I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl. Thanks for joining me here at Nice Jewish Books. Hello, today, I have a special treat for our podcast. I've had several listeners asked me if I would ever consider having a poet discussing poetry on the podcast. And while I love the idea, I've always been a little intimidated by it. I really don't know how to talk about poetry. So I was talking with my Association of Jewish libraries colleague Yerrmiyahu Ahron Taub about life, literature, libraries as one is want to do. And he mentioned that he had a poet friend that he would love to interview. So I was very interested in this idea. And then he mentioned the name, Irena Klepfisz, and I was thrilled. So in my college years, the three Bibles on my shelf were Our Bodies Ourselves, Nice Jewish Girls and the Tribe of Dina which Irena, edited with Melanie Kay Kantrowitz, it just helped save my soul during a lot of transitional times in my life. So I am really thrilled to have both Yermiyahu Ahron Taub and Irena Klepfisz here on the podcast today, Yermiyahu will be doing the the bulk of the interviewing and I'm going to mute myself and just soak in their their love of literature and poetry, I hand over to you Yermiyahu..
Thank you so much, Sheryl. It is my great pleasure to welcome you Irena Klepfisz to nice Jewish books. Irina is a lesbian, poet, essayist, political activist, Yiddishist, practicing secular Jew, and the author of Her Birth, and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971 to 19, excuse me to 2021. The book was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award, and a winner of the Audrey Lorde award for lesbian poetry. Irana Welcome to nice Jewish folks.
Hi, hi. Hello, Ahrnele. I know by the name of Ahrnele. And I'm really, really pleased that the two of us can finally have a conversation. We've known each other for a really, really long time. But we've never really sat down and sort of talk shop, say. So I think it'll be I'm looking forward to this conversation. Because it's, I think, been a long time and coming.
Thank you so much. And thank you again for this magnificent book. And congratulations on its success.
Thank you so much.
So as the book subtitle states, the poems here cover a span of 50 years. Can you talk about how this new collection came about?
It was a big surprise to me. Actually, what happened was the I had published a collection in 1990, a Few Words in the Mother Tongue. And the next decade, I was very involved mostly with prose writing on Yiddish, on performance pieces, essays. And I was doing a lot of organizing around Yiddish. And I did not publish any poetry and starting in the arts. I was I was writing poetry. I continued writing poetry, but I wasn't focused on publishing. And eventually, a Few Words in the Mother Tongue went out of print. And after my partner Judy died, and then two years later, my mother died, I decided to get back my rights to a Few Words in the Mother Tongue, and at the same time, because I wanted it to go into public domain. And I then went through all my journals and started looking at poetry that I had written and that I had never published or even tried to publish. And I came up with a book called a collection called Her Birth and Later Years, and my friend Julie, my good friend, Juliet Endzer, who's the editor of Sinister Wisdoms loved the book, and wanted to send the .. and sent to basically to Wesleyan for them to public They really liked it, but they thought it was too short. And so then Julie had the great idea of well, this other stuff is out of print, put together the whole book. And that's how the book was. And we sent it back to Wesleyan. And they accepted it. It was a very, it was not anything I had planned or thought about. And it was very easy. They were very eager to do it. And I had no problems. It was just remarkable, frankly, as a publishing story. I mean, I didn't look for a publisher, I didn't get rejected. It was like, it was an amazing, it was out of mind. It was a new experience. Let me put it that way.
So in putting together a collection, and you know, ushering it through that process, did you end up thinking about your poems differently? Do you find that they breathe live in unexpected ways in this new collection?
No, I think I mean, I think it's a very interesting process. You know, when I was doing the galleys, I had to look at material that I had written 50 years ago. I mean, it was very strange in a certain way, I was a different person. I mean, you know, there's, I mean, I'm, when I was doing this, I was like, 80, 81, I'm when I was when I had published some of this. I was like, in my early 30s. I mean, it's a big difference in terms of where I was in my life. And, and I was, so I think experimenting. I mean, I think one of the things, I mean, I evaluated my poetry very differently, I think, I think I thought more of the early stuff in 1990 than I did now. But now I sort of thought of them as really interesting. And sort of, I had some distance and seeing my development. And I was very interested in the fact in the very early poem, for example, in Searching for My Father's Body, which is like 1974, or something 73 or 71, even, I stuck in just I stuck into the poem, like, paragraphs from books. I mean, it was sort of an odd thing to do, or is not a traditionally poetic thing to do. And I thought about it and thinking about it, I thought it was kind of chutzbadik and a little bit. You know, nervy? Because I was not really skilled yet, when I would consider it. I didn't hadn't developed craft yet. But it was clear that I was trying to form I was trying to make poetry do for me what I wanted it to do, even though it looked bizarre. Do you know what I mean? I mean, yes, it wasn't, it was, it was not very conventional. And I'm not sure it was very poetic, but I think it reflects the kind of the thing that I've been very focused on most, most of my time is form and how to how to write a certain poem, and that each poem has its own form. And they're not going to all look the same. And they're not going to all sound the same. And, and I think I was doing that from a very, very early time not doing it really necessarily well, but I was seeing sort of the struggle and and for me, just personally, it's sort of interesting to have these early things to look at. And to see, to sort of see how they reflect that I was really thinking about these things, though, I'm not sure even that I could have articulated it that way.
So you didn't take out any of the poems from the earlier books for this collection, correct?
No, no, no. And in fact, now, what happened was that in 1990, I put in some poems that hadn't been published before, like, searching for my father's body had never been published before. So yeah. And also, for example, the poems
even though it's dated 1971. Right, right,
because that's when it was written. That's right. And so I was exactly. I was exactly 30. I mean, that was an interesting year. I mean, I had just thought of it right now. Because that was my birth. And I was very associated with my I was born on my father's birthday. And he was killed three days after my second and his 30th birthday. So 1970 ones, not that I think of it, I have to say, this is a first I haven't put this together before that I wrote that poem in 1971, which was my 30th birthday, and was a real crisis for me, sort of getting past my father's birthday is sort of interesting. Now that I think about it. I didn't think about it credible. Yeah. I've just had this epiphany about my own roles that I didn't have before we started talking.
Yeah, well, I do want to get back to your father's presence. But one other question about the social media, the political media, out of which so much of your work arises. And in your acknowledgments, you know, as a poet, I was Fortunate beneficiary of the parentheses mostly unpaid laborers of countless lesbians and feminists, who ran bookstores, coffee houses, conferences and distribution centers, and who published women's newspapers and journals during the women's movement. So you've already mentioned that this book is published by University Press. Is this your first book of poems not published by a feminist or lesbian feminist press?
Absolutely.
And if so, how did the experience compare? Were there continuities I think one of them was Out and Out bookS
Out and Out books was the very first one but it wasn't really when we did it. This was for, it's for self published self published that there was Jan Clawson, Elly Balkan and Joan Larken and published the first version of Amazon poetry which became Lesbian poetry collect writer, bigger collection later, and Joan Larken and published Housework. And we all self published our books because and put imprint on it, we pretended we had a press because vanity, it was considered vanity presses were considered, you know, really looked down on but nobody was going to publish us to begin with. And so Out and Out Books was a fiction. We each paid for our own books, we each had printed separately and so on. The next was, I mean, I've published with lesbian with Persephone press, with Eighth mountain press, [other press], and even Nice Jewish Girls was originally published by Persephone, which was a lesbian for us. And then there was the, there was Found treasures, the Yiddish women's collection that I wrote the introduction to, that was published by a Canadian Feminist Press. So they were either women's presses, or they were lesbian. And Wesleyan. I mean, I just never imagined I have to say that I would be published by any sort of main I mean, you know, this Ahrnele that university presses aren't exactly mainstream, but um, but in a certain way, they are mainstream. I mean, they're associated with academics, you know, your academic institutions and so on. And they're some some of my, of my sort of contemporaries managed to cross over, but I just didn't until this collection. And I was just shocked. It was a very, it's been a totally different experience, I think for a number of reasons, one of which everybody had was COVID changed a lot of stuff, um, in terms of I'm immunocompromised, so is limited, sometimes limited about what I can do a little more easy now. But when the book first came out, we were in the middle of COVID. And, but the main thing besides COVID, even if it hadn't been COVID, and I talked about this to other my contemporary writers, women writers. When we published in the 70s 80s, and early 90s, we could go to any city that had a woman's bookstore, and we could give a reading and we had an audience in which we understood each other that the givens were we didn't have to talk about the givens. We didn't have to excuse ourselves for talking about lesbian stuff we didn't have to. It was even if you didn't know a single person in that city, it was just a very kind of Hamish experience, because everybody was reading Off Our Backs or Gay Community News. And we all knew the same things, you know, there was a common context. And first of all, all my readings since the book has come out have been on Zoom. I did no, I apologize. I did two readings, one at YIVO and one at a university. But I had to wear a mask until I got up on the stage, you know, very weird, but they were audiences. I mean, with YIVO, it was different because there was this Jewish audience. Some a lot of people that I knew in New York, if I do meetings in like, if I would do reading in Barnes and Noble, I mean, to me, it's very alien. I mean, the whole it's a very, I don't feel I know who my readership is, in a way, or who the audience for this book.
There's still independent bookstores, but they're struggling, they're barely hanging on. And it's not the same as that immediate network of feminist queer bookstores that flourished or strong but were there
is there but it's but what what surrounds them is not the same thing. You know what I mean? I mean, I mean, I remember when bookstores were packed with people dying to see many brews Gloria Anzahl. Do you know Judy Gron I mean, it was like, rock stars kind of, and, and that's just not the same. I mean, the movement isn't there to sort of, I mean, it really was we were supported by the moon. have meant, I mean, that was it. That was really I think, and when you publish, like with Wesleyan, which was, they were really wonderful to me. I mean, I'm just amazed at the whole experience, it was one of the easiest things I've ever been through. And then now even doing, they're going to do a paperback, which I'm really happy about there. So because one thing that I don't like, the price, but that's how it is. But so it's very, just very different. It's a very, I don't really know where this book is going. Do you know what I mean? I mean, it was like, I don't know who it's reached, where it's reached. And then so far, I mean, you know, this hour that reviews take a very long time. And so I'm still waiting, I know that it's been reviewed some, I'm hoping it will be reviewed more. So I don't know, it's just a very different experience. It's much more isolated, feels more isolated than the experience I've had before in the movement.
You're going on, there are a number of key family members who figure prominently in the book, including your father, we've mentioned already your mother, your aunt Gaina. And there's the book begins with a poem, which you've already mentioned about your father called Searching for my father's body. The footnotes section begins with a poem called March 1939. Warsaw, Poland. And I'd like to ask you to read March 1939, Warsaw, Poland, and maybe set it up for us before
I had, will be happy. i My father is the last time I saw my father. I was one and a half. I mean, he died when I was two, like I said, and he was 30. And I knew very little about him. He was very much a figure in the community I grew up with because he was associate he was a participant and an organizer of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And he was when we had Memorial meetings, his, you know, his one photograph that I have of him, was always on the stage. And it's not even, it's not a photograph of when he was an adult, it's a photograph. It's a school Id like you know, 18, 19 years old. So he was always this sort of very heroic figure. My mother did not like talking about him. And she was quite very silent. I mean, she didn't want to answer a lot of questions. She, I think she had her own logic about why I think she was essentially angry with him for for dying. She was on the Aryan side, he went, chose to go back and died the next day, you know. And so I don't have a lot of information. And one of the earlier poems that I had about him was called about my father, which I listed about nine things I knew about him, and it was sort of one of those minimalist poems. In 2016, I was made aware that there was a file and he was an engineer. He was an engineer, he almost completed it when he died, but before the war started, rather than up and when he died, but it turned out that for some reason, his was one of the files that survived the war at the Warsaw Polytechnic, they had a complete file on him that his birth certificates, they had his requests for financial aid, they had his grades. I mean, it was very strange to suddenly come across this my mother had, by the time I found this out, my mother had died, but she also had dementia, so she wouldn't have appreciated it. And it was a shock. I mean, it was this incredible shock. And the shock was also that the last hand written note, I mean, it's the only thing I've ever held that my father actually had in hand. Wasn't it was this date this dated request for financial aid for the next semester for the fall? And it was dated March 27 1939. And as my students generally don't know, but should know, September 1 1939, was when Hitler invaded Poland. So this is like five months before the beginning of the war. Everybody knows what's going on in Germany. It's not like Poland is in a vacuum, you know. So I was very shocked. I mean, I couldn't even understand what the what this request was. It was three or four lines, but I understood the date. And the date just shocked me March 27. So close to the war. And I had this fantasy, obviously, as the poem says, I'll just read the poem, march 1939, Warsaw, Poland. I understand nothing but the date, march 27 1939. I want to whisper grab everyone and run to the nearest port, the nearest border, but he is worried about tuition. He understands oppression, hatred, slavery, torture but extermination genocide? gas ovens, Jakob, Mariam, Geena, Rikla, all his Bundist comrades fellow students, athletes and Frederick extermination I press forget the silver Bob just lays forget the books the photo albums The anniversary brutes forget diplomas Jakob Miriam's Guinness yours meiosis drawing, just tell respect to hurry and get her mother known time for goodbyes to good grace Shama use, but take the papers, money in the desk, forget the protractor, rulers, pencils, notebooks. Take the knapsacks pack scissors, clothes Relayers hat scarves a compass, remember Nealon thread and also string an extra pair of shoes. talk calmly, but hurry the old ones. Go. Run. Don't look back. Just go. Oh, Mica. Don't try to be a hero. Be my father. It's March 1939. In just five months, the butcher will begin grinding meat
Incredible poem.Yeah, that line don't try to be a hero. Just really. You can feel its reverberation. Over the decades. I do want to read something. So in preparation for our conversation, I went back to dollars on this and generations of bundests, of course the Bundt being the Jewish labor Poland group that advocated for Yiddish or Jewish national autonomy for democratic socialism, I would say social democracy. And in it they talk about your father and they say, mythos heroism was evident in 1934. He saved a child from flooded cottage when their dad's river overflowed. his heroism was lauded by the District Chief on the radio. He fought against fascist students in the Warsaw Polytechnic. He protested against the staging of a fascist play by Mussolini at the polish. Nardo V theatre was regularly seen at demonstrations, his generosity, good nature, and joyfulness created a warmth and friendliness towards him from his comrades. There was in his behavior and unpretentiousness. And he conducted himself as an ordinary soldier of the movement. And the last sentence of your father's entry and daughters bindis and reads, The widow Rosa and the little daughter, Irina, survived and are now in New York. And it just, you know, in reading this entry, it just seemed to me that so much of your life's work has been both about honoring your father's heroism and speaking about the social context, the political context, which nourished him, and your, you know, the commitment to social justice, while also expanding beyond that single line about your mother and yourself. To foreground, the work and accomplishments of women are so often left out. I wonder if you can reflect on that. It just it was just the thought that came to me as I was preparing?
Well, I'm glad you actually brought it up, because I think it's something I'm really, I did very, very consciously, I think the the awakening to feminism and the women's movement was contributed to that and made me in fact, look at the way the narrative. I mean, we like to talk about narratives that the narrative that I was handed, which was true, but incomplete. I would say it was there was nothing wrong with it, except that it wasn't a complete narrative. And I mean, I, I now, you know, when I think about it, or when I started really thinking about it, my father was killed a year and a half before the war ended. And I was really saved by my mother. I was in an orphanage at the time that the uprising happened. I was in an orphanage on the Arian side, my mother was passing. She had Arian papers. She was a maid for a Polish family. And she was left alone. I mean, she was 29 years old when he was killed. And she had a child, a hidden child in an orphanage. She had a phony papers, and the war dragged on for another year and a half. And she ended up basically when there was a second uprising. Most people confuse it called the Warsaw Uprising, which was the Polish uprising against the German It happened a year later on 44 in late August and then went on in September, which I mean, Warsaw was decimated by that. I mean, there was nothing left a wall. So after that, but my mother grabbed me she, she didn't have permission, but she basically kidnapped me from the orphanage and left the Warsaw. And she was very, she was isolated. She had lost contact with the underground. And by a miracle, she bumped into someone about a year later, that connect reconnected her. And that helped us. My point is that my father's picture hung and you know, in the auditoriums and it's Memorial meetings, but not my mother's. And my mother was you know, and the feminist movement made me aware of that. I mean, in that shout, I the prowl for a section is about her saving me. And I think, you know that one of the things that the women's movement did, I think, and that I am very, very much support is a whole redefinition of heroism. First of all, what is what is the heroism. And you know, Grace Paley is to say heroism as being able to put bread on the table when your family is hungry. That's how it was. And, and I just started seeing the narrative in a different way. And I started seeing, I mean, everybody that I knew whether they were Native Americans, or whether they were Chicanos, or they were African Americans, one of the effects of the women's movements, everybody went back to their home community and said, Where are the women? You know, everybody had the same kind of, you know, limited narrative and wanted suddenly. So, when I turned to Yiddish and Yiddish culture, or Bundist women wonders, or thought about my mother, I was, people think that this is very, you know, I don't know what, but it was really what everybody was doing. I did something except I did it towards the ocean Jews and you know, Jewish women. But mostly everybody I knew did that, you know, I want somebody said something about how special being an activist we're, well, ugly, well, you younger than I am. But you know, when I came out, anybody who came out was a had to be an activist. I mean, you couldn't avoid it. I think you were you were on the front lines in your whole life all the time dealing with stuff. So I don't consider it that oh, that, you know, unique or special or whatever. I mean. And so I think feminism, I think changed the way I looked at history changed the way I looked at my own history. And was incredibly, I think, transforming for me, and certainly coming out. I mean, that was a to me, that was a major shift. I don't know, we've never talked about coming out stories about I mean, something to talk about. But when I came out, it was like, the Holocaust took a different place in my brain. It was like I was coming into the present. And I had to deal with present issues that my parents had never even heard of. I mean, who knew about you know, gays? I don't know. They knew about them and certainly didn't talk about it in the Bund.
I always wondered about that. Yeah, like, there had to have the there's always been,
they were Yeah, hidden. And they were Yeah.
I've been everyone kind of knew and they just couldn't. It was unspeakable. Yeah. It was unspeakable.
And I mean, I suspect and I don't know for sure that my aunt my father's sister was was gay.
I was literally going to ask you that her picture. I mean, she is so Butch I know. It's like I don't know if you can see any blurry but I assume she is I know that. I mean, she literally looks like a young man. Incredible face. So powerful, strong faith.
She had a very, very close friend that a non Jew I mean, yeah, non Jew, a Polish woman who is my father and my aunt both were very close to these two sisters who are in the Peppa S, which was the Polish Socialist Party. And they will not choose and they have these two sisters that some of these guys help one of them. The other one not Manashah that was married to a Jew and Anna never married and I'm suddenly Manashah never married. And I met her after the war. And her love for my aunt was hard to describe. And I just suspected that they were lovers. I mean, she asked me at one point if she could be we had of my aunt was passing when she died. So she was buried in the Catholic cemetery. And she said my mother after the war, my mother had her name real name put down on a budget sheet Manasha asked me if she could be buried with her. And she asked to be buried with her but it didn't happen. But anyway, there were lots of small things aside from that which which have reinforced the photograph, you know, and so I'm sure there were but look gay and trans issues were not on anybody's, you know, the anarchists, designers and socialists, the communists nobody had that on their radar, you know? I mean, let's face it, it's hard, maybe,
actually, there was several times at least one time, where Ian mentioned in the essay about your father, this about, he was arrested, but they didn't think he was Jewish. They just thought he was a smuggler. So but of course, later, I mean, he evaded arrest so many different times.
He was he could pass easily the time that he was arrested. Yeah, they thought he was Polish. It was this polish smuggler. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, his contacts with non Jews were really important. During because he went in and out of the ghetto very frequently. He, he brought, he brought me out, he brought my mother out, he brought a lot of people out. But he also smuggled arms. And he smuggled all the, I guess, chemicals that they needed for the Molotov cocktails, because he set up these small kind of factories in the ghetto before the uprising for them with Molotov cocktails. So he moved, I mean, he moved very, very easily. So he was lucky that he was in that he was that looks matter of let's put it that way. It looks now. Yep.
So I have a couple of sort of technical, technical poetry type, poetics type of questions. So in, maybe I'm just kind of making too much of this. But it seems like, at least in a lot of your early work, there aren't a lot of commas. And also, there isn't a lot of capitalization, there's some. But there's also definitely whole sequences where you avoid capitalization, and commas. And I'm wondering if, if you feel like they somehow interrupt the flow of words, or distract from the visual experience? Or, or maybe it's like a gesture to kind of reframe what's possible in the poetics. In your poetics. I wonder if you could just reflect on those kinds of questions.
I think there are times, it's not exactly kind of directly logical in the sense or that I could rational, I would rather say it's non rational. It's not irrational, but it's non rational, kind of instinctive thing, there are times when it depends on the voice I'm using. And sometimes when I'm using what I would consider a, an unexpressed voice that's not really talking out loud, I would use lowercase and try to minimize a kind of, I don't know if it works, but it's just an instinctual thing. Like with the monkeys, for example, or some of those early poems, I think, especially in periods of stress, you know, when I've, I had a very brief, I came out when I was 33. And I came out four years after Stonewall, and at the same time that I lost my first and only full time teaching job at LIU. And I decided at that point, when I lost my job, I was gonna go out to the ocean and write poetry. I'd always wanted to write live by the ocean ...
you lost your job as a result of coming out?
No, no, no. Oh, no, I'm very glad it all happened at this. And so I decided to draw, I learned I didn't know how to drive. I learned how to drive. I got a car and I went out to Montauk. And I had this brief relationship with this woman to try to figure out who the hell I was. I was 33 years old. 34. And a lot of the poetry, the poetry that you're talking about, kind of were written at the beginning there because I was trying to figure out who the hell I was. I didn't know if I was gay. I had never thought of it. I thought about it. But I think it was because I passed my father's 30th birthday because I had sort of dealt with my survival, guilt and all kinds of things. I was ready to sort of enter the prison when I entered, and which is why I never talked about sexuality because it wasn't on. I wasn't, I was in the past. I had to get out of the past. And so I went to Montauk. And so a lot of the poems there are sort of my very internal I don't know how they read to other people. I mean, to me, it's kind of I'm not that crazy about them, but it's about my struggle really to find out who I am. Because it's all about fluidity and rocks and sand and water and what's water and what sands it's kind of because I was living right by the dunes and right by the ocean, and it was like my, my fantasy, but I was very, I was so fucking lonely. I mean, it was so isolating. But it was very good. And at the end of the summer I started going to this lesbian bar shape. Patches it was called it was Chez Pat. But we called it patches and rock, the boat was the main song. And they were like 500 dikes in the place, and the whole place was rocking. And I sort of knew I had come home. I mean, it was perfect. So I think a lot of those poems come out of that, angst, kind of the struggle of deciding and figuring out and how do you know, and, you know, and what do you know, and when did you know and, and, and so I also think, like, I'm thinking I don't do it as much as I do it now. But I think for example, I think I did it in in that poem where I'm trying to deal with the morning and Judy's death and one of the very later poems, and I think it's entering the stream. Any of those in the morning cycle, a lot of those are internal. And I think I owe I know, between shadows and light, I don't use any capital addition sign. That's a very internal poem. And it seems like, that's, it's very hard to explain. It's a very instinctive thing that I'd want I'd start with a poem, and I know exactly whether it's going to be uppercase, and whether it's going to be punctuation. I don't know why, you know, it's, I can't really explain it. But I think, and like, even in the works on it's I think I switch with capitals in in one voice does capitalism one voice doesn't? Because that's the one voice that's in the office. And then there's the cosmic kind of shifting of global whatever that I do. So, yeah, this there is some logic to it, except I find it hard to articulate.
Gotta trust your process. Yeah. Your voice your drive. So another sort of strategy, are your use of Yiddish words? And I wonder if you could speak about your thoughts around that, like, when do you integrate Yiddish words into your writing? And how do you do that? I mean, at some point, you decided or decided that you're not going to write fully Yiddish or, but you definitely I mean, Yiddish is clearly a part of your literary impulse or a drive. Can you just, you know, share some thoughts about how and why and what role Yiddish plays in your creativity?
Well, you know, I didn't, there was practically no Yiddish at the beginning. And it was it was really a sort of realization, which my friend Gloria Anzaldua was a Chicana from Texas. And if you know, Gloria's work, I mean, half of it is in Spanish. I mean, she's very bilingual in her work. And she also doesn't translate any of the Spanish most of the time. And I became friends with her in the early 80s. And we had long discussions about about this partly about this issue. And she sort of made me self conscious that I had the addition my background, I mean, I did postdoc work in Yiddish, but I have to what people don't really realize about me and my yet, is that Yiddish was not my my mama loshn, Polish has always been my mama loshn. I mean, I spoke Polish to my mother to my late teens. And I never used it in conversation. I mean, I just didn't never use Yiddish. I mean, that people wanted me to I could, and I did want forced to when I went to middle Shola, Shola whatever,
Bundist gatherings?
I, I tried not to I mean, I was the thing was that what by the time I came to the United States, English was my fourth language. And I understood everything because I was around Yiddish speakers from the time the war was over for enlarge, and then in Sweden, and here, and I always understood everything, but I never spoke and I didn't go to shul until I came here. And at that point, I was the head of the other kids because I understood everything. But I couldn't read or write and I didn't speak. And simultaneously, I was trying to learn English and I had enormous resistance. I was very unhappy here. I'm sure it was psychological because I picked up Swedish in no time and I spoke Swedish and, and I wrote the Swedish and all of that. And then I was my worst subject in school English, and kicked me out of honors English. I mean, it was just traumatic. And it continued, I just had problems with English grammar, and just had terrible I couldn't write essays, I mean, people in college they used to give me two grades "A" for content, "D" for grammar. I mean, it was like a nightmare. sort of carried a little bit into graduate school I sort of, so my whole struggle was to try to and one of the reasons Since I went turn to poetry was because I knew I thought that nobody could tell me I did something wrong in a poem. So and which was sort of not the brightest of ideas, but it was an approximation. And so I started writing some poetry. And you know, for myself, I didn't show it was I was very secretive. I didn't show it, I was embarrassed, and finally started showing it to one friend in graduate school in Paula showed me hers. But that was a so when people I mean, the idea of trying to switch from, I mean, my whole struggle was to master English. And I really, I struggled with it. I mean, I struggled with it in the poetry, I was just a struggle. And once I felt, finally, I mean, the sad part of it was stayed with me for a long time. I mean, I ended up writing a lot of essays. I was very insecure about it. I had to have feedback from friends. Judy looked over everything. I mean, I was so insecure, I can't tell you. Poetry I never shared with anybody. They either liked it or didn't like it. I didn't want feedback I didn't want to hear. But with the essays was different. So the idea that I should write in Yiddish was so to me, like it was going to break me. I had I fought so hard to feel grounded in English. Now that I couldn't even consider it. And also, I wasn't speaking it. I mean, the sense that and I resisted speaking, I was embarrassed. I was afraid I'd make a mistake. I had long conversations, and yet it was Schachter, Hava Schachter. You know, he told me I have a complex and he said, Your Yiddish is really fine. You just have a complex.
This is Dr. Mordecai Schachter, the eminent English linguist.
Yeah. And work with the English to Max Weinreich was my teacher at City College. But I don't like I still have it. I mean, it's just a problem.
So having these words interspersed ...
Yes. And I wanted in some ways, I didn't want to fake it. I mean, in some ways, I wanted it to reflect sort of the fragmentation that I experienced with you. And as long as a good compromise, you know, I mean, the problem was that people sort of expected me to do it all the time. And as you know, if I weren't, let's say, I'm writing a poem about Judy and morning. I didn't speak Yiddish with her. She didn't know she wasn't Jewish for one thing she didn't know Yiddish. If I put in a Yiddish word there, it would change somehow something. It's another words, I had to decide when to use it. And that was a big question. You know, what was it? Where was it appropriate and didn't change the poem in some way? Do you know what I mean? Yes, absolutely. And that was, I mean, I didn't I did it for a while, then I didn't do it. And then somehow, don't ask me how fremder in der fremd shop popped up? Yeah, a lot of I mean, it came to me in Yiddish first, because I love the idea of the Fremder in der fremd, which you can't duplicate in English, right? It means the stranger in the strange way. That's what it means. I mean, if you want to, not in the strange land or not away from home, I mean, in the fremd, is an interesting phrase
Such an interesting phrase. So hard to translate means different things in different contexts. One of the many seemingly simple phrases in Yiddish that really aren't.
But the root is fremd. Because die fremda is the stranger. To me, it was appropriate in that poem, because I was talking about immigration. And I feel that that's a very Jewish experience. My experience. I mean, there was a reason for for doing it that. Yeah. Other places, not so much. You know, I mean, it's, I don't know, the chain.
No, that definitely helps. Yeah, that's really, really powerful. So Irke, you've been a pioneering advocate for the work of Yiddish women writers really, for a very long time, your translation of the "Shorn Head" by Freidl Shtok appeared in the aforementioned Tribe of Dina came out, I believe, in 86. You wrote the introduction to Found Treasures, the anthology of women's writing that came out in 94. And there is a poem in this book called Freidl Shtok. And I wonder if you can read that for us. The poem is on page 186.
She's a realist writer who was reportedly died in a mental institution that's important for the poem. And the poem has an epigraph from Tesla, Milos, the Polish poet in exile. Language is the only homeland So this is Freidl Shtok speaking, but I'm taking on her voice. They make it sound easy, some disjointed sentences, a few allusions to mankind. But for me, it was not so simple. More like trying to cover the distance from here to the corner, or between two sounds. Think of it "heim" and home. The meaning of the same, of course, exactly. But the shift and vowel was the ocean in which I drowned. I tried. I did try first held with Yiddish, but you know, it's hard. You write gas and street echoes back, no resonance. And let's face it, memory falters, you try to keep track of the difference like Gott and God or hoys and house, but they blur when you start using ally. When you mean gassele, or Ave when it's a Bulevar. And before you know it, you're on some alien path standing before Brickhouse, the doorframe slightly familiar. Still, you can place it exactly passers by stop, concern they speak. But you've heard all this before the vowels shifting up and down the subtle change in the guttural sounds. And now it's nothing more, nothing more than Babel. And so you accept it. You're lost this time you really don't know where you are. land or sea, the house floats before you. Perhaps you once sat at that window and it was home and looked out on that street or gassele. Perhaps it was a dead end. Perhaps a shortcut? Perhaps not. Movement by the door, they stand their beckoning mouths open and close. Come in, come in. I understood it was a welcome a dunk, a dank, I said till I heard the lock snap behind me.
Ah.
I mean, the problem with the ending is that it turned out she didn't die in a mental institute, the great Norma Fein Pratt she wrote, she wrote a play about her also with this information that was the story about Freidl that she died in that mental institution - she didn't she went to California. And she tried even publishing afterwards. Normally, if I am proud that all kinds of wonderful research on her. So but that's all I knew at the time. And I usually put a footnote or a note about about sort of, I don't want to spoil the poem. But you know, I always say,
but sometimes there's that myth is there's so much richness in the myth. You know, how did the myth start added? So much to unpack and just that myth, I just love that line. But the shift involved was the ocean in which I drowned. Just ...
yeah. Those are the kinds of lines I have to say that I don't know if you've experienced this either way. But there are times when things just pop out of you. That just, you don't edit it you don't anything, you don't even know how it happened. I almost feel like I can't even take credit for it, because it just happens. I don't know how. I don't know how to release it. I mean, if I knew how to release it, I have more than
just creativity is such a mystery.
I know I tell this in workshops, I mean, people think there's certain things you just I mean, I don't know how that that's I know, it's good. It's really close. But I just don't know how it happened. And you don't edit them afterwards. They're uneditable you know, they just like they're
they were meant to be. It's almost as if they'd always been their channel
someplace else I don't know.
And we should note also that a book length volume of translations of stories by Freidl Shtok by Jordan Finkin And Alison Schachter called from the Jewish provinces was published recently. And they were interviewed on another Nice Jewish Book, podcast I believe that was at the end of last year or 2022. So do check that out. Irke, I wanted to transition into a discussion of something that you talked about on your book jacket, where you identify as a practicing secular Jew, and your essay secular Jewish identity Yiddishkeit in American America appeared in Tribe of Dina, which as we've mentioned, you co edited and then it was also republished in Dreams of an Insomniac as Jewish feminist essays, speeches and diatribes, can you talk about what practicing secular Jew means to you? Um, has your conception of Jewish secularism evolved since those days when you wrote that essay?
Well, first of all, I have to say that the phrase practicing secular Jew only occurred when I did the jacket when I did the bio for this book, and I wish I had started using it 30 years ago. And I know a lot of people just love it. I mean, there's so good Jews who love them that I stuck in practicing and there because secularism was always associated like with, say, assimulation, I'm secondary ism is I used when I wrote secular Jewish identity in the Tribe of Dina and went to a lot of women's studies, conferences, women were coming up to me and said, I didn't know I thought I was nothing. And now you tell me, I'm a secular Jew. And, and it was like, amazing.
There's a power in that naming.
Yes. And it was amazing to me that people who women who didn't observe and who came maybe from maybe rejected, observance and somehow then saw themselves as nothing, when in fact, they were doing all kinds of things I was. So I mean, the practicing, I'm glad I finally found it. But I wish I had found it like 30 years ago. Hard to Be an active, I mean, maybe it should be an active ... Well, practicing is the same thing practicing. Because most of the time, I mean, we don't have defined institutions like observing people have I mean, there's a whole spectrum of observance. Like, you know, from
what there is the whole humanistic Judaism movement. Did that ever speak to you in any way?
Does it still involve some secular prayers, which I think is sort of doesn't work for me. I believe in sort of strong I mean, I believe I'm not totally non observant in the sense that I went into my first synagogue. When I was like, 44 or something. I'd never been in a synagogue. I mean, and that was at the time it was it was an I can tell you exactly what it was. It was in 1982 when the Sabra Shatila massacre occurred, and I was upstate and I heard Jews were on and I was, I went with Judy and Judy, I took Judy to the synagogue upstate, and I thought I should be with other Jews. Then, I mean, I always heard about secularism in relationship to get us. It was Yiddish, cultural autonomy, it was cultural autonomy. That was really important for the bundists. And that was expressed through the language. Ydiddish and Yiddish, culture. So I always heard that just in relationship to yet a versus religious observance and versus also at the time, Zionism because the wonder and the Zionist
<...>.
And so that was always associated. I mean, secularism was associated with darkeit, not Hebrew, whereas Zionism was always pushing for Hebrew. So I came to see it, of course, when we .... I mean, you know, people talk about the influence of feminism on the larger society. And I also like to think of the larger society, influencing the community. So I feel like racism in Jew in the Jewish community only became we only became aware when we started talking about racism outside of the Jewish community. Jewish feminist didn't talk about multiculturalism at the very beginning. I mean, everything seemed to be Ashkenazi, it's as we all became more aware of Americans, you know, interaction, we started saying, oh, there are Jews who aren't Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Jews of color, whatever. So I think my sense of secularism broadened tremendously, it also started including English material. I mean, um, that was one of the things I think, I don't know if it's in that essay, or in another essay, where I talk about, you know, that there's Jewish Jewish books have been written in French and in Spanish and English. And it's not just even limited to the Jewish languages and other words, and people are writing about Jewish life and other languages. And that's part of the secular I think, and that is broadened completely. What we don't have is really an I don't think for me anything I am comfortable latching on to us kind of secular institution. Because I mean, students often tell me that they feel it's difficult to be a secular Jew, because they feel isolated, and they don't feel that there's a place to go to like if you, you know, a synagogue.
I mean, there are Jewish Community Centers, which can sometimes function that way.
Yeah. But when I went spoke to a Hillel, Director, student, I don't know she was a student, rather than the actual whatever, whoever runs Hillel, but she was like that Hillel President voted by the students. She said to me, Well, everything we everything that we do is secular really. And what she really meant was what the original women was saying it like they didn't have to do anything and it would be secular. But I said to her, you need to be consciously secular in the sense of that you have to be, it's not enough to give your characters Jewish names, if you're gonna give them Jewish names, unless they're totally assimilated, then give them some Jewish content. And if it's not going to be a synagogue that they go to, then it has to be something else, you know. And if it's going to be a Jewish rooted book, it should be rooted not just in the name that because somebody's called Josh Cohen. And this is, you know, Sheila Rubin. And then that's it. I mean, that to me is not really secularism. I mean, like that. I mean, you can certainly Jewish, but it's not what I would consider a real rootedness in any kind of secular Jewish culture. And that's drawn and it's changes and, you know, I mean, I don't know, how do you define it? I mean, how do you see it from your end? I mean, I would consider, you know, in all your work, secular work,
Oh, [laughing] we're switching roles here.
just for five to five seconds.
i Yeah, I'm sort of in between, yeah, kind of in between influence by religious culture. Don't go to a regular synagogue services, but my sort of poetic and intellectual cosmos is deeply informed by religious cycles, religious thought, religious ways to being, I mean, I dip in and out, more so before COVID, you know, to the familial, the Orthodox familial world. But I do want to mention that in that biographical entry on your father , and it's mentioned that he was part of a large branch a wide, a wide ranging, widely branch, rabbinic family, including one of it doesn't say exactly how he was related. But maybe you know, this from Shmuel Zanwell Klepfisz. Who was
he was a grant. He was the grandson who's
a great he's great grandson, great grandfather,
okay. And Reb Shmuel Zanwell was for 30 years head of the Yeshiva. He was 46 years and < > who am qualified to answer questions, close to 30 years head of the Rabbinate in Warsaw. He was renowned when Jews couldn't reconcile certain matters. They said we must go to Reb Zandwella. And so this is also part of your fascinating, your yerushah. rabbinic yiches secularity because it's all in this, you know, incredibly rich, genealogical lineage that makes or help to form you, you know, in a way.
Well, I've always thought that my interest in literature and looking at texts very closely, which I love to do explicating things and someone came from that rabbinic tradition. That is very rabbinic, in fact, I mean, the story of that is Donald Klepfisz, which I mean, actually, Judy, and I went to a store once that when they saw my name, said, Are you ... there is a Zanwell Klefpisz. I mean, they were talking about Zanwell Klepfisz, which shocked me, I was really, really, I was struck. But I mean, that story is that my grandfather, my father's father, Yonkov, of broke with I mean, my grandfather,
yes. They said he was accosted in his youth, Yankov,
and then he broke with the bund because he became a Bundist. And he remained a really strong Yiddishist. And he taught you, he taught you this, my grandmother, his wife, Miriam, my grandmother taught in a Polish school he taught Yiddish in schools, but they told
They were both teachers, Miriam Rosa and Bianca.
Yes. And they both spoke to ..., to Michal and Gina in Polish. I know the contradictions and paradoxes are amazing.
And I think Maryam Rose's mother was a midwife.
She was and she was observant, and they were they had to keep kosher and they had to do all kinds of things because she was living with them at the time of the war. Before the war, she was <....>
Gute, that you mentioned in one of the poems, was that one of Miriam Rose's sisters?
Gute? no Guta was my sister Her mother's sister, okay. Yeah. Well, there was only me if my mother had six, there were six children and my mother's family three did not survive three did. Two are in us to the families are in Australia in Melbourne,
another center for Yiddish culture. So I wanted to ask, so the header of the back of the books, back covers, talks, states, Collected Poems of a pivotal Jewish lesbian activist. And I found that fascinating. There's so much contained in those words. And I wonder if you can talk to us about balancing activism and poetry? How do you do it? When you're writing, do you feel like you should be organizing? Or maybe that divide itself is arbitrary. Maybe it's your writing, you see your writing as activism?
I mean, I think it was. It was I mean, it wasn't a conscious thing. I mean, I would get Judy actually like to pull me back. I mean, Judy loved my poetry. And she always wanted me, she wanted me to do less activism and do more poetry. But I don't know. I mean, I, it's, I went through a period, I mean, in various ways where I was very, very active. I mean, my life right now is so unlike my previous life, I mean, I haven't been to a protest, mainly because of COVID. I've been afraid. And so I mean, it's just, I'm totally, I just read about things. It's, I mean, I think, more than actually activism that held me back was economics. And I think that was true with Judy, I mean, it was not having enough jobs, or the right jobs or, and having I mean, we were very broke a lot of the time, that I think had a profound effect on my writing. And that's one of the reasons I wrote a lot about work, because it was it took up a lot, a lot of time about work. But in terms of activism, I mean, I just felt that there were things that I had wanted to do and had to do. I couldn't you know, when Lou Molad, who was an Jewish, lesbian, older woman, she was kind of a mentor to me, came to me and said, women and black are protesting started after the First Intifada. I don't know, I just picked up the phone. And I called my friend Claire Kinberg. And I, you know, we called Grace Paley. And we said, We've got to support these women and broke in, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I mean, it was like, What are you going to do with this information, you're not going to let them stand alone over there. So I don't know, it was like it was a draw. I mean, this was all of course, unpaid work. And so put a strain on other kinds of work. I feel it in some ways, it fed my poetry. I mean, I, I certainly broadened my themes, my topics, so that not only focused on my life, but on other things. I it is, its attention, there's no doubt about it, it's attention. And it can be frustrating. Sometimes, I've talked about it to other people, but most, like I say, most writers I knew were really activists, also, there was no such thing as just doing your work. You know, you had to be out there so that the work could be accepted. And your work and other people's work could also be accepted. It wasn't because it wasn't just about you, in some way.
And most of it was work connected to a movement emanating from and connected to,
and it was, and it was also, we were working towards a society in which our work could be accepted and the work of others can be accepted. I mean, that was part of a two. So it doesn't seem so yeah, there's a tension. But like I said, in some ways, I never resented my political work. But I did resent some of the crummy jobs I had to take!
There's another key figure. We've already talked extensively about her and that's your mother. And there's so many moving poems about your mother in her birth and later years. And I wonder if you could read one of them called, Der Mama's Shabbosim. And that's on page 188. Right after the Freidl Shtok poem.
Yeah, I wrote this poem after I read by him goddess memoir, called also the Marcia Mohsen. But he wrote a memoir, which in which the first part described his mother veligandu. In this really moving section. They were incredibly poor, living in a hovel, she was trying, she was a widow, she was trying to support him with selling apples. I mean, it's just a horror story. And he was, of course, this unrepentantl Yeshiva student who was rebelling and she was always worried she was going to be late for Shabbos, and it was, it's just very poignant. And of course, I'm a little competitive. So I decided that I was going to write up my mother's Sabbath days, but as I've said, we were secular. So we had no Sabbath. We had some Shabbosim But I decided to write it anyway. And the only thing that's you should really know is at this point, my mother became an ultimately an archivist. But she never originally earned a living by being a seamstress. And she did a piece work she did piece work. But she ended up at this point, when I'm writing the poem, she was working for a fashion designer, which was very glamorous. I mean, she was she was very exacting, and so on. There were four shows a year and there were models. I mean, it was, you know, it was very, it was hard work, but it was and so this is a poem about my mother Sabbath days. My der Mama Shabbosim was some inspired by Villa gladden. By no means is this given on the leash, I knew nothing of the 613 mitzvahs, which did not bind me nor of the three which did, though I am sure my grandmother Rychlak Perchickof knew them all. And I have a vague image of her covering her eyes and swaying. Shoshanah blue sky, larger mama law, and more recently rose. In short, my mother and all her reincarnations did not pass on such things. She'd given them up even before she'd ever claimed them. She was more modern. And besides, there were other matters to teach. So by age 11, been shown given up and indicates hotseat Liska. I was a passionate socialist. So , impatient to grow into my knowledge. Never guessing there was no choice for work and rest wrestled in every human life. With work, inevitably, the unbeatable winner. So for us, it was different era of Shabbos was playing phytic or more precisely pure tech. I remember summer evenings I wait for her at the Marshall who stop of the Lexington line. Bright heat and light at six o'clock. She was full of tales of misconduct designer, a career woman longing for home and family in love with a handsome pilot of Scotty the model, married smart and well wealthy buyer and now said brazenly chic in a reformed synagogue. I listened eager to understand these widow tales of romance amid the rush of each season's showing, and once even saw on the page of the times, a mannequin dressed in the very gown mama law had made all the way up to Rome Avenue we'd walk past the Jewish deli where we never ate. What was the point if you could make it at home? Pass the pizza place where she occasionally while shopping, she'd buy me a slice. Pass the outdoor groceries, fruit stands fabric shoes, lingerie, and stationery stores to gunho world and Jade gardens. Perhaps I knew it was treif. She certainly did but was not concerned. We'd order the salty wonton soup chowmein or pepper steak. And though she mocked the food, she never resisted. It was Friday, the shop was close, really dinner. And like the rich, we leisurely back in our booth. I didn't know it was at a Shabbos. Still, she rested.
So that's magnificent. Really just so beautiful. And I see again, that interplay between religion not religion, reforming religious concepts awareness of but not following. It's yeah, that interplay is so rich and exciting. And moving, moving to hear, I think, did I read somewhere that your mother felt? Or maybe you had said something about, you know, caught between her, you know, her husband who tragically died young, who was a hero, and now her very famous poet daughter, like was there?
I think there was actually my mother was very, I mean, I, I certainly understood it because as a child, I was often introduced as Michah Klepfizs'x daughter know and people didn't even sometimes know my name. I mean, it really bothered me. I had to really deal with this. As I was growing older, especially my teenage and early 20 years. I didn't like it. I wanted people to know me. And she was always identified as me, Micha Klepfizs's widow. My friend Meredith tax, I don't know you do, you know, her work. I mean, you know, Rivington Street and those labor novels. She went into research at the joint distribution committee JDC, which was this relief organization and my mother became monogamous. And she walked in and she was introduced as she would wanted some materials from my mother, you know, just from the archives. So she got introduced as Rose Klepfisz and Merideth said the absolutely wrong thing. She said, Oh, are you Irena's mother? My poor mother. So she was sort of became .... and she she joked about it, but I think it was a kind of painful joke for her. That in the end, you know, that she people weren't seeing her. There were a lot of these. And she, you know, she parties, she was very, she was not easy about my being gay. Let me put it that way. But she also like being like she went to if it was in New York, if there was a conference, and we were selling the Tribe of Dina she sat at the table and sold copies, you know, I mean, she liked that. Because it also brought her attention and stuff. But she did get caught. I mean, between she was proud of you as she was. She was also a little bit jealous. I mean, it was it was a complicated relationship. But I mean, I have photographs of her with Melanie and Linda at the time, Linda Vance. And she was also very guarded. I mean, she didn't boast about herself very much. I mean, she was remarkable. She didn't. She started working when she was 12. She never really had when she got the job at JDC. She lied. She said she had gymnasium but she didn't. When she got the job. She had been working at YIVO on the first multilingual bibliography of the Holocaust. This was like in the early early 60s, she got this job by a fluke. And she really trained under really like Baran and Friedman, these Holocaust scholars, she got trained at YIVO doing that work. And then eventually, she got the job at JDC. And when she got the job at JDC, they didn't have an archive, they had a warehouse with boxes of documents. She put it all together. I mean, it was amazing. And but she never really got, she didn't want to talk about it on the one hand, and then she sort of resented that she didn't get sort of public credit. It was it. She was complicated.
But it's so beautiful that you're honoring her in this way speaking about her writing about her, you know, speaking honestly, about those complexities, that's really rich and beautiful to read and learn about. In your acknowledgments. You also mentioned your trip to Poland in 2017. And then after that, as well. And I wonder, can you talk about those trips? Was the 2017 trip first in a long time, okay. Since the first one since the war.
No, no, I, I had number of trips to Poland. But it's really, as I like to say, I really didn't see Poland. I went with my mother in 83, which was the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. We didn't go for the official ceremony. She didn't want to and we went afterwards. And we spent a week in Poland, we saw Mark Adelman. That's when I saw my aunt Gina's friend Marisha Savitskaya, who was already at that point, probably in her a, I don't know, 70s. And then I went I stopped a few times. I went there for the Bund anniversary for the 100 anniversary of the bund. There was a conference I went. And then there was Mark Edelman's funeral. I mean, most of these were like very quick trips with my mother put up a symbolic stone for my father and the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. So you know, these were like, two or three an hour few days, and all I did was go to cemeteries and didn't really do anything. But then Gabi, who was who is here, somehow found out about one of my poems Bashert, and we met in 2016. And in 2017, I took my first ... I went for almost three weeks and Gabi and her husband drove me around Poland. I mean, I went to Krakow, I went to Lien I went to Szeyni I went to Zakopano which I've always wanted to go to because that's where my parents met. Because there was no nothing left in Warsaw to look at from that period. But I knew that they had gone skiing down they had all these trips. These Jewish organizations that do you know, Olympics in Sapa continent soccer upon a Jewish Olympics, and so I knew my parents met this I wanted to go down there I went there they took me all over Poland for three weeks and they introduced me to a lot of people and wonderful people and it was just a fabulous expansion of what my relationship to Poland is. I mean, I just changed sort of if you've come across this I'm sure I'll a lot of people won't go to Poland. I mean, they were very bitter about and people were furious with my mother for speaking with with me in Polish. When we got here. People were furious with her. She got a lot a lot of are very grateful. Actually, she didn't change languages because I had enough to deal with with I'm having to do that. So I mean, Gabi has been just enormously wonderful. And she's actually here helping, helping not helping me but almost doing it herself. We're trying to catalog Judy's paintings, because I want to try to see if I can get them better known or work better known. So she was incredibly prolific.
And the book is dedicated to Judy, your life partner Judy Waterman.
Painting on the cover is one of her paint is her painting.
Can you talk about how that painting was selected?
I picked it. I love that.
It's an amazing painting.
I loved it. And I didn't think that they would use it, or didn't want to even send it but Zoe Zohar was happened to be in New York and I talked to her about it. And I showed her the thing and I wanted that she said well send it they all they can do is reject it. And then you can send them something else. So I sent it and they said in 10 minutes, they said we want it we want,
how would you describe it? We're on a podcast, how would you describe it visually? Well, to our listeners,
I used to call it the happy coffin. And
I mean, it's literally a coffin filled with what looks like a lot of party confetti or
Flowers. And it's gigantic. It's as big as what's behind me right now, which you probably can't see. But it's, I will send you a photograph both of you and photograph of what the original looks like. Because we just tagged it, and I photographed myself with it. And you'll see it's I mean, it's enormous. I just thought it was because it is the because this is about, you know, the book is really about birth and death.
I mean, yeah, you know, and there it is captured in that image. And,
and, you know, I made it a joke, you know, and her later years, you know, her
joke with tremendous consequences.
Yeah, her birth and later years. I mean, what does that mean? So, so I thought it was an appropriate actually painting, I thought right away that that's the one I wanted.
We're nearing the end of our conversation, I feel like I can talk with you for hours and hours. But I wonder if we could begin to wrap things up with you reading a poem called a Poem for Judy and that's on page 118.
A poem for Julie, beginning a new job, Judy was the only person I ever met who didn't want to have something to fall back on. If she couldn't make it with our art. And so she organized her life around night jobs, so that she could paint during the day. But she couldn't always do that. And this is a poem when she could not do then she was taken she took a job for the day, you know, temporary job during the day, a Poem for Judy beginning a new job, I will keep this simple, not give it universal significance, nor transform it into art. You say I will not do this forever, I will paint. I've learned now that it's no solace to point out the others, so many others, straining, wasting, unable to do what they know they must do. For such losses always solitary and unshared. outside the scope of bloodless theory, you do not paint and what must happen does not happen. The transformation on the empty canvas of the elusive marble into the shadowy water, or of the simple water into impenetrable rock. And nothing, nothing, not even loving embrace a special intimate midnight talk will ever make up or diminish that loss for you. For her, her or her
amazing, amazing poem. I love how the beginning of the job is kind of part of the title. But it's also an epigraph. It's kind of in between place. And of course, keeping it simple. It's not simple and not giving it universal significance, but yet expounding upon how this is something that happens to so many people. Yeah, it's just an incredible, incredible poem. And it really, we talked about this earlier, work is such a big part of this book, who gets to pursue, you know, their career, their, you know, their work dreams, who's doing you know, office work. Some of the most moving poems in your book are the works on it's where you grapple with so many complicated questions of what works is valued, what work gets acknowledged what work is seen. And then also looking deeply at the lives of the workers, their complexity, their ambivalent, ambiguous and status interaction with that work. So yeah, I wonder if you could just reflect on the role of work in your writing and in your career and how to both give it dignity, but also acknowledge, you know, the unfairness also, and the fact that certain kinds of work can be mundane.
yeah, I mean, Judy, and I both really, both really struggled financially. I mean, I lost like I said, I lost my job in 1973. As a full time teacher, I, I hated graduate school, but I got a PhD because I thought I could give me a living. I could earn a living because I knew I had no interest in like writing scholarly work. I didn't want to turn my dissertation into a book. I mean, the second I finished the second I did my oral, I never want to think about it again. And I was very disappointed. And I had to return again to office work, which sustain me during graduate school. I mean, that's what I did. I didn't do waitressing. I didn't do physical work. But I did do office work. I was very good secretary. I did. I was a medical transcriber, as a graduate student. And then I became a legal legal secretary here in New York after grad after I lost my job. I worked for a law firm I worked here up here. I came here. And I worked as a secretary to psychiatrists. I was in Austin Riggs, which is a really famous psychiatric hospital. And Judy, also, she pieced it together. I mean, and when Judy first came, she came. When I went to Chicago, Julie came to New York, and she was doing night work, like she was had part time work at the 42nd Street Library, for example. So she got night work that in those days, you could really live on part time work. But in the in the 60s and the 70s. I mean, I did it also. But by the time the mid 80s, and the late 80s. It got harder and harder, the rents went up, everything went up. And so we both struggled. I after I got more or less, I did less work after, after the two books came out. I got more invitations to conferences, to give readings to give lectures, and even to be guest professor, guest teacher places. I I flew all over the place. I was always leaving here to go someplace. So it was very difficult. I mean, it was difficult. It got better a little bit better when I got the job at Barnard. I mean, I was in Barnard for 22 years. But I was an adjunct the whole time. And so but it was a steady thing in New York, which was very, very good. I mean, I was tired of schlepping around. And also I got I did get other kinds of gigs so that it was supplemented. Judy was working at the beginning, but she became sick, sicker and sicker as the first decade. And by 2010, she just had to stop working. Totally. So and she died in 2014. And so it was hard. I mean, it was just just plain hard. It got easier. It played an important. I mean, in my writing, I wrote a short, very long, very long short story, which was published in conditions and then afterwards in my collection in London, called the Journal of Rachel Robotnik is about a writer and a juxtaposes her writing with what her daily life is like. That's what I want to sort of show
and the presence of filial son figures into this book to silences
Absolutely, she was she really helped me to focus understand what what I was experiencing. And she really, I mean, I met her I mean, she was very, very supportive. Wow. Yeah, she even I mean, she was quite amazing. So I ...
just made such an impact.
Yeah, silences was like, I couldn't finish that poem context. And then I read silence her book silences, and I was able to finish it. I couldn't put it together. And she made that book made, made it really, and she likes she read the journal, Rachael rebonding. And she said, This is how I mean, she was very supportive. So I've had an enormous I mean, I if I could not write about it. I mean, I also wrote an essay in my essay book about feminists and the girls at the office, sort of back class issues in the women's movement, which I saw being dealt with that well.
Well, it's just, I mean, it just reveals that, you know, art and literature is not inevitable. There are conditions that help sustain it and that are needed for a creative life to flower. And I think what's so powerful about your work? Is that all that it's all there like it's all out play. To reveal the seams, there's no like gleaming facade, Jake is in to the struggles. And I think, you know, readers have really been moved by and identify with those questions. And so with that, I feel like again, I said it earlier. I feel like we could talk for another two hours. But I do want to thank you Irena Klepfisz, for joining us on Nice Jewish books. I want to thank Sheryl Stahlh for making sure everything runs smoothly. Sheryl's regular host, Her book is Her birth and later years new and Collected Poems 1971 to 2021. And it's out from Wesleyan University Press. And I understand there's also a play based on Irena Klepfisz's life that is now being performed. So congratulations, Elana And folks look out for that play. I believe it's in Berkeley now.
It's, it's in Berkeley, and it's on the sixth starts on the 16th. But I understand they're sold out.
Wonderful. That's a whole other conversation. So congratulations on that. And with that over you Sheryl.
Thank you both so much. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub and Irina Klepfisz for such a beautiful, rich conversation. I appreciate it both so much. Irina, one last question. If someone would like to get in touch with you, what is the best way?
It's my email. It's my first initial with my last name, but without the Zik we PFI s@barnard.edu
Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you again, both so much. If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite physical or online bookstore or at your local library. Thank to Die Yan Kee for use of their fraleigh which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries, and you can find it at Jewish libraries.org/nice Jewish books. If you would like to support this podcast, please click on the donate button in the top left corner of the podcast page, or the link in the show notes. I would like to thank ajl and my podcast mentor, Heidi Rabinowitz. Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode of our sister podcast, the book of life, a show about Jewish kidlet Mostly.
Hi, this is Richard Ho, author of two new years.
And I'm Lynn Schofield, the illustrator for two new years.
I'd like to dedicate this episode to my kids who are both Chinese and Jewish.
And I'd like to dedicate this episode to my family, my mom's side, who's Chinese and then my step family who's Jewish.
And we'd both like to dedicate this episode. Additionally to all the kids out there that don't fit neatly into a box.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host, Heidi Rabinowitz and I podcast about Jewish kidlet. Join me to hear my September 2023 conversation with Richard HoH and then Skorpio about two new years
