Poets From Poland

"I feel a sense of urgency when it comes to Trump and his administration. I’m here today because I’m beginning to see what my parents saw in the 1930s in Europe. I always tried to imagined how it was like for them, but this is the first time in my life when I feel that I’m experiencing something similar. It has enormous echos for me. ‘America First’ is not substantially different from ‘Deutschland über Alles.’ One of the things that scares me is the global rise of right-wing movements in the United States, Europe and Israel. The American alt-right is in dialogue with similar movements in Israel, and this might pose a danger to both Israelis and Americans."

"In a 1989 speech at a public event sponsored by the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Klepfisz articulated what motivates her to action-to organize workshops, co-found the Committee, and travel to Israel to connect with the women's peace movement there: "We are told that history is made by other people.... We are told this because we are women.... Over and over again the message is monotonously the same: you have no power, you have no power to change anything. But I don't believe this. I believe common, ordinary people are not passive participants in historical events. How each of us shapes our life, shapes history."

"no theory about American Jews has been able to express quite as well the nature and power of Jewish identity as the moment when I realized I had passed without a second thought a group of homeless people on a New York City street because I was rushing to a Jewish women's vigil protesting Israeli policies against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. I saw myself instinctively redefining geography and distance, experiencing how much closer Israel, the West Bank and Gaza felt than the 59th Street stop of the Lexington line. Moments like these, integral parts of our daily lives, simultaneously embody theory and concrete experience and I continue to trust them most."

"One of the most striking characteristics of so many of Klepfisz's essays is her ability to develop a bilingual mode of writing, a mode that transplants Yiddish into English, thus preserving mame-loshn (the European mothers' tongue), making the language more immediate, less strange. The deep resonances and childhood memories that surfaced when I first read these essays remind me that for Klepfisz, as for me and many other Ashkenazi Jews dispersed throughout the world, Yiddish serves a vital function-it is "the mirror that made me visible to myself." Klepfisz knows that language is a significant carrier of culture, something that is especially true of Yiddish, which in the context of Jewish history "summons a world beneath the words.""

"The use of Yiddish was an expression not only of love of a language, but of pride in ourselves as a people; it was an acknowledgement of a historical and cultural yerushe, heritage, a link to generations of Jews who came before and to the political activists of Eastern Europe. Above all it was the symbol of resistance to assimilation, an insistence on remaining who we were."

"in July, 1983-thirty-seven years after having left-I returned to Poland with my mother on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the varshever geto oyfshtand, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Though I had been raised in almost a khurbn kultur, a Holocaust culture, I was totally unprepared for the experience. In Poland I saw the shadows of Jewish-Polish culture and was able to infer from them the magnitude of what had taken place. It was like stepping into a negative rather than a photograph. I was overcome by the sudden realization of the scale of the loss."

"Experiments, she calls her essays. Attempts at solutions. But Klepfisz has never used the lack of certainty as an excuse to avoid taking action. In addition to her theoretical writings, she has been an organizer in both Jewish and lesbian/feminist communities, lecturing and giving workshops on feminism, Yiddish culture, anti-Semitism, and the Middle East. Taking my cue from the author's preface, I have allowed myself to respond to these essays in a nonlinear associative way, which is also my preferred mode of writing. Klepfisz's essays are freeing and engaging because of the honesty she brings to the processes of writing, thinking and rethinking, questioning, reexamining a decision that may seem to be correct today but may prove to be disastrously wrong tomorrow."

"I think it is time for all of us in this movement, Jews and non-Jews alike, to examine our silence on this subject, to examine its source. And Jews especially need to consider their feelings about their Jewishness, for any self-consciousness, any desire to draw attention away from one's Jewishness is an internalization of anti-Semitism. And if we want others to deal with this issue, then we ourselves must start to develop a sense of pride and a sense that our survival as Jews is important."

"By means of her advocacy of a new Jewish secularism, Irena Klepfisz calls to our attention the seriousness of the break and in so doing begins the necessary work of repair."

"Though the students in my public school were probably ninety-five percent Jewish, not once between the second and eighth grades do I remember a single teacher-Jew or gentile-discuss a Jewish topic or issue, holiday, leader. All things Jewish belonged outside the walls of P.S. 95. And with the parents' consent."

"The extraordinary power of Irena Klepfisz's work lies in the force of its moral and artistic integrity. These essays interweave and overlap (not only with each other, but also with her poetry) in entirely unexpected ways. Who else but Klepfisz could make us understand so clearly (and always in a framework that is Jewish, lesbian, feminist, and conscious of class) the imperative to speak out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? Against anti-Semitism and homophobia? Against compulsory motherhood? Against the commercialization of the Holocaust? And to speak as loudly for the strengthening and preservation of secular Yiddish culture in the United States? For the demystification of writing? For the celebration and joy of creative work? At a time of repression, when progressive politics are eroding and hate crimes are on the rise, Klepfisz's essays make plain that the political is personal, and that the personal must continue to be understood as political. Klepfisz's sharp critiques of many movements and communities lead us to take action, which is her way of keeping hope alive. Although I have gladly accepted the task of writing the introduction to this volume of essays, it was through her poetry that I first came to know Irena Klepfisz. I can still call up the rush of excited recognition that came over me when, after browsing through the lesbian poetry section of a women's bookstore sometime in 1977, I casually opened periods of stress and recognized myself. Here was a woman writing as a child survivor of the Holocaust, as a lesbian, as a feminist, and as a Jew. At the time I knew of no other lesbian/feminist who had also somehow managed "to escape that fate.""

"Klepfisz is emphatic that "non-observance the choice made by the majority of American Jews is not the same as secularism, that consciously chosen pre-Holocaust secularism was always political and cultural, and always associated with a "fierce determination to preserve Jewish identity." She is equally emphatic that "a true commitment to Jewish secularism inevitably means that we must make decisions-just like observant Jews-about how to structure our lives and our relations with Jews and non-Jews-how to incorporate the past.... A true commitment to Jewish secularism inevitably also means a commitment to establishing and supporting secular Jewish institutions that provide us with a sense of community and common purpose.""

"In looking back, I wonder why something so basic as di yidishe kultur, so intimately connected to my life, has been so difficult to maintain, to be actively loyal to. Why have I experienced so many setbacks?...The problem stems from American society, which does not tolerate cultures outside the mainstream and does everything, materially and psychologically, to weaken them. Whether to Spanish-speaking or Chinese-speaking or Yiddish-speaking children, the message is monotonously the same: Change your name. Americanize. Forget the past. Forget your people."

"We Jews are living in a strange historical period in which our sense of history is often quite warped. For many American Jews, the Holocaust and Israel have reduced Jewish history to the years 1939-1945, or 1948 to the present. This extremely limited view of Jewish history naturally narrows the concept of Jewish identity and that narrowness is one which we as progressives ought to be countering."

"Klepfisz insists on maintaining the integrity of each individual culture as it joins others. This is a vision worth emulating."

"From the age of twenty, my ego has been invested in poetry. For me, the prospect of expression through poetry transforms solitary silence and an empty page into sheer pleasure. I feel unafraid, knowing I can break all the rules, invent my own forms. No matter what persona I take on, my voice remains accessible and recognizable. There is no artifice, no pose, no sense that I have to transform myself into someone else. As a poet, I remain comfortably disrespectful. I experiment, take risks which sometimes work and sometimes don't. For years I have had no such courage in essay writing. It has seemed an iron-clad genre that I could neither escape nor fit into."

"I never thought that as a secular Jew who defined herself through Yiddish culture, my sense of self was inextricably bound up in its existence, that when it was in jeopardy, my own identity was in jeopardy. I never realized that it was the mirror that made me visible to myself as a Jew."

"Throughout, and in its very last lines, this book asks fundamental questions about the uses of history. That it does so from a rootedness in Jewish history, an unassimilated location, is one part of its strength. But history alone doesn't confer this strength; the poet's continuing labor with Jewish meaning does. The other part, of course, is the integrity of its poetics. A Klepfisz poem lives amid complex tensions, even when its texture may appear transparent. There is a voice, sometimes voices, in these poems which can often best be heard by reading aloud. Her sense of phrase, of line, of the shift of tone, is almost flawless. But perfection is not what Irena Klepfisz is after. It is the tension among so many forces: language, speechlessness, memory, politics, irony, compassion, hunger for what is lost, hunger for a justice still to be made, that makes this poetry crucial to the new unfoldings of history that we begin, in 1990, to imagine."

""Bashert" is a poem unlike any other I can think of in American, including Jewish-American, poetry, in its delineations not only of survivor experience (in the skin of the mother "passing" as gentile with her infant daughter) but of what happens after survival: the life that seems to go on, but cannot persevere; the life that does go on, struggling with a vast alienation, in a state of "equidistance from two continents," trying to fathom her place as a Jew in the larger American gentile world,"

"what the Jewish lesbian encounters are the typical conservative stances. Closed doors. Silence. Disgust."

"Klepfisz has written one of the great "borderland" poems-poems which emerge from the consciousness of being of no one geography, time zone or culture; of moving inwardly as well as outwardly between continents, land-masses, eras of history, or, as Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa expresses it, in "a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways." A consciousness which cannot be, and refuses to be, assimilated. A consciousness which tries to claim all its legacies: courage, endurance, vision, fierceness of human will, and also the underside of oppression, the distortions quarantine and violent deracination inflict on the heart. When I say that "Bashert" is a poem unlike any other I mean this through and through: in its form, in its verse and prose rhythms, in its insistence on memory without idealization, its refusal to let go."

"Those of the Left, Jew and non-Jew alike, seem to believe what the Right has always maintained-that Jews run the world and are, therefore, most responsible for its ills. The casualness, the indifference with which the Left accepts this anti-Semitic stance enrages me. It is usually subtle, often taking the form of anti-Semitism by omission. Its form is to show or speak about Jews only as oppressors, never as anything else. That is anti-Semitic."

"There is extraordinary vitality in Klepfisz's early poems on women in the Holocaust...In them, Klepfisz takes the considerable risk of trying to bear witness to this part of her history without compromise and without melodrama. She succeeds because she is a poet, not only a witness."

"Klepfisz's bilingual poems do not-and this is significant-drop Yiddish phrases in a cosy evocation of an idealized past, embodied in bobe and zayde, or as a kind of Jewish seasoning on an American tongue."

"The great flowering of Yiddish literature took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the rise of Jewish secularism and the Jewish labor and socialist movements. It is from out of these traditions that history uprooted Irena Klepfisz, depositing her into a community of survivors in New York."

"If I speak here, then, of experiences from which Klepfisz's poetry has been precipitated, it's because a historical necessity has made her the kind of poet she is: neither a "universal" nor a "private" stance has been her luxury."

"In white North America, poetry has been set apart from the practical arts, from political meaning, and also from "entertainment" and the accumulation of wealth-thus, pushed to the margins of life. Klepfisz, the inheritor of both a European Jewish Socialist-Bundist political tradition, and a Yiddish cultural tradition, naturally refuses such "enclosures.""

"This is perhaps the most painful aspect for me of being Jewish, for I identify strongly as a Jew, am proud to be a Jew. And yet I sometimes feel so torn-so torn from the Jewish community, from the Jews I grew up with, who nurtured me, helped me. And yet I don't understand what America has done to them and how it has seduced them. The conservatism is there and really hard to accept. But it is there, definitely there with the mainstreaming."

"I cannot end without affirming as strongly as I can my deep feelings of identification and pride in being a Jew. It was Jews who first instilled in me the meaning of oppression and its consequences. It was Jews who first taught me about socialism, class, racism and what in the fifties was called "injustice." It is from Jews that I adopted ideals that I still hold and principles that I still believe are true and must be fought for and put into practice. It was from Jews that I learned about the necessity for resistance. It was from Jews that I also learned that literature is not simply fancy words or clever metaphor, but instead is deeply, intimately connected to life, to a life that I am a part of. It is really almost impossible to compress this inheritance into a single paragraph. But I know its depth and vitality, and I know that I have absorbed it thoroughly into my consciousness."

"because "history stops for no one," Klepfisz has gone on to write a poetry of uncompromising complexity, clothed in apparently simple, even spare language-simple and bare as the stage of a theatre in which strict economies of means release a powerful concentrate of feeling."

"At age 2, Klepfisz escaped with her mother from the Warsaw Ghetto and then lived in hiding until the end of World War II. Arriving in America via Sweden, Klepfisz struggled to master English in public school while attending Yiddish supplementary school and speaking Polish at home. For Klepfisz, poetry — in English — was also a hiding place, a “private language” where no teacher could criticize her hesitant use of new words. But the linguistic shifts remained daunting. “Words attach themselves to our most intimate experiences,” she told the Forward. “When you move into a new language, you lose that intimacy, and it’s a tremendous trauma.” Klepfisz treats that trauma through her own poetry, which braids Yiddish into English, and by translating the works of Yiddish women writers. To Klepfisz, who grew up with a deep awareness of the lost life of Jewish Warsaw, the supposed parallel between Yiddish and Irish is not so strange. “We each have a goldene keyt,” she said, using the expression “golden chain” that signifies the Yiddish literary tradition."

"This is the confusion. Being Jewish. Being a lesbian. Being an American. It all converges. It is like feelings about one's parents. Love and embarrassment. The painful realization that they are not perfect."

"The venerable Polish-Jewish culture that Irena Klepfisz was born into was destroyed by Nazi genocide. She has committed herself to the cause of keeping Yiddish (the mother tongue) and Yiddishkayt (the Yiddish way of life) alive. Much of her poetry, essays, and plays as well as lectures, teaching, and social and political activism is devoted to this end...At the margins of poetry and prose she writes with clarity and precision about cataclysmic moments that occurred in her very young life, bringing the reader into her nightmarish world. Klepfisz's harsh view of America comes from the poet's loyalty to the socialism of the Jewish labor movement; her vision is that of a secular Jew. "I was taught that capitalism oppresses the working masses and all poor people, that it has to be smashed, and that we are to work toward building a classless society.""

"When it comes to the bottom line, the Moral Majority is Christian. So is the Ku Klux Klan. So is the Nazi Party. And I am completely stymied that large segments of the Jewish population have not absorbed these simple basic facts."

"I asked Irena: What makes up our Goldene Kayt on the feminist left? “I think you have to find it,” she replied. “The links are there, but you have to put it together into a chain.” She spoke to me about the attempts that feminists and lesbians made to find their forebears and write a history of their own. “We discovered all these women that we never heard of. They were there. They lived. They made an imprint on the world. It’s just that they were never put together. The Goldene Kayt is there. We just have to fashion it.”"

"What Klepfisz is: a survivor who studies survival, who lays out the cost of surviving in her poems and bears witness to those who did not survive. The accounts of which she is the keeper are the accounts of a destroyed small world in Jewish Poland, a culture, a civilization that is no longer extant...She operates from a stark but deep compassion. Nothing is stated in these poems; all happens. I've never read a better sequence about political prisoners.""

"Klepfisz is one of those rare North American artists who, within and by means of her art, explores the material conditions by which the creative impulse, which belongs to no gender, race, or class, can be realized or obstructed."

"I write as much out of a Jewish consciousness as I do out of a lesbian/feminist consciousness. They are both always there, no matter what topic I might be working on. They are embedded in my writing, embedded and enmeshed to the point that they are not necessarily distinguishable as discrete elements. They merge and blend and blur, for in many ways they are the same."

"Endurance, repression, survival, exclusion, absurdity, and work are the themes which drive this relentless poetry. Klepfisz is more than equal to the task of translating her formidable consciousness into splendid language. The poetry takes many forms: narrative, sonnet, journal entry, prose....The mood of the poetry is grim, cynical, ironic. The clarity and simplicity of her language are breathtaking."

"Her verses on rebel womanhood, violent histories, queer love, and dissident, diasporic identity are urgent reading for the present."

"I am also angry that Jews have somehow, during this process, gotten stuck—I'm not sure if that's the right word, but I don't know how else to express it. They have been unable to absorb the experience of the Holocaust, have not learned how to transcend the catastrophe. They've mistakenly thought that to transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it's kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression—not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression."

"Irena Klepfisz's work is an essential part of this poetry of cultural re-creation. It begins with a devastating exterior event, the destruction of European Jewry in the Nazi period through the technologically organized genocide known as the Holocaust, or, in Yiddish, der khurbn. (Klepfisz has written: "The Yiddish word was important, for, unlike the term Holocaust, it resonated with yidishe geshikhte, Jewish history, linking the events of World War II with der ershter un tsveyter khurbn, the First and Second Destruction (of the Temple).""

"I did grow up with a real prejudice against religion. And I think to some degree I still have it. But at the same time, I have to respect the fact that there are intelligent, well-meaning people who, you know, believe it. And I can’t get around that. And if I want them on my side, I have to treat them with respect and with knowledge and not be ignorant in the same way that I would like other people to be respectful of me and not be ignorant about who I am."

"the role of poetry in the women’s movement and during the second wave, was just so important and so visible."

"the Bund was started with 13 people in a crummy attic and Vilna and it became a mass movement. And I know it from my own experience of what happened in the lesbian feminist movement and the women’s movement, somebody like Gloria Anzaldúa, who’s now being taught in women’s studies classes. Audre Lorde, who’s being taught in women’s studies classes. And we started, you know, Conditions and Persephone Press. Kitchen Table, This Bridge Called My Back, I mean, that was just started by two or three people. You know, and it’s sort of amazing what happened. And who would have predicted it? They didn’t predict it, they just wanted to do it! They wanted to publish something and so they did."

"I think the thing is that being a secular Jew in a committed, conscious way, not just by default or by absence, but rather with content, is hard work. I mean, you have to work on it. It’s not like you have a synagogue to walk into. You know, it’s not like there’s an institution that you can walk in."

"if you’re ever interested in looking at what happened in the women’s movement, in the lesbian movement, around Israel, you should read Yours in Struggle, which has an article by Barbara Smith, an African-American lesbian, Minnie Bruce Pratt, about being a white Southern lesbian, and Elly Bulkin who does an entire survey of what went on around Israel and Zionism on magazines, on collectives. I mean, it was a breaking. It was one of those issues that just broke people up completely."

"I think mourning six million without having a clue who they were, where they came from, what their lives are like, is meaningless. I really believe it’s meaningless. You have to know what you’re mourning. And there’s a real resistance, I don’t know what it’s about."

"when you go into a bookstore and you look at Judaica, for example, the majority of the books are either on Israel or the Holocaust. Those are the two main topics of books. And that’s a shame. Because there is this incredibly rich history. And also you should know what was destroyed and what was possible. I think that’s one of the things that the Bund did was to show what was possible."

"If someone were to ask me did I think a Jewish Holocaust was possible in this country, I would answer immediately: "Of course." Has not America had other holocausts? Has not America exterminated others, those it deemed undesirable or those in its way? Are there not holocausts going on right now in this country? Why should I believe it will forever remain benevolent towards the non-Christian who is the source of all its troubles, the thief of all its wealth, the commie betrayer of its secrets, the hidden juggler of its power, the killer of its god? Why should I believe that, given the right circumstances, America will prove kind to the Jew? That given enough power to the fascists, the Jew will remain untouched?"