Academics From Poland

"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."

"One of the nice things I like to do is to get bilingual books, both in Yiddish and now in Polish...I have, like, poetry which is in Polish on one side and English on the other. And that's sort of an interesting way, also, for me to think about poetry and look at things."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I think there’s a strand of people who say you have to speak Yiddish, and you have to speak it correctly. I don’t want the movement to become elitist. It used to be that Hebrew was the loshon ha-kodesh [holy language]. I don’t want Yiddish to become a holy language. I want it to be of the people, which is the way that it always was. I think that’s something to guard against."

"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.""

"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).""

"There was a thousand-year-old tradition in Poland that I feel far closer to than the religious traditions based on Torah and Talmud and halakha. Now much of that tradition is religious. But it represents my history, my Polish Jewish ancestors. Poland is the center of my Jewish cultural roots, and the destruction of that center in Eastern Europe has created the deprivation of my life. My mission is to try to figure out how to continue here. So in that sense I don't accept the Zionist premises of Diaspora and homeland-that dichotomy. I feel Jews can be Jews anywhere. They might have to work on it in different ways depending on the contexts, hostilities, support, and so on. But they have to figure it out. So, yes-neither Israel nor the Bible is the core of my Jewish Identity. (GP: Can you say what it is? Is it memory?) IK: For me it is language and culture. What the Jewish Labor Bund called national cultural autonomy…Language by itself really doesn't mean anything to me. It's because a language is the medium of a whole culture, of a literature, of a politics (socialism) that language-Yiddish-takes on meaning. Now the question for me is what happens to that combination of language and culture here in the United States. I'm someone who is currently active in translating. I don't want that Yiddish heritage lost to the Jews here who can't read Yiddish. So simultaneously when I translate I'm also proselytizing for people to study Yiddish so that they can read the original. What I don't know is whether we can in fact have a secular culture-meaning one not based on religious practice and ritual or on religious texts-here in the United States as they did in Europe. They had the Yiddish language to define it, we do not. Of course, I'm hoping we can and will."

"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."

"Experience has obviously taught me that Jews are not the only ones in danger and that what is "undesirable" in me is not limited to my Jewishness."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"At thirteen I tried silence. At sixteen I tried anonymity. I have since learned these are not the only options."

"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."

"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."

"As I grew older, I learned the full breadth of Yiddish literature; but this early introduction with its inherent political vision became as powerful an influence in my life as did the war."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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?"

"These early attitudes, the post-World War II push toward assimilation and American Jewry's increased involvement and identification with Israel, have made their mark on the present generation. When I would tell people that I was teaching Yiddish, most-especially Jews-were amused. Over and over again, I heard: "How cute!" I would counter that Yiddish is a language like any other. Generations of Jews in Western and Eastern Europe spoke it and wrote it, just like any other people in any other language. But here in America what had been mame-loshn to millions of Ashkenazi Jews, what had been a medium through which Jewish history, culture, politics, ethics were transmitted, had become a joke, a joke usually made by Jews, a joke now so Americanized it has become the property of the gentile mainstream."

"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."

"I do not accept the assumption that there exist two distinct Jewish worlds-progressive and mainstream (or traditional)—all of whose values and norms are always in conflict. My experience as a feminist and a lesbian is that the Jewish world we call progressive has been often as slow and reluctant to deal with feminist and gay issues as the mainstream Jewish world. Some advances have been made and many, though not all, Jewish progressives have reached the stage of paying obligatory lipservice and ensuring token representation at progressive events. But a clear-cut commitment to fighting sexism and homophobia and a dedication to gaining full rights for gays have not evoked the same passions which the struggles for rights of other minorities evoke. Most Jewish feminists and gays that I know remain angry and frustrated by Jewish progressives. Deeply committed to progressive causes, frequently in the vanguard of political action, Jewish feminists and gays find ourselves fighting for the rights of others without the secure knowledge that others will fight for us. Most of the time we fight sexist and heterosexist battles alone in both these worlds."

"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."

"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."

"Perhaps this experience as a lesbian and feminist is the reason I try to avoid the "us" and "them" division and try to find common ground in both worlds from which to launch various battles. The "us" and "them" division-"us" meaning progressives and "them" being the mainstream-is too simple and veils a more complex reality. It also smacks of smugness and self-righteousness, which I find alienating. It assumes that the progressive world has everything to offer the mainstream and the mainstream's main activity is to unlearn its evil ways. This is neither useful nor accurate. I am, for example, often pained by the ignorance of many Jewish progressives in relation to Jewish history, culture, and religion and wish we would have more contact with the mainstream community and get our Jewishness on firmer ground."

"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."

"Defining and setting Jewish boundaries, prioritizing Jewish concerns and Jewish needs (especially less concrete ones like identity building) are particularly difficult for those of us who have learned to value and respect other cultures and peoples."

"there needs to be greater communication between Jewish progressives and the Jewish mainstream, there needs to be an exchange, bartering if you will. If such exchanges do not take place we will still be progressives, but not Jewish progressives...There needs to be among us a greater sense of an exchange between equals rather than between givers and receivers. If this sense of mutual respect does not exist, then we progressives will surely be forever seen as outsiders."

"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."

"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."

"Like most activists and artists, I have difficulty establishing priorities. The tension between being active in the world and needing solitude is one all of us struggle with. I find myself discussing this tension with other Jews, particularly in regard to our activism on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Not an abstract discussion."

"Let us not take the attitude that because of our politics we must remain pure and not mix with the Jewish rabble-the mainstream. Let us be as willing to meet with Jews in small community centers in our neighborhoods as we are to meet with Palestinians. The work to be done at these centers and synagogues is as critical as the work needed to resolve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict."

"Though the Middle East is "far away," Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza remain close to our hearts, to our Jewish identity. We discuss the U.S. government's role in the region, the connections between defense spending and the homeless, between Third World people's solidarity with the Palestinians and the tensions between Jews and other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. But these are not, I believe, at the core of our involvement. Israel retains a special place on our list of priorities because it is a Jewish state and we are Jews and cannot disengage ourselves from its fate. It pushes us psychologically, gnaws at our sense of personal responsibility. It keeps us constantly focused and conscious of our Jewish identity."

"since Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatilla camps' massacres, I have experienced a slow disorientation around my Jewish identity. Israeli policies have caused me to question the adequacy of how I defined myself as a Jew. Like those Jews who until '82 were not focused on Israel, I felt discomfort and then rage about Israel's relationship to Palestinians and an increasing urgency about working to resolve the conflict. With great resistance, I have accepted that events in Israel and in the Occupied Territories-no matter how I defined myself as a Jew-affect my vision of myself as a Jew, my Jewish pride, my sense of how Jewish issues are to be prioritized."

"For too long our preoccupation with Israel (either in the form of Zionism or fundraising for Israel as the primary content of our Jewish identity or in the form of political opposition to Israeli government actions) has prevented us from seeing and dealing with Jewish identity, and Jewish life in the U.S."

"For some, the symbolic gesture of unequivocally supporting Israel (morally and/or financially) has been the core and sole expression of Jewish identity. As they begin-with great resistance and probably in secrecy-to question that support, they find themselves unable to define their Jewishness, particularly if they are not observant. Other Jews, active for the first time on a "Jewish" issue by opposing Israeli government policies, are also struggling to define their Jewishness and explain their emotional involvement with a country which, until now, they never identified with. The "far away" crisis is triggering the recognition of an emptiness in the Jewish self."

"We mustn’t let our hands be bound by commitments to third parties who do not meet their own obligations."

"Communism finished in Poland 25 years ago, on 4th June 1989. We tore down the Iron Curtain of propaganda and lies to be able to live in the truth. We tore down the Iron Curtain which the authorities of the People’s Republic used to hide behind, in order to build a democracy, a system where authorities are held responsible before the citizens. On that day, for the first time, elections were no propagandist fiction but the making of a real choice."

"We do not want to diminish the achievements of others, but we want (...) others to remember that freedom began in Poland."

"The wish for freedom is contagious, that's why all tyrants fear it. Freedom seen from close up inspires human strivings. Its triumphant march began in Poland."

"We need to think how not to respond only to the crisis in Ukraine, not to extinguish the political, economic and military fire, but to start systematically support the modernization of Ukraine, to help it and itself to realize national goals."

"Everybody knows that voters dislike pay increases for politicians, and they enjoy it when money is taken away from politicians."

"Poland seeks European solidarity notably by the deepening of the integration process and among other things by the deepening of the principle of solidarity between nations."

"If in so many places we are witness to conflicts that entail the death of thousands of people and humanitarian dramas, this happens as a rule due to a failure to observe fundamental human rights. Entire communities and nations are denied influence over political decisions. Power without control is in most cases, corrupt and self-loving, incapable of lifting countries out of underdevelopment and poverty."