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Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page. He is the poet of the living history of unspeakable names and his book...sings with dark wit the tales of tough family spirits. --Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and The Night Watchman. These are very exciting and original poems...a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew. --Yehuda Amichai, author of A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994 and Open Closed Open: Poems

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9781953829139

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In this marvelously augmented extension of The Missing Jew, Rodger Kamenetz doesn't miss a trick. He writes with a Yiddish lilt, a rabbinic braininess and tenderness, a three thousand year memory of torah and suffering and exile, and a wild kabbalistic dreamlife, all wrapped up in our beautiful freethinking American idiom. -Alicia Ostriker, author of For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book, and Waiting for the Light, winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award. How does Rodger Kamenetz manage to have so singular a voice and at the same time precisely encapsulate the world view of an entire generation (also mine) of text-hungry American Jews born in the middle of the twentieth century? Crammed into the copious, immersive, hypnotic, hilarious, wise and heartbreaking Missing Jew is the experience of the child of Eastern European immigrants ( what did gud yuntiv mean?/ it meant the clothes were new ) kabbala ( when God finally speaks/ each letter creates a star/ each star has ten worlds/ each world has ten men / each man has ten voices/ each voice has ten languages ), Chumash ( Isaac . .. lying on his back . .. /forgot his father/ in the presence of the Shekhinah ) Talmud ( Reb Arthur said, If a Jew is a verb/ - conditional/ Reb Toynbee said, Past perfect/Reb Yahtzik answered fiercely, / Future perfect ) as well as secular cultural references from Walt Whitman to Dante to Mark Rothko, whom we experience both as an immigrant Jewish boy from Dvinsk and as God's own mentor ( In his early work, God painted like Rothko. ). Among this collection's abundant gems is this proverb: the mind is a moment late to the movie of the world. But Kamenetz's mind - or at least is voice - strikes me as being, consistently, right on time. -Jacqueline Osherow, author, Ultimatum from Paradise and My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple: Poems In The Missing Jew: 1976 - 2021, Rodger Kamenetz writes that just as one mitzvah leads to another, so does the making of one poem lead on to the next, poetry an act of continuity, of attempting to fill the spaces of our chipped, fragmented world. In a poem about Mark Rothko, for instance, Kamenetz observes, You emptied your paintings, / made them huge, surrounded us in a field, till we too / stripped off shape and story, number and name. And yet, these canvases are not composed merely of a what isn't but are suffused with a floating light. Here, the poet too reclaims absence, reconsiders desolation. Through elegies, midrashim, new psalms, dreams, he makes the missing unabsent. This book of books opens by acknowledging that The history of my family is / the history of breezes, and ends with an address to God, a prayer to be transformed into something faceless, stripped of arms and heart and eyes. But then how would I see you? the speaker wonders. The answer: Through emptiness, emptiness no longer a void but a place to be occupied by the shimmering intellect and imagination of these generous poems. -Jehanne Dubrow, author of The Wild Kingdom Who is the missing Jew? The Jew lost in America, the Jew murdered in the Shoah, the Jew of the ghetto whose movement in the cities of Europe is restricted; the grandparents, the parents, the children, the unborn. The missing Jew is the Jew in front of you, in your hands, in these pages and poems. Rodger Kamenetz is the poet of the missing Jew. The Ancients speak through him in the form of parable, joke, anecdote, midrash, but always in his own voice, the voice of an American poet finding

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