Overview

Inventive poetry explores Jewish identity in America /> />""How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?"" ""America, whose death / didn't you come from?"" These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one's child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor. A dybbuk is a restless spirit who inhabits another's body, and as a possessing spirit the dybbuk is often treated as a demonic force, but it can be read as merely trying to climb the ladder of the afterlife. In other words, a kind of striver. Enacting the idea of competing selves in one body, Dybbuk Americana plays with form via a series of text boxes that create a multi-channel effect on the page. The body of the poem can be read with surrounding and intercutting text boxes to generate multiple interpretations. This innovative poetic technique maintains a dialogue with Jewish literary lineages: Talmudic commentary and interpretation of the oral law, as well as the fragmented nature of geniza, a place where Jews store sacred documents when they fall out of use. Dybbuk Americana weaves together the father-son arc within a larger socio-political commentary and historical narrative. Poems move deftly between the ironic and the mystic, from aphoristic questioning and inventive narratives, to interview, oral history, and archival materials. In these lines, ""the angels./ They get as close as they can."" Witty, curious, warm, and searching, Dybbuk Americana signals a fresh voice in Jewish-American poetry. /> />[sample text] /> />CHAIN MIGRATION /> />It took ten men />to make a minyan, /> />but only one name />of G-d for us to share, /> />so we settled on />America, one by one, /> />we settled on America, />man and woman. /> />My grandfather />earned his way over /> />shoveling coal />in the hold of a boat. /> />Grandmother sewed />gold into her coat. In secret /> />they sewed, they sold, />they glowed. I dream of /> />gold. G-d's name in gold />milked and honeyed /> />in the dust />beneath our boots— /> />our dust. And when they made />a minyan and didn't /> />realize it? And when />they married in /> />and didn't realize it? />No matter: they sewed, /> />they sold, they glowed. />Yes, they sold /> />their solid gold, sold gold />into gold, sewed gold /> />together into dust. />When I was born /> />they gave me />a dead man's name. /> />But that's true />for everyone.

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9780819501158

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Reviews

"""Joshua Gottlieb-Miller's Dybbuk Americana is a completely sui generis book. Galvanized by Rashi, he gives interpretations and exegesis of the poems about fatherhood, identity, inherited trauma, and anti-semitism. Hybrid in the best ways--aphoristic, narrative, analytical, and personal--this is important work.""--Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi ""In this daring and formally inventive collection, Joshua Gottlieb-Miller exploits the old saw of 'two Jews three opinions' to explore multiple perspectives on Jewish identity and history--punctured by shocking contemporary reality, like a bomb threat to his son's preschool.""--Aviya Kushner, author of WOLF LAMB BOMB ""Reading Joshua Gottlieb-Miller's Dybbuk Americana one is struck by the complexity of a hybrid identity expressed in a hybrid form where prose and poetry gesture across lined barriers towards a holy name that can only be voweled in English with a hyphen. A passionate wrestling with irreverence and reverence, Gottlieb-Miller's writing brings the Jewish past to life with all its dybbuks and its present into focus with all its soul.""--Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022"

Author Information

JOSHUA GOTTLIEB-MILLER is the author of The Art of Bagging (2023) and serves on the faculty at San Jacinto College. His work has also been published in Brooklyn Rail, Image, Poet Lore, Pleiades, and Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology, among others.

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