Irena Klepfisz

"It seems to me that there are sort of multiple American Jewish identities. One is the Zionist identity -- that I'm a Jew because I'm a Zionist, and I don't have to do anything else, but I can support Israel and I'm a Jew. And then, there's the observant one -- the one that's -- you know, you go to the synagogue. And the secularists -- I mean, when my -- when I first wrote my essay, "Secular Jewish Identity: Yiddishkayt in America" in "Tribe of Dina," which was, like, in, I don't know, '83, '84, people came up to me and said, I didn't realize I was a secularist...there was also this other identity which had to do with the Holocaust, and it had to do with either identifying yourself as a survivor or identifying yourself as the first generation or second and now third, where your identity is Jewish because of your connection to the Holocaust."

"The arts, I think, are very affirming -- affirming, even when they're depressing."

"My students always -- when they want to talk about activism, are always worried that they're not -- you know, Well, we only have four or five people. And I tell them, "Don't worry about that." You know, four or five people can do a lot. And you don't know where you're gonna end up."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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.""

"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 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.”"

"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 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.""

"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 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."

"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."

""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,"

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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.""

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

"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."

"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.""