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Literary Moment
literary moment Q&A
Anita Diamant and the Pursuit of Menstrual Justice
A whole generation has gone through the Jewish life cycle with Anita Diamant. The guides she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s—The New Jewish Wedding, The New Jewish Baby Book, Choosing a Jewish Life, Saying Kaddish— enjoy such lasting popularity that Diamant is now revising several of them to reflect the societal changes she has also played a role in bringing about. Her novel The Red Tent, a retelling of the story of Dinah from Genesis, quickly attained the status of feminist midrash. Along with half a dozen more novels, journalism and an essay collection, she’s been an activist, founding the Boston area’s progressive mikvah Mayyim Hayyim (Living Water).
Her new book Period. End of Sentence. A New Chapter in the Fight for Menstrual Justice looks at women’s lives and life cycles from yet another angle. It describes the growing movement to eliminate obstacles posed by menstruation, a cause that speaks both to the enduring issues raised in The Red Tent and to the cutting edge of Gen Z activism. Diamant speaks with Moment book review editor Amy E. Schwartz.
There’s a scene at the beginning of your new book in which the 2018 documentary of the same name wins an Oscar on international TV. Watching at home, you write, “I jumped off my couch and cheered, certain that a million other people were doing the same.” How is the book related
to the movie? The movie inspired the book. After seeing the Oscar ceremony, I watched the movie on YouTube the next day. It tells the story of a small village in India and a group of high school students in California who raise money to donate a machine to the village so they can make menstrual pads. You learn about how little is known about menstruation, how stigmatized menstruation is and how transformative it is for these young girls to talk to people about it. And for the village women to make menstrual pads for themselves and for sale, so they have a microbusiness, is very empowering.
The movie’s makers asked if I’d write a companion book. I spent my lockeddown COVID year doing research and was overwhelmed with how many issues come together in dealing with menstruation. There are intersecting issues of equity, medicine and of course poverty, which exacerbates the problems of everyone who menstruates and can’t afford the products or the healthcare they need.
One thing I learned, and that I find hopeful, is how much activism there is around menstrual shame and menstrual pain. I’ve been inspired by the number of people who are dedicating themselves to changing this on every possible level: donating things, getting laws changed to require that there be products in schools and public spaces, and also raising questions about education, health education, sex education and the role of men. It’s a lot. The activism starts with trying to provide products, but it doesn’t end with products.
You say in the book that menstrual justice is a perfect introduction to activism for young women and girls, to give them a sense of agency. Yes. Everybody who’s menstruated knows the
panicky feeling of being out in public and not having what you need, especially as an adolescent. If they’re 12 or 13, it strikes them that this is patently unfair and that it doesn’t have to be this way. So they start collecting and donating products. They get featured in the newspaper. And it teaches them that they can change things. My great hope is that this generation, which is very creative and outrageous, will take from this experience the sense that they can have a big impact on the world and become active in other ways as well.
Many synagogues, particularly sisterhoods, have taken up the menstrual justice cause and organized collections. What more should be done?
There are large and small ways to help. A lot of people are working to get rid of sales tax on menstrual products in their states. Every state decides what it puts sales tax on, and necessities are exempted. Are menstrual products necessities? That question opens the door to a conversation about who counts in the most basic of ways.
In Massachusetts, a very liberal state, there’s a bill languishing in the legislature that, if it passes, will require all municipal buildings, schools, shelters and prisons to have menstrual products available for everybody. And I’m thrilled that more and more synagogues are putting products out in their bathrooms all the time, not just when there’s a wedding or a bar mitzvah. We need to normalize that.
How can men become part of this conversation? There’s a chapter in the book called Men-struation, which starts with a question somebody posted online, “What’s the most ridiculous thing a man has ever said to you about your period?” Some of the answers are very funny, and some are cruel. But mostly, the chapter is full of men behaving beautifully, examples of dads doing right by their daughters when they get their first period, or teenage boys helping when they see one of their classmates with a stain on her pants. There’s the cab driver in South Africa who, when he noticed bloody tissues on
the floor in the back of his cab, bought pads and put them for free on the dashboard. It’s really important that we hear these stories. There have been cultures where the entire community—men, women, people of all genders and ages— acknowledged and even celebrated the beginning of a girl’s menstruation because it was seen as proof that life and the community would continue.
When I started writing this book, I’d take a deep breath when someone asked me what I was working on. I’d say, “Well, I don’t know if you want to hear this.” I stopped doing that pretty quickly. I learned to say, “I’m writing about menstruation.” Then I’d ask people, “Do you carry toilet paper around with you?” And everybody said, “Oh, I guess not. I guess I don’t need to. And I guess if you need menstrual products, you should have them.”
Menstruation has been a recurring theme in your work, from The Red Tent to the mikvah to menstrual jus-
tice. It may seem that way, but it was all so unplanned. For me, The Red Tent was not so much about menstruation. The title refers to the tent where I imagined women would go to menstruate, to give birth and to recover. But I thought of it as more about community than menstruation, a place where women could be themselves and talk to one another. But the blood is part of it, and it’s considered normal. And as I imagined it, the tent was not off in the distance. The men and boys knew what was going on, and it was an accepted part of life. There’s no documentary evidence that our ancestors actually did that, although there have been pre-modern menstrual places all over the world and there still are some, and some of them are horrific, and some are quite beautiful.
When I got involved with the mikvah, the impetus wasn’t menstruation, either, but conversion. I had been working on a book on conversion called Choosing a Jewish Life, and the one mikvah in the Boston area that was open for conversions was not a welcoming, warm place. It struck me that we, as liberal Jews, could do better. So that’s where that came from. Menstruation was not really my bridge to it. But all my work focuses on women’s lives and women’s agency.
Do we need new rituals connected to menstruation? Should there be a celebration honoring menopause?
Menopause is a sort of slow roll out. You start menstruating at a specific time, but it takes a long time before you’re really finished. People have celebrated it in different ways, and some ceremonies feel manufactured rather than authentic. Going to the mikvah feels good because it’s an old tradition you’re using for a new purpose.
But we don’t have any models for this. In fact, in Judaism, we have no models for marking the life cycle of the female body: beginning menstruation, deciding to have a baby, ending nursing, deciding to stop having children, infertility, all of the life cycle of the body with the uterus. We have, what, 100 blessings you’re supposed to say every day? There are a lot of blessings missing. There’s no reason not to add them. The more blessings, the better.
This is an excerpt of a MomentLive! interview. To watch the full interview, visit momentmag.com/zoominars
BOOK REVIEW ROBERT SIEGEL
THE RIPPLES BEFORE THE STORM
In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution and the Rise of Nazism
By Michael Brenner Princeton, 392 pp., $35.00
unich in the years following M World War I was a nasty, bloody microcosm of the political catastrophes in Europe that preceded and followed Germany’s defeat in that war. Political instability and recriminations over the war’s outcome led to violence, revolution and counterrevolution. Even before the war’s end, one of Germany’s imperial neighbors, Czarist Russia, had already collapsed and in 1917 had given way to Bolshevik rule. In 1919, Communists took power in Hungary, which had entered the war as Austria’s co-imperial power. That same year in Munich, capital of the German state of Bavaria, several governments rose and fell in quick succession. Two of them were so-called “council governments,” imitations of the Bolshevik model (“soviet” being Russian for “council”). It was a time of collapse for the old order and of apparent opportunity for movements promising something better.
The leaders of Munich’s series of revolutionary governments were very often Jewish, like their counterparts in Russia and Hungary. Their moment in power was brief; conservative governments ousted and succeeded them, and victory in Munich’s political struggles ultimately went to the Nazis. By 1923, Hitler (an Austrian transplant) was popular enough to launch a failed coup in the city, the so-called Beer Hall putsch. His followers regarded Munich as the cradle of Nazism, and in 1935, after coming to power in Berlin, they officially designated Munich “the Capital City of the Movement.”
Munich during all this was home to a small, diverse Jewish population— according to the 1910 census, 11,000 strong in a city of almost 600,000. The city had both a Reform and Orthodox synagogue. Historian Michael Brenner’s book In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution and the Rise of Nazism explores the great variety of roles played by Munich’s Jews in those years, putting to rest any simple characterization of preWorld War II German Jewry. The Jews of Munich were neither predominantly radical, nor conservatively complacent, nor oblivious to the rise of antisemitism in their city.
One of the most interesting characters in Brenner’s story is Kurt Eisner, a Jewish newspaper editor, activist, socialist and pacifist who in November 1918 led workers on a protest march through Munich and declared the Free State of Bavaria. Until that day, kings of the Wittelsbach dynasty had sat on the Bavarian throne for seven centuries, even after the kingdom had joined the Prussian-led German Empire. (The terms of entry included Bavaria keeping its own monarchy—soldiers of the Bavarian Army swore allegiance to the Bavarian king, not the Prussian Kaiser.) Eisner led a faction that had broken from the center-left Social Democratic Party over the question of German war guilt. His Independent Social Democrats held Germany responsible for starting the war. In 1918, he had publicly supported a strike by Bavarian munitions workers (while the country’s soldiers were still at war). Following his declaration of the new Free State, Eisner became Bavaria’s prime minister, a stunning milestone for a Jew—and a post in which he demonstrated a similarly stunning lack of political acumen.
As a socialist, Eisner filled the German right wing with fears of expropriations, nationalizations and government based on the soviet model—though these were all policies that he rejected. He disappointed the left wing by ruling out just such revolutionary extremism in favor of reformist policies that included women’s suffrage and the eight-hour workday. He infuriated nationalists by insisting on Germany’s responsibility for starting the war. This was no mere political talking point; German war guilt had been a rationale for punitive reparations in the Treaty of Versailles.
He was not a Bavarian by birth, but rather a Prussian Jew, a designation that in the eyes of many Bavarians made him doubly suspect. Bavarians resented northerners who ruled the imperial roost from Berlin, a city they deemed less cultured, artistic and congenial than Munich, their own capital. But it was Eisner’s Jewishness that proved a catalyst for events that ultimately played a part in the rise of Hitler.
Eisner was born into the largely assimilated Jewish middle class of Berlin. Early on he eschewed religious practice, but, as Brenner writes, “he bore no feelings of hatred for his Jewish background, which had not always been especially important to him but was also not something he denied.” He identified himself as a Jew on public documents, campaigned against antisemitism and counted as his most important intellectual mentor
Hermann Cohen, the most renowned German Jewish philosopher and public intellectual of his day.
Not four months after his ascension to leadership, a politically hobbled Eisner was walking to the opening of the Bavarian parliament when he was assassinated by a right-wing university student named Count Anton von Arco auf Valley. In death, Eisner appeared to have gained some of the affection that had eluded him in office. He was mourned at a public funeral by thousands of people who had both supported and opposed him. It would be another 15 years of polarization, thuggish politics, the two Communist governments of 1919, right-wing rule and intensified antisemitism before the Nazis took over Germany.
But Eisner’s Jewishness tapped into deep currents of Bavarian antisemitism. Anti-Jewish attitudes at the time ranged from accusations of involvement in international Bolshevik and banking conspiracies to suspicions of war profiteering and avoidance of military service. Worst of all was the allegation of Jewish culpability in the “stab in the back myth,” the widely popular notion among Germans that traitors, Jews prominent among them, had caused the defeat of Imperial Germany in the Great War. As Brenner describes it, opposition to Eisner’s government expressed every variety of antisemitic trope:
To many outsiders peering in, this Social Democrat residing in the petty bourgeois suburb of Großhadern was a Prussian Rothschild and Bavarian Trotsky all rolled into one. The Bavarian citizen who had grown up in Berlin was branded by his opponents as a Galician or, as if this was not sufficient, an Eastern Galician. The established journalist was characterized as a destitute bohemian.
The “Eastern Galician” part was telling. About a quarter of Munich’s Jewish population at the end of World War I consisted of Ostjuden, East European Jews who had fled the murderous pogroms in Poland. Labeling him this way rendered Eisner a foreigner, alien not just to Bavarian traditions but to German ones. He was widely,
Kurt Eisner, who organized the Socialist Revolution that overthrew the monarchy in Bavaria, in 1918. Eisner was assassinated in Munich by a German nationalist in February 1919 only months after taking office.
and wrongly, rumored to have changed his name from Salomon Kosmanowsky so as to obscure his Galician roots. Even the papal nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, described him unquestioningly in a dispatch to the Vatican as “a Galician Jew.” Pacelli went on to become Pope Pius XII. Brenner documents how a wave of resentment of Eisner in his short time as prime minister, fanned by right-wing parties and their servile newspapers, helped suspicion and hatred of the Jews to go public and become the stuff of common political conversation. His own research in the Munich archives, he writes, turned up “a bundle of two thick files of antisemitic hate letters against Eisner” sent to him by hostile citizens when he was in office.
Despite the prominence of antisemitic
political discourse, and the public focus on the Jewishness of Eisner and his more radical successors, German Jewish voters in the 1910s and 1920s were in fact not especially identified with the radical left; most actually voted for centrist political parties. “In addition to the antisemites,” Brenner writes,
it was members of the Munich Jewish community who objected most strenuously to the involvement of prominent Jews in the revolution. They remembered well the saying from the Russian Revolution a year earlier about Leon Trotsky (whose real name was Bronstein): “the Trotskys make the revolution, and the Bronsteins pay the price.”
Brenner’s contribution to this story is to depict and insist on the breadth and variety of Munich’s Jews: conservative Jewish businessmen, literary revolutionists, socialists, Jews yearning for Zion and Jews nostalgic for the Wittelsbach monarchy, prosperous families with deep roots in Bavaria, desperately poor families fleeing Poland, and even the occasional German nationalist. All dealt in their own ways with the ominous trends surrounding them; no strategy fended off the ultimate catastrophe.
If we stretch the definition of a Jew to one that the Nazis adopted, at the extreme end stands the influential Munich newspaper and magazine editor Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, Jewish self-hatred personified. Cossman had converted to Catholicism in his thirties and championed the “stab in the back” myth and the expulsion of the Ostjuden from Bavaria. In the summer of 1942 Cossmann died in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, his Jewishness ultimately inescapable. One could look still farther afield to Eisner’s assassin, who was treated at his trial like a sympathetic kid driven to murder by the stress of the times. ArcoValley, as he was called, was said to have acted out of frustration at being excluded from an extreme-nationalist society due to his mother’s family’s long-renounced Jewish ancestry. At his murder trial, it was said by the prosecutor, “If the whole German youth were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm we could face the future with confidence.” Though he was convicted, his death sentence was commuted, and after five years in prison Arco-Valley was freed and soon pardoned. His treatment presaged that of Adolf Hitler five years later, who was jailed and tried after the Beer Hall putsch of November 1923 but was treated with fawning deference by the people charged with prosecuting and incarcerating him. In a Washington Post op-ed on January 9, 2021, just after the riotous assault on the U.S. Capitol, Brenner wrote of the echoes and lessons of the Beer Hall putsch, an armed assault on the Bavarian state government that was put down by force. The putsch was perceived at the time as a failure, but it actually elevated Hitler in public esteem and provided his movement with martyrs. The Bavarian judicial system, “blind in its right eye,” contributed to the ascent of Nazism by failing to prosecute the perpetrators ardently. Brenner also noted in the op-ed, and describes vividly in his book, the misguided notion among conservative politicians (in this case, the people who governed after the fall of Eisner’s coalition and the council governments) that they could use and contain the upstart Hitler for their own purposes. The users typically ended up being used. There are frightening parallels, to be sure. But while both the Capitol insurrection and the Beer Hall putsch were inspired by charismatic leaders who exerted extraordinary power over their followers, Hitler’s mob was motivated by a hatred more profound than what we have heard from most of the Washington insurrectionists who have spoken in court. Kurt Eisner’s story provides one more measure of that hatred, years after his death. In 1933, the Nazis inflicted what they considered one last degradation on the first Jew to lead a German state. His bones were disinterred and reburied where according to Nazi race laws they belonged: in a Jewish cemetery.
BOOK REVIEW VIVIAN GORNICK
THE PALPABLE JOY OF JOURNALISM
Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom
By Carl Bernstein Henry Holt & Co., 352 pp., $29.99
he time is summer, 1960; the
Tplace, Washington, DC; the protagonist, 16-year-old Carl Bernstein on his way to buy a suit for a job interview as a copy boy at the Evening Star, the city’s major afternoon paper at that time. The interview itself will turn out less than satisfactory. He is passed from one editor to another, no one is sure he’ll do—he’s too young, he’s too short, he’s too freckle-faced, they’ll call him. But even at age 16, Carl Bernstein is nothing if not persistently proactive. He calls the Star every day until he gets the job.
The reason Carl was so determined to get this job, he tells the reader in his new memoir, is that during the interview he had passed through the newsroom—people running every which way, typewriters going like machine guns, men at their desks shouting “Copy!”—and felt galvanized. “In my whole life I had never heard such glorious chaos or seen such purposeful commotion as I now beheld in that newsroom. By the time I had walked from one end to the other I knew that I wanted to become a newspaperman.”
Carl Bernstein has been one of the bestknown journalists in America since 1972, when he and Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency. Chasing History, his newest memoir, is a nearly 400-page account of the apprenticeship he underwent at the Evening Star between 1960 and 1964. The book details his hunger to rise to the top of his chosen profession by becoming an ace reporter. It delivers a record of such single-minded pursuit of a goal that at times our protagonist’s rise can feel reminiscent of Budd Schulberg’s classic tale of the ur-hustler, Sammy Glick, in What Makes Sammy Run? However, Bernstein’s hustle stops short—way short—of Sammy’s ruthlessness. The young Carl is dogged but seems neither underhanded nor predatory; all in all, he is so good-natured that it’s a pleasure to spend time in his company.
Nonetheless, from the moment he gets the copy boy job he is aiming to be sent out on a story. Toward this end he nags, cajoles, manipulates. There is nothing and no one who can’t do him some good—not an editor, reporter or rewrite man, even the printers in the composing room. But whether they help him or not, from all of them he learns something more about the newspaper business. Perhaps “learn” is not really the right word. Perhaps the right word resides somewhere in the realm of “swallows whole” or “soaks-up-like-a-sponge.”
A striking element of Chasing History is the generosity with which Bernstein profiles almost everyone with whom he worked, showing how each one contributed to “getting the story out.” This group at the Evening Star, in particular, he thinks, provides a wholly admirable example of how things unfold when a newspaper is working as it should. Among the many examples he offers, here’s a simple but effective one:
A police call comes in. Something terrible has happened in the city. At a public swimming pool, electric lights went on accidentally in the water and two children were electrocuted. Within minutes if not seconds the city editor, a master at his trade, has organized his reporters and photographers and sent them running: some to the pool, some to police headquarters, some to the nearby hospitals. He then puts his rewrite men on alert to receive the phoned-in stories that will soon be coming, and copy boys are sent to the library to retrieve clips on the history of the playground in which the pool is housed, similar electrical accidents in the past and neighbors’ reactions to the accident. Everything done on the run. The adrenaline in the newsroom is running so high it could power a tank.
All in all, 75 minutes elapse between the police dispatcher’s first call and the last paragraph of the story reaching the composing room. Pulling it all together, Bernstein writes of “the horror of the event, the city editor’s calm, the gathering of facts, the making sense of them, the speed of the paper’s reflexes, the truth emerged from confusion and coalesced into a coherent story. It was a lesson in the workings of the Star and the values of the newspaper trade.” His admiration is riddled through with love.
The years that Bernstein worked and climbed at the Star contained many dramatically historic events: the Kennedy presidency in its entirety, the civil rights movement at its most vital, the terrifying days of the Cuban missile crisis; and on top of it all, the Russians send a cosmonaut into space and bring him back! During all of this, Bernstein, perpetually begging for assignments, gets sent to zoning hearings, school board meetings, business associations— and goes to them all happily. Everything holds the potential for a story, a real story, his story. And wherever he goes, he makes contacts and takes notes. Especially, he takes notes. And he keeps them. I think
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that there must be a room in Bernstein’s home entirely set aside for his notes. How else could he have written a book so filled with descriptions of “what happened”? The detail he has retained of people, events, circumstances, as well as the local and political ambience of the time, is a marvel.
Bernstein was born in DC, and even though his parents moved him to the Maryland suburbs when he was 11, he has always thought of the capital as his hometown. From the first pages of Chasing History he is eager to let the reader know how familiar he is with the city. Arriving at the store where he has been sent to get his interview suit tailored, he writes:
“Louie Goldstein’s ‘haberdashery,’ as its owner referred to his store when I walked inside, was conspicuous from the sidewalk because of its big electric sign—unusual downtown, where almost everything shut down by six o’clock in the evening, except for a few restaurants and bars, and the peep show movies and burlesque house on Ninth Street.”
His ability to make of Washington a collection of neighborhoods that a working-class boy like himself would know like the back of his hand is an enrichment of his memoir, as is the judicious way in which he refers constantly to his left-wing family, his boyhood friends, his grade school memories, all representative of the thousands of ordinary lives that are being lived in the capital, right alongside the glamour and power we associate with the city.
Chasing History is not particularly artful, nor is it reflective. Its virtue lies elsewhere. Narrated by the Carl Bernstein who did indeed become an ace reporter and is still in love with the newsroom, this little history of what it was like to live and work in the world of on-the-ground journalism as it was practiced some 60 years ago—a world of tactile intensity as opposed to the bloodlessness of online reality—is alive with the joy that clearly filled its author’s mind and heart while he was writing it. That joy is not only palpable; it’s contagious.
Vivian Gornick is an essayist and critic. Her most recent book is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader.
BOOK REVIEW MARCELA SULAK
A POET’S APPETITE FOR GRIEF AND DESIRE
Breaking & Entering: New and Selected Poems
By Barbara Goldberg The Word Works, 184 pp., $26
There must be an appetite for grief. How else to explain this gnawing on memory until its bones are clean? —“What is Served”
Barbara Goldberg’s poetry has always displayed an insatiable appetite for grief and desire. Breaking and Entering presents a satisfying sampling of Goldberg’s previous five collections over the past 35 years. Her work’s memory center is, in many ways, her family’s survival of the Holocaust and what surviving this horror has done to their desires, their loves and those of the generations after. They love and hurt one another, they marry, divorce, cheat and forgive or hungrily lick their wounds. One imagines that Goldberg’s own life relationship with a partner who longed for his homeland when he was with her, and longed for his partner when he was at home, may provide material as well.
The “New Poems’’ that introduce the selected works feel up-to-the-minute as well as foundational. The fascinating “Writings from the Quattrocento” series seems to have been penned around 1985, though published only now. This series—imagined entries from the diary of Tommasa di Benedetto Malefici, wife of Paolo Uccello, the Renaissance painter and sculptor known for the theory of perspective—introduces some of the most salient themes of Goldberg’s life’s work. The poems describe a couple’s sincere love for one another and the trials that strain its capacity to endure when they are unable to produce a living child. While the husband throws himself into his work (“I know he wracks his brain—/ how can the appearance of near/and far be rendered on a flat plane?”), it is the wife who seems to have mastered the true theory of perspective. This perspective explains, perhaps, why history remains circular, and why we want only what we cannot fully possess:
If he raised his glance to really look at me he’d see how near and far are merely metaphor of present, past and future. Ah, but his realm is space and all its variations, while mine is time. The two realms intersect, of course: for instance, when he went far, I ached for his return. Now that he’s here I feel a greater distance.
Aside from the Quattrocento series, most of the new poems seem to be set in Israel, fitting for a woman who is the first member of her Jewish family to be born in safety, in America, after fleeing the Holocaust “by way of Czechoslovakia, France, Spain, Portugal, to a Greek ship that took them from Lisbon to New York, and then to Brazil to await their permanent visas,” as she noted in a 2015 interview in the publishing blog Accents. She added that she was the only sibling born in the United States and that the family’s language was German. Many of the selections from Goldberg’s earlier books mine the aftermath of this harrowing history; others focus on pivotal characters in medieval European history, such as the 1986 Berta Broadfoot and Pepin Short: A Merovingian Romance.
The new poems open in the birthplace of the author’s late partner, the noted Israeli
Barbara Goldberg
poet Moshe Dor, whose work Goldberg has translated into English in Scorched by the Sun (2012). Goldberg has devoted most of her life to translation, editing and publishing; that work culminated recently in an extraordinary volume, Transformation (2019), a selection of single poems translated from a wide range of Israeli writers along with personal essays about her lifelong relationship with translation. Together, she and Dor co-translated one volume and edited four anthologies of contemporary Israeli poetry, including After the First Rain: Israeli Poems on War and Peace (1998) and the award-winning The Stones Remember (1991).
The new poems are quite different in language and style from most of the selected work, but they act as a gloss on nearly everything Goldberg has written. “Furlough” is especially apt in describing how our parents imprint us with the love of fear and transmit generational trauma through their most loving and playful acts:
I love to see those tall, lean, muscular men with their clean-shaven heads and digital
watches toss their kids in the air. And I love to see them drop, not weightless, but light
as grenades. This is how children learn that fear can be fun. And fathers, that this too is hand
to hand combat. To cradle or kill—what story do we tell ourselves to justify. That a dunam
of earth is worth dying for? That a child opening his mouth with an O of pleasure overturns
everything? We grow like onions, our heads buried in dirt. And we die like onions, face
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The children, we can’t help but feel, might one day have poems to write or read about wars their fathers or their lovers will have fought in. The digital watches tracking circular time, the Os of the mouths and the onions, the water bubbles in boiling water all emphasize the limited circulation of human love. And we know that what has been will happen again. A few poems later, “Penelope’s Song” concludes a section of poems about military outposts and Memorial Day. Penelope and the furloughed fathers are positioned in such a way that they are looking across the same sea, in one another’s direction, separated by 3,300 years of circular history of wars, loves and longing.
Goldberg’s insights about the nature of desire, its various and surprising objects, are remarkably astute, and they work as a breath that activates harmonious notes throughout the work. In fact, one might say that each of Goldberg’s poems is a microcosm of her entire work. I keep returning to the last section of the poem “Weight,” from The Royal Baker’s Daughter (2008):
The pallbearers took turns carrying the casket. To the south lay the sea, and north, the castle and beyond the stone was the maiden Margot whose yeast cakes were always studded with raisins. How heavy death is if you don’t take turns.
Here, practical concerns such as distribution of a corpse’s weight open and close the poem, and in between is a fairy tale setting of sea and castle, complete with a maiden baking sensual cakes. In the short span of this Bruegelesque snippet of a poem, we are distracted from the deaths that we carry in us, and from our own. Indeed, we must all take turns.
As with other first-generation American poets, Goldberg’s poetry often returns to early 20th-century Europe through parable, fairy tale and multilingualism. Goldberg’s interest in fairy tales as allegories and repositories of hidden truths also makes her a sister to the English novelist Angela Carter. Goldberg herself has described her work as containing elements of magical realism, which might best be described as narratives that contain two complete worldviews whose frames of reference have collapsed into one another. This collapse of boundaries between two intact worlds might also aptly describe the immigrant experience, or the experience of a child of two Holocaust survivors, or a couple whose homelands are separated by a deep sea.
Marcela Sulak is a poet, essayist and translator who directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Israel’s BarIlan University.
