Transition, Process, & an Erasure: The Soviet Jewish Americans

I begin 2020 without A Day Job. That’s the result of much thinking, deliberating, and planning. (Remind me to tell you about the story of Job—the biblical one—and where that fits in.) And yet here we are, mission accomplished, my time finally mine—mine, all mine! she says in Golum voice—and the prevailing feelings I have range from discomfort to despair. But that’s January in New York for you. Or for me, at any rate.

So today I sat in the Rose Reading Room for the first time this year. I’m looking forward to, and counting on, my library-going ritual to shore me up though this transition. And one of the small rituals of transition I’ve been using for a good while now, starting when I had just one day a week to call my own (A Day of One’s Own?) is making a blackout / erasure poem based on a randomly(ish) selected book off the shelves.

The Rose Reading Room is really two enormous, gorgeous rooms with clouds pained on the ceilings and smooth wood as far as the eye can see. This afternoon I picked the tourists-permitted side, which I usually avoid, so that I could more easily get at the photocopiers. My mood has been pugilistic, recalcitrant, taciturn, and I was vaguely interested in picking up a book that could tap into that. It seemed no coincidence that when I sat down, I found myself flanked on the left by a shelf of books about the World Wars. The first title to catch my eye was The Bitter Woods. A few spines down was A Prince of Our Disorder.

I thumbed through them, only to see that Bitter Woods was a military play-by-play, which seemed too noun-laden, and to realize I had already picked up A Prince of Our Disorder before (in May of 2018, when I took a poem from page 199). Of all the books in the New York Public Library … well, I assume it reveals everything you ever wanted to know about my psychology. Prince opened naturally to the last page of the first section, where this passage, quoting the young archeologist Lawrence of Arabia, seemed to have been planted by some goblins:

“Poor Father! his sons are not going to support his years by the gain of their professions and trades. One a missionary: one an artist of sorts and a wanderer after sensations; one thinking of lay education work … still the product of fairly healthy brains and tolerable bodies will not be all worthless anthems world. One f us must surely get something of the unattainable we are all feeling after.

[in another letter:]

… I fear father is right about us and our careers: but this idealistic disregard for the good things of the world has its bright side. And to say that he had five sons, none making money, would be a glorious boast—from my point of view at least.” (Mack, p 34)

I crept forward a few paces. I plucked out The Soviet Jewish Americans, apparently one of a series including Taiwanese Americans, Cuban Americans, et cetera. Of all the personal reasons to be drawn to this tome at this time, it’s more fun to share that just a few minutes prior, I was finishing a lentil soup in the cafe downstairs, sitting near a young Russian-Jewish-American man and his fiancee as they interviewed a wedding planner about organizing a couple hundred people for their nuptials at Cipriani. I finished my soup but was eavesdropping so intently I forgot that I wasn’t a required participant.

Blacking out the text for this page felt challenging, the information somehow too specific and too esoteric. Could there be a “story”—a new meaning—in the poem that was any different from the story of the text? Or would I just be translating prose into verse?

When I typed up what words remained, I gave myself more permission than usual to fiddle with the text. I got something dreamier to emerge, and I let it feel incomplete, imperfect, indeterminate. I tried (slash forced) to to push it a little into surrealism and to represent some of the disruptiveness and erasure caused by migration, oppression, and assimilation in the text itself. I loved the phrase “Mountain Jews,” so at odds with most stereotypes (urban American Jews, desert-wandering biblical Jews), and the irony of being from the Caucasian Mountains, when Jews have had such a complicated relationship to whiteness. But I’ve cut those final words, which seemed to confuse and undercut the kind of ringing-gong tone of ending with “centuries before Christ.”

So here’s what happened.

Settling Soviet Jewish America

From The Soviet Jewish Americans, Annelise Orleck, p 127

Bukharan Jews celebrate weddings

in grand style at Leonard’s 

of Great Neck, ice swans

holding beds of chopped liver

on their backs, 

a two-story crystal 

chandelier and plexiglass piano, 

Leonard’s pinnacle children 

assimilated, American

Dreamed of fantastic fabled cities:

Samarkand, Minsk

—the rites of gaudy grounds—

a vedushchii (master of ceremonies)

pokes the audience alert

The marriage varies

depending on the food, plov and shaslyk 

(pilaf and shish kebab)

cold vegetable salads

lox (smoked salmon),

roast chicken

and jellied calves’ feet.

The music the meal the silks that Jews

in Samarkand have woven 

and dyed for centuries

Neapolitan tuxedos

Love songs and flashy jewelry

Israeli folk dances (citation excised). 

In the Hills are Mountain Jews

and Georgian Jews. Both have———

Both were———

with roots six centuries before Christ. 

So that’s it then—I’ve done an erasure, breaking through the seal on the day. And in writing all these dang words about it, I’ve succeeded in spending the afternoon—a portion of it at least—writing. My little trick has done the trick. But am I ready now to re-open the projects that have been moldering for the months in which I plowed through my job transition and the holidays? Not sure.

I haven’t set any New Year’s Resolutions … but I have been thinking a lot about bravery. Reading Pema Chodron, Elizabeth Gilbert, all that jazz. In the best moments I can call this commitment to “idealistic disregard” and “feeling after the unattainable” acts of courage. I noticed, though, how many posts are sitting in Draft form, though, and am asking myself what the brave move is when it comes to them: push them out into the light, or let them go?