Aleph, broken: poems from my diaspora - by Judith Kerman
Publication Date: June 1, 2016
Paperback, 84 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-22-9
Available from Small Press Distribution
My hands know more than I do,
prayer shawls, braided bread.
The broken Aleph—first letter of the Hebrew alphabet—represents the chasm between the author, a secular Jew, and her cultural and religious heritage. The poems in this collection explore her efforts to repair that breach and to find her footing in the world, negotiating the path of history and tradition while fully alive to the present.
A little at a time
I begin to read the old language,
though it is still an iron grate,
a bricked-up window.
Though her journey is personal, the reverberations of the work are universal, doing what the best poetry always does, permeating boundaries and opening up a space for wonder to enter the world.
A book tells secrets
it's dying to share
once the mourning ends.
"America is often described as a land of immigrants. It is less often noticed that America is a land of diaspora. People from all kinds of backgrounds, religious and ethnic, find themselves in an ambivalent relationship to assimilation and also to their cultures of family origin. We work at finding a home here while also thinking about the old home place (physical, cultural, spiritual) that may or may not be possible to visit. We often feel tugged toward cultural memories that may be heavily romanticized or traumatic or both. Aleph, broken appeals to readers, both Jewish and not, interested in the tension between American identity and the other resonances rooted in culture of origin."
Judith Kerman
Praise for Judith Kerman's Aleph, broken:
"In this evocative and powerful collection of poems, where personal history collides with ancestral memories, a sense of elegiac longing is tempered by language of exquisite beauty. Questions about what is holy and what is human and how cultural touchstones can help us make connections across the boundaries that separate us from our deepest selves are the subject that Kerman returns to again and again, often with wonder, sometimes with regret, but always with the confidence of a master poet."
Eleanor Lerman
"Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, now broken, the poet tells us, that language being 'one of the burned tongues' she never learned. In this America, in this whole world that 'goes on beyond what anyone knows,' within this infrastructure of disruption, displacement, violent din, political disgrace, & Hopkins' blear of human activity that threatens god's nature, how can we center ourselves again, connect, feel spiritual wholeness? Judith Kerman follows her own intuitional & soundful voice the way in her beautiful 'Star-nosed Mole' that shroud-like creature scrapes 'toward the knot of black roots' until, 'Even now, all these years later, / the light of her star / gleams down the long tunnels' of space and time. This is a remarkable book by a poet who helps us find our way despite such knowledge as might entrap us."
William Heyen
"Judith Kerman’s new collection of poems, is a gathering of restrained and thoughtful mediations on her life, focusing on her secular Jewishness and the implicit impact history has had on the way she experiences the world. Kerman is a poet who observes everything with careful eyes, unsentimental about her own failings. She is doing some meaningful witnessing— testifying to the simple power of living in the non-dramatic and resisting the temptation to (over) dramatize it. Her best poems are refreshing observations—her mother’s Florida garden, her difficulty trying to describe a color, the flash of a diamond ring on her finger after she’s bought it for herself at auction, mastering and using religious language, though it’s clear this is an exercise, not a passion. Judith Kerman writes with substance, a wholesome acceptance of an imperfect world, oneself included. Her poems are an admirable reality-check for all of us.
Diane Wakoski
Judith Kerman has published eight Postcards from America (Post Traumatic Press), as well as three books of translations (White Pine Press, BOA Editions, Mayapple Press). She was a Fulbright Scholar in the Dominican Republic in 2002. She founded Earth’s Daughters magazine in Buffalo, NY Press, located in Woodstock, NY, since 1980. She is Professor of English Emerita from Saginaw Valley State University, where she previously served as Dean of Arts and Behavioral Sciences.
A literary trailer of her poem, “Fragile,” and her video documentary about Dominican Carnaval, as well as clips of several readings, can be seen on YouTube on judithkerman.com.