“Everything we once shared, considered / our very own has become alien” (Benefactor).
In the winter following the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre, Maxim Shrayer, a professor at Boston College, reached out to me. He was surveying fellow Jewish-American poets about impacts of the Hamas/Israel war on the reception of their work. I responded, one among many already experiencing publication and speaking opportunities denied, invitations dried up, and the walls of familiar venues plastered with slogans that forced a choice for Jews who love Israel: hide or leave.
I invited Shrayer to participate in a Jewish Poets’ reading at my synagogue in New York’s Capital Region. He read poems that now appear in this book, English translations of poems he’d first written in Russian, his translation of one of his father’s poems, and a smattering of others. I learned how intertwined are his craft and his complex identity, so when I accepted this assignment, I read “Zion Square” hungry for more.
Mr. Shrayer’s Afterword opens with, “This is a book of war, love, despair, and mourning.” I would summarize the book as a Russian-Ukrainian-American-Jewish émigré’s search for home. It progresses as a hero’s story, with the poet on great adventures seeking truth. The last line of the closing poem, “Mourning,” reads, “There’s no end to lineage, / as long as there’s memory and universal language.” Shrayer finds home right where he left it: in his beloveds, his ancestors and descendants, and in poetry, the language that shapes his knowing.
We begin, in “The Ghost Trio,” as the bonds among the three musicians crescendo until they are shredded by the very American ghosts of antisemitism, racism and white privilege. “The music rips the skein of being. The ghost is proudly silent. / A triumph of difference. Discordant and defiant.” We roam the garden of a suburban Boston home (“Grapes of Sukkot”), where the Irish builder’s ornamental plantings are overrun by a Russian Jew’s proletarian concord-grape vines. From there we hop over to the Carmel Shuk in Tel Aviv to buy a kipa (yarmulke) with threads that take us time-space traveling to every catastrophic 9th of Av, the murder of Litvaks, the Dead Sea, the Negev and Moscow, before landing again in Tel Aviv, right after the Hamas attack, where the poet finds himself, “seething / with useless words of righteous rage (“My Woven Kipa”).
After a quick pop into the UN (“UN General Assembly Resolution on Gaza”) to hear a disturbing vote as poetry, we’re brought into a domain Shrayer once thought he could call home: academia. “Silentversities” is reminiscent of the communal confessional prayers Jews recite on the high holy days. One column identifies the sinners: “silentversities” repeated on every line. The column to its right tersely states their sins. “Silently witness / fail to condemn.” I heard the wounded poet’s unspoken plea: Pound the heart in your chests, confess your sins; I beg you, return to your true purpose. But alas, in “Poets of Hamas” and “Campus Confrontation,” he despairs that campuses are no refuge for a Jewish poet. So back to Jerusalem we go, this time to kikar tsiyon, “Zion Square,” which could be said to contain the pain and dreams of a Jew with his heart in Israel, roots in Europe and branches in the Unites States. “I saw a vision of the past. / Or was it a vision of the future? I still do not know.”
I heard the wounded poet’s unspoken plea: Pound the heart in your chests, confess your sins; I beg you, return to your true purpose.
When Act II opens, we are in Moscow, eavesdropping on an imaginary takedown of the Kremlin’s denizen Vladimir Putin by Russian-American poet Vladimir Nabokov (“First Name and Patronymic”). From there, we fly to Brookline where the poet, as former-refusenik-child, relives the newborn freedom to be openly Jewish. “Split pine trunks were shaped like weather-beaten / harps that captive Hebrews wouldn’t play.” We head in for a drink of “dark-green absinthe” with a pal in the still-Soviet Estonian city of Tallinn (“Tallinn, 1987”), soar over springtime New England to peek at old religious Jews and Jewesses in Krakow, Poland (“An Old Polish Poet in New England”), and light down briefly just outside New Haven, Connecticut’s Italian butcher shop (“Delmonico”).
“I, too, would order
a Delmonico steak
and the name of it sounded
so triumphantly American,
auguring a new home,
promising to correct
each and every mistake
a greenhorn makes.”
It’s a gorgeous autumn day in New England in “How These Words of Love.” The polyglot poet’s languages are clogging up, eluding him, leaving him with “a muteness and / a wordlessness. Years of silence. / No rhyme. No meter. A suspense,” which might be why he turns envious attention to a Brooklyn émigré who burned his Russian passport and articulated, “I’m an American expat Jew / of Ukrainian descent. / My Russian passport / is nothing but an error of history.” Later in “Verses About a Burned Passport” the hero rues that he has “nothing to immolate” because Russia took even that from him.
Returning to current events in “The Soviet Rhetoric (After Mayakovsky),” the poet interrogates members of Congress’s far-left “Squad” about their anti-Israel rhetoric, which “works better than the truth.” From there we join him as a younger poet, awed by Jewish-Hungarian poet Louise Glück, of blessed memory. “What could I say that she didn’t already know— / so perfectly beautiful, lonely, hazel-eyed?” (“Anniversary”). We say farewell to that younger man when he agrees with one part of his future father-in-law’s “Prediction”: “He was wrong / about poverty / and the noose, / but he was right / on the nose / about poetry.”
Poems in the closing section accelerate the urgent clash of the poet’s multiple identities and spin us dizzily as he seeks the answers evading him. “Our Fathers” asks how earlier generations could have been so elegantly and audaciously Jewish under worse threats than ours. “We’ll go inside, feel the aroma of resinated wine and see the carefree fa- / ces of the Viennese who don’t know guilt.” In his marital bed in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” we feel this moment’s liminality: “at the boundary of darkness and daybreak, / the intersection of life and deathlessness, / I really don’t want you to awaken, / don’t go yet, when else we’ll be together.” We leap up with the poet in “Last Will and Testament” to witness the humanist author Thomas Mann’s (perhaps imagined) return to Germany after fleeing Nazism, where he attests, “All my life I’ve been faithful to Germany. Now what an ending / to discover that nothing of mine remains.”
“Victory Parade in Massachusetts” and “Israeli Soldiers in Ukraine” are soaked in the weary courage of Jewish émigrés who arise to fight the same old battles. “When right time, my dear children? What I fight for? / So now I must unfasten and take off holster / of memory? So I forget everything? Stay silent like a coward?” “Peculiarities of the National Pilgrimage” brings German, Austrian and Russian-Jewish pilgrims to Jerusalem seeking national affirmations while “In Paris” follows a callous American woman on a frenetic adventure in France. In “A Guide to Russian Vienna” we’re passengers with the poet and a Ukrainian Uber driver as they argue their way through the streets of Vienna.
“Forget your past. It’s worth deleting;
The savage war, the awkward rhyme.
Transform yourself and start believing
In your inexpiable crime.”
In “Benefactor” the poet dream-remembers the opportunities a deceased friend, Ilia Salita, opened for him, their common history and then the drift apart. “In America we’ve grown / different.” The poet apologizes, “What kind of Jewish-Russian script can I compose today? What kind / of a funeral waiting song? Please forgive me, I just couldn’t let you down.” In “Wine Tasting in Winter,” we are transported to San Gimignano, Italy, where the poet and a Saudi aristocrat approach and quickly retreat from camaraderie over a shared interest.
At last, we stand with the poet at his father’s fresh grave. “My father, a New England poet by choice and by persuasion / rests in the neighborhood of Jewish trades for all occasions.” We feel the poet, too, rest from the émigré’s untethered search. They are both settled somewhere just outside Boston, where home is in their love. “And is it any consolation to know that time is lenient / with those who refuse to give up hope of a reunion?”
Rhonda Rosenheck lives in the Capital Region of New York. She is the editor of “Thriving: An Anthology,” and has written two books of poetry—”The Five Books of Limericks: a Chapter-by-Chapter Re-Reading of the Torah” and “Looking”—as well as the cartoon book, “Yiddische Yoga: OYsanas for Every Generation.”
