Poets From Poland

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In a different vein, Klepfisz's poems to women lovers probe with a questioning scrutiny what happens in bed, in relationship. Sometimes, as in "periods of stress" dry humor laces vulnerability; always there is compassion for both self and other."

"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."

"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."

""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 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.""

"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).""

"the Holocaust. I find it almost impossible to write that word because here-in America-the word has lost almost all meaning. And the fault lies with both non-Jews and Jews. It lies with the "American way of life," with the process of Americanization, with American Big Business, with commercialism, with posing, with artificial feelings...I find-and am repeatedly stunned by it-that people (including non-Jews) insist on dredging it up. Writers, for example, who have no feelings or connection to the war, insist on it as literary metaphor, as an epigraph, as some kind of necessary addition. A casual allusion to Auschwitz. An oblique reference to the Warsaw Ghetto. Somehow this "sprinkling" of Jewish experiences is thought to reflect sensitivity, a largeness of heart. And of course it does not. It is simply the literary Holocaust, the Holocaust of words that has nothing to do with fact. It is nothing more than a pose. I must say that my teeth grind whenever I see these gratuitous gestures-usually devoid of any Jewish context, devoid of any sense of the Jewish experience or history."

"I've been thinking a lot about it lately, about the corruption here in America, how everything becomes big business, how everything becomes diseased. Everything."

"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.""

"As a writer I still cherish poetry that tells a story, especially the dramatic monologue. I still value most a poetry that deals with people, especially those alienated and out of the mainstream-the overworked and dreamless, Third World, women, gay-a subdued, earnest poetry that expresses their feelings, their struggles, the conditions of their lives."

"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."

"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."

"I want my Yiddish involvement to be rooted in my life, in the present, want it to be infused with my contemporary politics and concerns, with the special quality of Jewish American experience. Di yidishe svive in the American environment. One world, not two. That's what will keep Yiddish alive for me."

"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."

"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."

"How can I say to people that for the survivors with whom I grew up the Holocaust never ended? That all my life I will feel the loss of never having known my father, never even having a photograph of him after the age of seventeen. That all my life I will feel the loss of aunts and cousins and grandparents I never knew. That my mother still stacks shelves and shelves of food-just in case. That twenty years after the war, when some plaster fell down from the living room ceiling, she froze with fear because she thought we were being bombed...The Holocaust was not an event that ended in 1945-at least not for the survivors. Not for me. It continued on and on because my mother and I were alone."

"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."

"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 very much admired the people that went on the Birthrights and interrupted them, the trips, and insisted on asking questions and then were forced off. I think that was just great. I have to say, I think there is, it’s not only anti Zionism, I think it’s a general, that there’s a very young generation now, and I don’t know where they are culturally or secularly, but I think politically that they have stopped being afraid of the Jewish establishment and they have refused to accept what they’re being told. And they’re challenging. And that, I think, is just wonderful. Because they don’t want to say the Holocaust is untouchable and you can’t compare anything and blah, you know that. And they don’t want to say you can’t let me talk about Palestinians, you know, I’m going to talk about them, I’m not going to be silenced."

"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."

"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?"

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

"When the Jews finally staged the uprising in April 1943, the Polish underground refused them almost every form of assistance. Even though they were facing the same enemy, even though their country was occupied, the Poles could not overcome their anti-Semitism and join the Jews in the struggle for the freedom of both groups, and instead chose to stage a separate Polish uprising more than a year later."

"Jewish poet Irena Klepfisz writes in the mame-loshn, Yiddish, the mother tongue, even her fragmentary version of it, as an act of reclamation, to salvage what is left, "this echo of a European era and culture in which I never lived and about which I have only heard second-hand like a family story.""

"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."

"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."

"Repeatedly, I find that I am preoccupied not with countering anti-Semitism, but with trying to prove that anti-Semitism exists, that it is serious, and that, as lesbian/feminists, we should be paying attention to it both inside and outside of the movement."

"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."

"I want the issue of anti-Semitism to be incorporated into our overall struggle because there are lesbian/feminists among us who are threatened in this country not only as lesbians, but also as Jews. If that incorporation simply takes the form of adding us on to the already existing list of problems, then it will be mere tokenism and lip service. But if it includes self-examination, analysis of the Jew in America, and dialogue between Jews and non-Jews, then I think this movement will have made a real attempt to deal with the issue."

"As a child, my first conscious feeling about being Jewish was that it was dangerous, something to be hidden."

"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."

"For me, Israel played no important role. And like I say, I mean, I longed for Poland, not for Jerusalem."

"We formed Conditions magazine so we felt we were doing something really constructive and something that we really believed in. And we were going to change literature. And I think we did."

"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."

"di bavegung, "the movement," has pushed, encouraged, and given me space, like it has to many women who lacked confidence in their skills and in the value of their perspectives. Above all, it challenged me to present publicly what I discuss privately, to raise issues that I care about and that are central to my experience as a feminist and lesbian, as a Jew sorting out my identity and my relationship to Jewish history, as an American Jew defining my relationship to events in the Middle East."

"I did teach, and I may start again next semester, for ten years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. And I always sort of considered that part of -- I don't know where the desire came to do that. It's something that I really love doing, and it -- you know, it made me see and opened up a whole part of sort of American justice system and society. But I felt it was very much in keeping sort of with my Bundist connection, even though it had nothing to do with Yiddish or Jews necessarily, or anything else. But it did have a lot to do with fairness and justice."

"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."