is a Jewish deli. An institution in Chicago, it’s a favorite stop of local politicians on Election Day. It has also hosted Bill Clinton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Barack Obama, so it has a national profile, too.

“Police said two suspects got out a white sedan and approached the restaurant when one of them broke the front glass window and entered, but did not succeed in taking anything,” ABC News reported.. “The suspects then fled southbound on Jefferson Street in the white sedan.”

You can see in surveillance video that a man stops in front of Manny’s, smashes a window—and flees. It doesn’t look like a robbery.

Manny’s is also the kind of place that’s “kosher-style” but not kosher. And while it’s not clear yet what the motive is—it must be said that detectives are still investigating—many are already wondering if the glass-smashing was motivated by antisemitism. Several other Chicago kosher restaurants and Jewish delis have been vandalized in recent years.

The whole “is it antisemitism?” question—again—reminded me of the kashrut committees of my childhood, who were charged with making sure something like birthday cake was really kosher, or kosher enough for the entire class.

Sometimes, it seems that anytime someone comments on antisemitism, another person says—“well, that’s not antisemitism.” That might be followed by an insistence that it’s anti-Zionism, or anti-capitalism, or the manosphere, or the general state of the world.

I thought of all this lately while listening to three prominent voices—from the U.S, Hungary, and Australia, and from the very different worlds of comedy, film, and literature—make extraordinary statements about the rise of antisemitism.

The comments are most interesting in their entirety. And they’re worth considering together.

It’s the Inconsistency

Comedian Bill Maher chose to speak out on Israel’s Independence Day, and his audience was unusually and completely silent.

During his monologue, which he devoted entirely to antisemitism, he directly addressed how Israel is currently viewed as uniquely evil by many and noted that a respected poll showed that 60 percent of Gen Z respondents in America favored Hamas over Israel.

“If you think as so many do now, that Israel is the monster country of all time, you either don’t read or you don’t care about your own hypocrisy,” Maher said, before reeling off a list of “worse” places.

He said that the sign of antisemitism was “inconsistency.”

It’s not just Gen Z these days; recent Pew data shows that 70 percent of Americans aged 18-49 now have an unfavorable view or Israel, a country which is home to half the world’s Jewish population. There has to be significant overlap between Maher’s audience and that 70 percent.

At the end of his monologue, he directly called on the Democratic party to act—and to educate, not capitulate. Maher has 2.97 million YouTube subscribers, and about half a million on live television. He’s probably the best-known of the three, and he has a record of saying things other comics might be afraid to say.

But Maher has said that his outspokenness has cost him. He has been nominated for an Emmy 58 times, and won once. “Obviously it’s something I said, he told Deadline. “Well, it’s everything I said.”

“Anything Jewish Is Now Considered…”

Meanwhile, in a stunning interview in The Guardian, László Nemes, one of Europe’s most prominent filmmakers and the director of Son of Saul, described an “orgy” of antisemitism that has taken over both culture and online culture.

Son of Saul describes a day and a half in the life of a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The 2015 film is “an astonishing, unflinching study of slave laborers forced to perform the bleakest task imaginable: clearing the gas chambers of the corpses of their fellow Jews, depositing the bodies in ovens to be incinerated. Son of Saul dared to stare into the abyss of the Shoah and was swiftly recognised as among the greatest films about the Holocaust ever made. It won every prize going, including the Oscar for best foreign language film,” Jonathan Freedman writes in The Guardian.

But here is why all this is relevant right now. Freedman then asked Nemes how the film would be received today.

László Nemes (Wikipedia)

“I don’t even think it would make the [Oscar] shortlist today.” Why? “Because of the politicisation of cinema, because anything that’s Jewish is now considered … ” He doesn’t complete the sentence. “Nobody would touch it with a 10ft pole.”

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“There’s an orgy of antisemitism, an absolute, shameless orgy of antisemitism, overtaking the west,” Nemes said.

That word “orgy” has stayed with me.

I wanted to find a way to write about this, but wasn’t sure how.

Meanwhile, Nemes has been unable to find a U.S. distributor for his latest film, Orphan. “People [would] ask me about Gaza, instead of, you know, asking about the movie. [They ask] if I signed this or that petition,” he told The Guardian,

Nemes calls the environment “anti-humanist” and says Jews have been cast as “internal enemies.” That, of course, echoes the framing of the 1930s.

Withdrawing a Blurb—The New Blacklist

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I was familiar with Ben Yitzhak’s exquisite Hebrew poetry and with an intriguing translation into English published in 2003 by Peter Cole at Ibis Press, which Cole founded. (For those interested in poetry news—several Ibis titles will be re-issued by Wesleyan University Press in 2026.) There was a time when I found myself in conversation with other poets about Ben Yitzchak, and his addictive, mysterious lines; that hasn’t happened for many years, and I don’t know why.

I also did not know that Ben Yitzhak once had another English-language translator who was also a poet—Jacobs, who happened to be working on the translations when he died in Madrid, shortly before his 57^th birthday. After his death, many of Jacobs’ unpublished poems were discovered by friends and family in his residences in both London and Madrid,” the Scottish Poetry Library notes. https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/a-c-jacobs/#:~:text=Read%20more “

Those have been published first in Collected Poems & Selected Translations (ed. John Rety and Anthony Rudolf, 1996) and later in Nameless Country: Selected poems of A. C. Jacobs (ed. Merle L. Bachman and Anthony Rudolf, 2018).” In case you missed it, I wrote about Jacobs and his poetry in the newsletter here, in part I of this two-part series on Jacobs: Between Scotland and Jerusalem

Jacobs grew up in Scotland and lived in Israel for a few years; some of his poems reveal a complicated relationship to Israel, and a continuing interest in diaspora. His poems don’t fit into the easy boxes of “feeling at home with Israel” or “feeling disillusioned with Israel.” He returned to Scotland throughout his life, and he also lived in Italy before settling in Spain.

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As I re-read Jacobs, I found myself thinking of Paul Celan, who also grew up in an Orthdox family, and also wrote of Jerusalem but lived in Europe, where he was born. Jacobs also lived in a post-Shoah world; his subjects, familiar to those who read post-ward Jewish poetry, included “the exhaustion of Jewish life after the Holocaust, the death of Yiddish, the honouring of his pious … Jewish ancestors, the urban impact of his birthplace Scotland, the English landscape, Jerusalem,” Anthony Rudolf, a friend of Jacobs and the co-editor of his Selected Poems, observed.

All of this terrain was familiar to Ben Yitzchak. Here is a famous Ben Yitzhak poem. The first word, ashrei, is familiar to many from the tefillot, the prayers. The word “ashrei” is translated variously as “happy,” “blessed,” and in the case of Chabad, “fortunate.” You can see why a poem that starts with this word might appeal to Jacobs, who grew up in an Orthodox family:

From: Poems, Avraham Ben Yitzhak
Publisher: Tarshish (1952) 1968,

And here is Ben Yitzchak, in a Jacobs translation:

Even if you do not read Hebrew, you can make out what Jacobs kept from Ben Yitzchak—the stanza length. Stanzas that are two lines long in Hebrew are two lines long in English.

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The Scottish-Jewish poet A.C. Jacobs, who deserves more readers, was haunted by the concepts of diaspora and home. When in Scotland, he wrote about Jerusalem, and when he was in Jerusalem, he remembered Scotland.

As I read his Selected Poems, I found myself thinking of the Greek word diaspeirein, meaning “to scatter, spread about,” because for Jacobs, remembered or imagined landscape is also scattered, or spread about, whatever he is looking at, wherever he is. These landscapes are also spread throughout the poems, as if mimicking the actual physical diaspora and the wandering embedded within it.

Edinburgh Castle.

The word “diaspora,” which comes from the Greek diaspeirein, has been part of the English language for over 400 years. Diaspora, with a capital D, “can be found as far back as 1594, in a translation of Lambert Daneau’s A Fruitfull Commentarie vpon the Twelue Small Prophets, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary reports. “This scattering abrode of the Iewes, as it were an heauenly sowing, fell out after their returne from the captiuitie of Babylon … they are called Diaspora, that is, a scattering or sowing abrode.”

St. Enoch subway station in Glasgow, in front of the St Enoch’s Hotel, September 1933.

This “scattering or sowing abrode” was the story of the Jacobs family. He was born in Glasgow in 1937 into an Orthodox Jewish family. “With his grandparents on both sides being Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Jacobs’ upbringing was influenced by the Yiddish language (often combined with the Scots vernacular of the Gorbals in Glasgow) and the lingering shadow of the Holocaust,” according to the Scottish Poetry Library. “He received a traditional Jewish education and attended secular Scottish schools before his family moved to London in 1951.”

Arthur, or A.C. Jacobs, who died in 1994, published exactly one book and one pamphlet of original poetry in his lifetime, and perhaps this slim output is what drew him to translating the great Hebrew poet Avraham Ben Yitzhak, who published exactly eleven poems during his time on earth. (I will highlight one of these translations in a future newsletter. ) After Jacobs’ death, many of his unpublished poems were discovered by friends and family in homes in both London and Madrid. Those poems were published in Collected Poems & Selected Translations (ed. John Rety and Anthony Rudolf, 1996) and again in Nameless Country: Selected Poems of A. C. Jacobs (ed. Merle L. Bachman and Anthony Rudolf, 2018).

Arthur C. Jacobs (1937-1994)

It’s not so easy to find The Collected Poems, which includes some of the translations Jacobs worked on. The Selected Poems, edited by Merle Bachman and Anthony Rudolf, published in 2018 by Carcanet Press, is a good introduction to his work. Jacobs lived in Israel for a few years; some of his poems reveal a troubled relationship to the country, and a continuing interest in diaspora.

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You can hear all of this in “In Green Hills,” one of the many poems that move between landscapes and states of mind. Here Jacobs is, in Europe, remembering Jerusalem. But is it the Jerusalem he saw with his own eyes, and lived in? Or was it the Jerusalem he longed for, perhaps the Jerusalem promised in Jewish text?

Jacobs did not stay in Jerusalem forever. He returned to Scotland throughout his life, and he also lived in Italy before settling in Spain. He also kept returning to subjects like Jewish life in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the fate of Yiddish, his family and his ancestors, and of course, Scotland, England, and Jerusalem. In addition to Ben Yitzchak, he also translated David Vogel from the Hebrew and Yiddish, and those were published in a volume titled The Dark Gate (Menard Press, 1976).

One of Jacobs’s strongest poems is the last poem in Selected Poems, which captures much of what interested Jacobs, throughout his life. I think the editors chose well by giving it this placement:

The diaspora and the “long exile burning in us” is on many minds lately. The idea of being home with a person, or being at home, in exile, has been talked about before; it’s back now, with a flurry of recent books.

None of this is new terrain; Jacobs, like many Jewish writers throughout the centuries, undoubtedly thought about diaspora, exile, and what home is over and over again. You can even feel that wandering in wavering moments in individual lines.

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That is the case in “State,” and in particular, the question mark at the end. Musician Boy George, speaking in the aftermath of the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green in London, a heavily Jewish neighborhood, observed that no one is asking Americans or Russians to individually answer for those countries’ actions. The stabbing was just the latest in a spate of antisemitic attacks in the United Kingdom.

The opening line, “Here in my native country/ I’m answering for somewhere else” seems especially apt and contemporary now.

The line “exile within exile” is haunting. Reading Jacobs is a reminder that perhaps all of this has been there all along, and maybe we just weren’t listening closely enough.

Next Salon: Merle Bachman on A.C. Jacobs

Perhaps because of his lifelong search for a true home, Jacobs was intrigued by Esperanto, the dream of a common language for all of humanity. The next newsletter will spotlight one of his translations along with a poem he wrote to honor the inventor of Esperanto.

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Stay tuned for part II of “Between Scotland and Jerusalem”—and hope you join us for the upcoming salon featuring poet, translator, and scholar Merle Bachman, who will discuss her work editing Nameless Country: Selected Poems by A.C. Jacobs, and offer a window into his life and poetry. More details soon. Shabbat shalom!

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Hope you found this newsletter meaningful! Thank you for your support of writing with depth.

The reading featured poems from these two recent books:

Zoom Recording Link

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With the time change, here is a reminder that we will be starting in 30 minutes! Join us for a special focus on Jewish poetry now. Zoom info below. Hope to see you soon!

Poetry Salon with Baruch November, Tikva Hecht, and Larry Yudelson

Time: Mar 8, 2026 02:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

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Meeting ID: 892 0162 3901

Passcode: 823100

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Each poet will read 3-4 poems and talk about how the poems were made. I will then host a conversation about publishing Jewish poetry with Ben Yehuda Press publisher Larry Yudelson and the poets. And as a special bonus, please check out this pre-salon commentary from poet and editor Rabbi Julia Knobloch, in the form of a video interview on editing Jewish poetry.

You can read the newsletter about Tikva’s work here. and Baruch’s work here.. You can learn more about The Jewish Poetry Project at Ben Yehuda Press here. Bios and Zoom info below. Hope to see you there!

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Tikva Hecht’s debut poetry collection, Tashlikh (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her writing can be found in Canadian Literature, CV2, Grain Magazine, Modern Literature, and The Lehrhaus and she has served as a Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference Scholar, a National Havurah Committee Institute Timbrel Artist-in-Residence and a University of California, Riverside, Gluck Fellow.

Poet Tikva Hecht.

Baruch November comes from a family of poets. His new collection is The Broken Heart is the Master Key, and he is also the author of Bar Mitzvah Dreams and Dry Nectars of Plenty (co-winner of the BigCityLit chapbook contest). His poem “After Esav” was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. November co-directs and organizes the JCC of Buffalo’s Jewish Poetry Reading Series,

Poet Baruch November.

Larry Yudelson is a longtime reporter for Jewish newspapers and the publisher of Ben Yehuda Press, which proudly proclaims that it “believes in poetry”. The Jewish Poetry Project has published a wide range of contemporary Jewish poets.

Larry Yudelson, Ben Yehuda Press publisher.

Zoom Info for the Salon

Aviya Kushner is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Poetry Salon with Baruch November, Tikva Hecht, and Larry Yudelson

Time: Mar 8, 2026 02:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89201623901?pwd=OXilanpAjoS4JgKTGXy1sXG4PVpiRg.1

Meeting ID: 892 0162 3901

Passcode: 823100

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