Category Archives: poetry

April 18, 2023 · 7:00 am

A Yom HaShoah Reflection

by Howard Debs (Palm Beach Gardens, FL)

“How does one mourn for six million people who died? How many candles does one light? How many prayers does one recite? Do we know how to remember the victims, their solitude, their helplessness? They left us without a trace, and we are their trace.” — Elie Weisel

In the mid-80s I was privileged to experience “The Precious Legacy,” an exhibit then touring the United States consisting of a selection of Jewish artifacts from the collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague. (As it happens, Prague is very close to home, my ancestral home, actually. My paternal grandfather came to America from Riga, Latvia in 1886.) 

One of my areas of special poetic interest is ekphrastic poetry, a form which takes its inspiration from pictorial and other artwork. The artifacts in the collection were silent witnesses from the time, and I realized that I could give them a voice, and, in this way, let them speak for themselves through me — a bold but plausible idea. 

I contacted Jakub Hauser, the curator of the vast photographic collection of the Jewish Museum, and presented my idea. I asked if the museum would grant permission for me to select and use a number of archival photographs from the collection for a series of poetic statements about them. The museum agreed.

My intent was to explicate and illustrate the indomitable spirit for good juxtaposed by the inevitable potential for evil — what in Hebrew is called yetzer hatov/yetzer hara, “good inclination”/”evil inclination.”

I chose Terezin as the focus of the work, as the camp has become associated with the spiritual resistance of the Shoah. Thirty-three thousand perished at Terezin. In all, some 140,000 Jews were transferred to Terezin, of which nearly 90,000 were ultimately sent to points further east and to almost certain death. Fifteen thousand children passed through Terezin. Approximately 90 percent of these children perished in death camps.

Here’s one of the poems that I wrote after viewing the collection and with which I began my journey to bear witness:

The Suitcase to Terezin

Josef Ernst is the name on the suitcase.

What can we know from a suitcase?

285 is the number the Nazis assigned to him

for purposes of his transport to Terezin that

day on the train identified as AAw,

and so from lists that were kept

we know he was taken away on the

3rd of August, 1942 from

Horomeritz a quaint Prague village the name

of which appears on the suitcase, his captors

being meticulous about the details of such things

as this and from such records we know Josef Ernst

born 24 June 1900 was liberated from Terezin,

he survived the Holocaust this we know, he had

a life after Terezin and surely now he rests in peace,

we can but hope that he forgave the human race.

For some 30 plus years, I’ve searched for a way to continue bearing witness to the Holocaust, and feel blessed to have written such a poem and to have founded the New Voices Project as a way to help others bear witness, as well.

— 

Howard Debs is the founder of the NewVoicesProject newvoicesproject.org. He received a University of Colorado Poetry Prize at age 19. After spending the past fifty plus years in the field of communications, with recognitions including a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Educational Press Association of America, he resumed his creative pursuits. Finalist and recipient 28th Annual 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards, his essays, fiction, and poetry appear internationally in numerous publications. His photography will be found in select publications, including in Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge” artist and guest editor. His book Gallery: A Collection of Pictures and Words, is the recipient of a 2017 Best Book Award and 2018 Book Excellence Award. His chapbook Political is the winner of the 2021 American Writing Awards in poetry. He is co-editor with Matthew Silverman of New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust and is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory. 

As a writer, you’re invited to help the NewVoices Project. Please visit The Goodreads/Amazon Reviews Challenge for more information.

Note: This story is based in part on Howard’s essay, The Poetry of Bearing Witness, which he wrote about creating the New Voices Project for Krista Tippett’s On Being Project. https://onbeing.org/blog/the-poetry-of-bearing-witness/

His poem series, “Terezin: Trilogy Of Names,” was originally published in China Grove Literary Journal, Vol.3, and is partially reprinted here with permission of the author. Name and information are from the database of Terezin Initiative Institute entries for Shoah victims and survivors.

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April 17, 2023 · 6:30 am

Birthright

by Lori Rottenberg (Arlington, VA)

For my grandmother, Margot Butterfass Rottenberg (1912-1996), and her father, Shaya ‘Max’ Butterfass (1872-1932)

The past is not decent or orderly, it is made-up and devious. 

—Robert Pinsky, “Gulf Music” 

A diamond horseshoe  

to pin the cravat of a man    

smart and squat, grand liar   

and survivor, continental pinball— 

gold to fix him   

to some ground  

after so many homes   

passed beneath his feet.  

Warsaw, New York, London, 

Berlin—Max decided  

truths carved on forms would be  

chiseled by him alone:  

Birthdays, dates, names, 

sworn oaths to bureaucrats  

whose countries didn’t want him— 

interchangeable as the chickens he raised.

 

What mattered were the chances 

he forged from an alchemy of blood:  

escaping pogroms, documents that unlocked  

borders like keys, wealth he could wear. 

***     

My grandmother transformed  

Max’s bit of glittering luck caught   

in the Weimar sun, turned tietack to ring  

after he died. She carried him  

on her pinky to America,  

sailing on the paper boat  

of citizenship that was his  

legacy. She wore him  

for 60 more years, married  

another hard man who bent  

only for her. The ring  

became promise—for me,  

granddaughter made daughter—  

while she lived, piecing  

a new life, joining  

family to family.  

She offered me everything   

else before dying but  

could not let go of her father’s   

sparkling horseshoe.  

When I die you will have it.   

This was a lie.   

It disappeared where I was not  

but should have been: at her side. 

 

*** 

Now without the light  

from her twinkling ring, reminder   

of the man who birthed my future,   

I pull strings of truth from tangled memory.

Almost as old as Max would live to be, 

I am bloodbound to tend his words,  

to pick the paper bones of his life:  

all that remains of my birthright.   

I am the one supposed to know,   

the one to smith our story into words   

that will last like gold, like diamonds.   

Max’s horseshoe can’t help me   

tell truth from lie—all   

I see is history’s churn,   

countries changing every generation,  

life’s work scattered; the ring’s one   

more thing lost in the journey.   

But its luck is my life, my great wealth  

the pinky it graced: an estate  

I will claim the rest of my days.

Lori Rottenberg is a writer living in Arlington, Virginia who has published poetry in many journals and anthologies. Her most recent work on her Jewish family history will be appearing in 2023 in Minyan Magazine and Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters. Through the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition, one of her poems was chosen to appear on county buses, and she served as a visiting poet in Arlington Public Schools for over a decade. She works at George Mason University, where she teaches writing to international students and poetry to students in the Honors College. She is in her third year of studies at the George Mason University MFA Poetry program. For more information, please see  https://lrottenberg.weebly.com/ or https://yetzirahpoets.org/bios/lori-rottenberg/.

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April 5, 2023 · 11:10 am

Passover Table

by Janice Alper (La Jolla, CA)

Thanks to Joy Harjo

This is the table

where Zayda held court.

His grandchildren cut their teeth 

on matzah, 

made crumbs on the floor.

This is the table

where sweet red wine stained

the white tablecloth

and the little books we read

about freedom.

This is the table

where I learned to ask questions,

listened to uncles argue,

aunts disagree.

And Zayda droned on…

with a twinkle in his eye.

This is the table

stretched out

to make room for one more

who had no place to go.

This is the table

I hid under

with my cousins

giggled

played pat-a-cake

as the seder went on

late into the night.

This is the table

where we slurped hot matzah ball soup

ate roast lamb

tzimmis

sticky desserts

loudly sang Passover songs.

This is the Passover table

today,

compact,

far from its original home,

where memories resonate

with every drop of wine

every matzah crumb.

The image of Zayda

hovers over us

as we continue the tradition

with new melodies

new rituals

and ask more questions.

Janice Alper has reinvented herself in her senior life as a writer of poems, personal essays, and memoirs which have been published in San Diego Poetry Annual (2018, 19, and 20) The San Diego Union-Tribune, and Shaking the Tree. Currently, Janice’s memoir, Sitting on the Stoop, about her Brooklyn, New York childhood from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, will be available on Amazon in the next few weeks. Words Bursting in Air, her book of poetry, may be obtained by contacting her at janicealper@gmail.com. You can follow Janice on her occasional blog, www.janicesjottings1.com

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April 3, 2023 · 6:30 am

What I know

By Marilyn Schonfeld-Davenport (Louisville, CO)

I am a first generation American and a second generation Holocaust survivor. 

My mother was born in Korosten, Ukraine. 

My father in the shtetl of Oleszyce, Poland. 

They came to this country in 1950 with my three-year-old sister who was born in a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany.

They were lucky, my mother always said. They were not in concentration camps.

They met during the war on a Russian state-owned farm (Sovkhoz) in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan.

I do not know the name of the farm. I do not know how my father ended up there. Only that while in the Russian army, he jumped off a train to escape banishment to Siberia and found himself on the same Sovkhoz. 

They were lucky, my mother always said

They were not tortured. They did not starve.

They did not have to hide underground or in sewers or cellars with rats. 

They did not have to strip down naked and suffer inhuman conditions and humiliating treatment. 

They did not have to forage for food in the forests. 

They did not have to watch their children die.

My parents were lucky. 

Not like their dear survivor friends whose tragic stories I overheard as a child, amidst the shuffling cards and the clicking chips of the poker table. 

But still, their young lives were thwarted by the horrifying rampage of a madman.

They were scared. They were on the run. 

They were separated from their families. 

They scampered to strange places, seeking refuge and safety.

Their fate collided at the Sovkhoz where they fell in love and lived in relative peace. And waited. And wondered, when will it end?

They worked in the fields, repaired small machinery, slept in bunkers and occasionally had a decent meal of more than watered -down soup.

My mother worked in the canteen and snuck my father extra bread and cigarettes.

That’s all I know about their life there.

After the war, they got married and returned to Korosten so my dad could meet his in-laws and my mother could say hello and goodbye to her family. 

My dad set his sights on America. 

The land of promise. The land of opportunity.

She was going with him.

But first he wanted to go back to Poland to see what happened to his family. 

He had no idea if anyone was still alive.

Somewhere, somehow he discovered they all perished in Belzec. 

Except for one sister.

She escaped with the help of a priest and was in a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany. 

And so they went there.

My mother said they walked.

But how? How did he find out about her? How did they walk all that way? 

Who helped them? How long did it take? 

My past is a patchwork of fragmented stories and unanswered questions.

They hang suspended looking for a place to rest, to make me whole.

My father never talked about his past or his childhood.

I try to seam it together through any research I can do, any tidbit I can find. 

A box of papers from the DP camp; sponsor forms, luggage tags, passport pictures, a diploma from ORT that said my father could make a shoe.

But I reach a dead end when it comes to my Polish family. There is so little.

There are only imagined faces of my relatives instead of photos that do not exist. 

Imagined lives in places I cannot fathom.

I never asked enough and they never said enough. 

I do not know enough. 

But I do know this.

I am a first generation American and a second generation Holocaust survivor. 

I am defined by that more than anything.

Marilyn Schonfeld-Davenport has always held the stories of her parents and her ancestors deep inside her, those few that she knows, those fragments that she can piece together. These stories composed the backdrop of a relatively carefree childhood in the suburbs of Chicago, but beneath the surface was the lingering impact of her parents’ trauma: her mother’s anger and fear, her father’s quiet introspection.

Throughout the years, Marilyn has returned to those haunting stories of her youth to try to weave the pieces together and better understand her past. She is currently working on a memoir of sorts, based on her mother’s notebooks of recorded minutes as the secretary of the Trossman Family Club. Uncle Sam Trossman, the patriarch, brought her parents and sister to this country after the war.  She lives in Louisville, Colorado with her husband Mark and dog Wilson. Her two grown sons live in Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota and she misses them every single day. 

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March 20, 2023 · 6:30 am

Hineni

by Jane Hillson Aiello (Denver, CO)

Raised between the transom

Of women’s lib and balabusta

No chance for ritual

No push to excel

No college application

Instead, a cross country trip

In Chevy’s version of a Conestoga

Landing in foothills

A place beyond knowing

Mamaloshen faded

Who am I      who am I

Echoed in the valley

My mother died before my poetic voice sprouted

Even though it was she who helped plant the seed

I will see her again one day

Beyond the heavens

In a field of fresh mown grass

She’ll be leaning on her Fairlane 500

As blue as the Colorado Sky

A scarf around her reed thin neck

Jackie O sunglasses

Cigarette in her right hand

I will call out to her in the ancient language

Of daughters

I am here mom 

Right here

Jane Hillson Aiello is a lifelong intuitive poet. Raised in a loosely conservative Jewish family in the suburbs of New York City, she calls the Front Range of Colorado home for more than forty years.  She also writes essays and memoir vignettes. Jane leads poetry workshops for Kavod on the Road and other organizations in the Denver metro. She has four poems featured in the soon to be released anthology Unplugged Voices. 125 Tales of Art and Life from Northern New Mexico, the Four Corners and The West.  Jane is a member of Poetry Society of Colorado. Read more of her work on her blog:  Poetry, Prose and Prattle 

Author’s notes: Hineni – Here I am; Balabusta – a good housewife; Mamaloshen – Mother tongue

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February 6, 2023 · 6:00 am

Saturday morning

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

A man this Saturday
passes me on the street.
He is dressed in a suit and tie
and carries his tallis bag obviously 
on his way to the local shul.
He wears a yarmulke.
“Good shabbos,” he says.
I mumble the same in reply.

I feel I should be someplace else.

I am dressed in a 
tee-shirt, shorts, and sandals,
and on my head is a baseball cap.

I feel I should be someplace else.

The morning sun, 
rather than a call to prayer,
dictates my walk around the park
where I can think my little thoughts.
The air is fresh, my mind is clear,
and yet …

I feel I should be someplace else.

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. You can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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January 9, 2023 · 6:30 am

Sanctuary

by Alison Hurwitz (Cary, NC)

Incongruous, that towered height among the holly, butternut, 

hydrangea, along the oaks, camellias, black-green laurel hedge —

there it rose, so tall it steepled everything, as if to say, remember,

pray to what grows green above us.

A field-worn, furrowed man called Shorty came knocking once. He said

when young, he’d planted a young redwood seedling there, brought back

from California, vaguely hoped that it would someday grow to be 

a landmark. He’d removed his crumpled hat, his hand a map of years, 

his eyes as wide as forests, asked if he could go and touch the trunk, 

already girthed to temple, breathing dusk. My mother understood,

she a tree parishioner, so both of them remained a while in silence.

When Shorty went away, he left his story grafted to its branches. 

Dad cut back the deck each year, to give the redwood room to ring. Rare 

days when grandparents sat dappled on the deck, polite and tightly furled,

Jews and Catholics baffled past translation, they sat in shade below it, and 

in stillness, shifted into softening; green a common tongue between them. 

At seventeen, I’d park with my first love across the street, and kiss until the night 

dipped branches dark with longing. When, same car, same street, same boy, 

time wrenched us into ending, the tree stood by to witness, a shelter until 

my loss let go its spores, until my heart referned with undergrowth.

Ten years later, beneath the tree, my new husband and I stood quiet while my parents, 

faces filigreed with leaf-light, planted blessings in us. They prayed we’d tend

a sapling, make a small repair, something to green the broken world. My parents’ hope 

could sing the music out of wood.  Mitzvot and Meritum. Their reverence, ringed.

The day after my father died, when all I had was absence, I stumbled out to sit 

below our redwood tree. There, grief burrowing among its roots, I stayed until 

I found a seed and held it in my palm. I breathed and felt the way that branches 

lifted into blue, its birds built nests, the fledglings flew, each ending bending to beginning: 

holy as the timeless sky.

Alison Hurwitz’s work has appeared in Global Poemic, Words and Whispers, Tiferet Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Anti-Heroin Chic, Book of Matches, and The Shore, and is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Rust and Moth, Thimble Magazine, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and SWWIM Every Day. She writes gratefully in North Carolina. To read more about her and her work, visit alisonhurwitz.com

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December 26, 2022 · 6:30 am

Peel Away to Dust

—a pantoum after Psalm 103, verses 6-16

by Donna Spruijt-Metz (Los Angeles, CA)

Tonight—buoyed 

by making order—and rituals

of passing 

and there’s the fear of it.

By making order I am lifted—rites

of YOUR presence—

the fear of it—

the haunting stop

of YOUR presence

gentling me. Time—and yet

the haunting—stop—

I am blindfolded by my hands

as YOU gentle me—time—

the moving into—yet

my hands

along the walls of YOUR compassion

are absolute—yet 

the ghost persists, spirits me

along the walls of YOUR compassion—

fumbling YOUR fabled kindness.

I touch it, hungry

spirits peel—fragile—

as I fumble in YOUR kindness

YOU lift humiliation, my concerns—

peels me fragile,

frightened desertion. 

Unlock concerns

and dust feels pain.

I remember every desertion, 

going to dust

I am dust and dust feels pain

as I fertilize YOUR fields.

I, willful, mourn going to dust.

Wind passes through us all—moves us on.

I bless, fertilize YOUR fields

tonight, light, buoyed.

A few words from the author on the poem “Peel Away to Dust“–
For years, on most Thursday nights I have gathered with a group of friends to study psalms using a process called ‘Lectio Divina,’ borrowed (and morphed) from the traditional Christian monastic practice. Often these musings lead to poems. The repetition in the pantoum form helped me to express my halting approach towards the holy.

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, a psychology professor, and a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She lived in the Netherlands for 22 years and translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations appear in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, the Tahoma Literary Review, the Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are ‘Slippery Surfaces’ (Finishing Line Press) and ‘And Haunt the World’ (a collaboration with Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). Camille Dungy (Orion Magazine) chose her forthcoming full length ‘General Release from the Beginning of the World’ (January 2023, Free Verse Editions) as one of the 14 Recommended Poetry Collections for Winter 2022. She gets restless. Her website is https://www.donnasmetz.com/

And here’s a link to Donna’s debut collection, which will be released on January 1, 2023: https://www.amazon.com/General-Release-Beginning-World-Spruijt-Metz/dp/1643173510

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December 22, 2022 · 10:00 am

Chanukah Metaphor

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Nun.

Gimel.

Hey.

Shin.

The four faces of the dreidel,

a game learned in childhood,

a metaphor for adults.

Take all, lose everything

put in two, take half.

Fate turns on a spin, 

fortunes flip on a dime, 

a fifty-fifty chance for the dime, 

a one-in-four shot for the dreidel. 

Thus, the questions I’ve wrestled with

ever since childhood:

is it luck, circumstance, or fate,

or are we all part of God’s plan?

Does He spin the dreidel for us?

Does He decide which side turns up?

Or are we subject to twirling all our lives 

and watching where we land?

Nun.

Gimel.

Hey.

Shin. 

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. You can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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November 7, 2022 · 6:30 am

It Could Have Been Me

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

It could have been me

     A survivor tells how lice
     attacked her body daily
     A man waits for an exit visa
     in Berlin, 3 days, he still waits
     The ship St. Louis is turned back
     900 refugees are barred from the U.S.

It could have been me

     A family goes into hiding in Amsterdam
     They will soon be discovered
     A prisoner, shriveled and starving,
     throws himself against an electric fence
     A baby is shot in the head because
     he was crying in his mother’s arms

It could have been me

     He is forced out of school in Vienna,
     taunted now by former classmates
     Starved in the cold in Poland,
     he will do anything for a morsel of bread
     They are marched to the showers in Auschwitz,
     where are you, my God?

It could have been me… all of them could have been me

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. You can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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