New England Review

Behind the Byline

Paul Otremba

Paul Otremba (“Like a Wide River,” 39.3) speaks with NER Poetry Editor Rick Barot about industrial landscapes, the Mississippi in his imagination, and being an artist in the Anthropocene.

 

Rick Barot: Can you tell us about how “Like a Wide River” came to be?

Paul Otremba: I had to go back and check early drafts of this poem, and it started from a writing exercise I’ve been using for the past five years or more. I choose a line or lines from someone else’s poem, and for each word, I try to come up with an amateur definition or select language from the context in which I may find the word. It’s really an exercise in metonymy, using contiguity and association to generate a draft, or at least some potentially interesting lines. This practice frees me up, so I don’t feel like I need to start with an idea or inspiration. I’m pretty loose with it, letting myself free write and extend off of a word, not worrying if I get to the next word of the instigating poem if I feel like I’m off chasing something.

A paradox of this practice is that while it originates in an arbitrary fashion, by the time I’m into it, I’m drawing on ideas and feelings that are present to me or deep within. I start by writing in a journal until I feel like I’ve exhausted the exercise, and then I type it up, revising as I go. When I first started doing this, I was performing this kind of “metonymic translation” for one single poem, in its entirety, over and over—William Carlos Williams’s “Poem, (‘As the cat…’).” The results were always wildly different.  

What I can tell from the first draft is that I started with the self-conscious investigation of metaphor, or perhaps more precisely, conceptual metaphor, the kind that is born out of experience but then becomes its own way of framing how experience is understood or felt thereafter. I grew up along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities, and it holds a powerful place within the source of images from which I have drawn to make poems. One must have the mind of a river, so to speak, etc.

 

RB: The poem seems to see place as something that’s richly layered with the present and the past. That is, place is informed by a kind of pastoral light as well as a dark understanding of its degraded state. Is this an accurate way of reading the poem?

PO: I think that is an accurate way to describe the poem. Although, I think I see “pastoral light” and “degraded state” as existing on a sticky continuum: for me, there is no idyllic “Nature” we have to get back to or some wholly human space threatening and mutually exclusive from nature. I was recently teaching Robinson Jeffers’s “The Purse-Seine,” and this is why I love and quarrel with it. In that poem, human civilizations are compared to fishermen using purse-seine nets to gather up phosphorescent sardines, while some slightly comical and definitely baffled sea lions look on. Jeffers’s poem works like a descriptive meditative lyric, where a present scene of watching the beautiful and “a little terrible” action of purse-seine fishing is layered over a past scene of looking out over a populated city at night. There is a framing that occurs, where how we see the world influences how we conceive of it.  

In the middle of my poem, the association of having a consciousness layered with the present over the past (or perhaps the past layered over the present), and the past and the present projected into the future, led to the Walt Whitman allusion. The image of his head in a halo of sun in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” makes an appearance, before the boat ride takes a more archetypal turn. But as much as my poem is about figurative language, it is also about its limits. So after my cat, Musetta, wades into the poem, with Charon’s coins for eyes, the spell of metaphor is broken. The economic, political, and environmental realities of living near a major body of water insist their way into the poem. I draw on my experience of landscape to create figures for internal states, which might have some debt to the pastoral, where nature is a withdrawing of sorts. Yet, what living in industrial landscapes has taught me is that there is no nature to withdraw to, which is to say we have no position outside it, even here in Houston, the fourth largest city in the U.S. I feel that as an ethical and ontological position, where nature is not this pristine, nonhuman mass over which we have stewardship. We are caught up in it, even as all the stuff of the world has autonomy. I think that is what I was going for with that final image in the poem.

 

RB: You have a third collection of poems forthcoming from Four Way Books. What are the subjects and themes you explore in the book?

PO: “Like a Wide River” comes from a group of poems dealing with ecology and the Anthropocene in my new book, Levee. Living in Houston for the past fourteen years, I have gone through three major hurricanes and two devastating floods. Here, the effects of global warming are experienced with the backdrop of a city built on the oil industry and the refining and exporting of oil for global markets. Those industrial institutions and the financial institutions that come along with them make much of the wealth that supports the arts in this city, a complication and irony that is not lost on me. I hope that comes across in the poems. I’m also thinking about contemporary ecopoetics with what Timothy Morton, my brilliant colleague at Rice University, calls hyperobjects, or things massively distributed in space and time that challenge our attempts to wholly grasp them, things such as global warming, Styrofoam, microbeads of plastic, fossil fuels.

For my last book, much of the political backdrop was the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic collapse, and the rise of the Tea Party. For Levee, three major political and social sources are behind many of the poems: the Black Lives Matter movement, the increase of mass shootings, and the election of Donald Trump. I’m thinking of “levee” as also “levy” with these poems—what is owed, what is gathered, what is a flood of indignation, anger, and grief.

I’ve also returned to more personal poems, or personal poems rendered in a more straightforward manner than in my second book. Memory has become a subject that I want to explore in its intersection with the ecological and the political. When I was starting to draft the book, I was diagnosed with gastric cancer. I spent my first couple of months on chemotherapy organizing the manuscript, editing, and drafting new poems. I didn’t initially imagine poems about cancer fitting with this book, but there are a handful that have made their way in. I’ve been thinking about the difference between urgency and importance, and I’ve found some conceptual connections for myself between cancer and the twenty-four-hour “breaking” news cycles, the Tweet storms of Trump, police violence, and the planetary violence of capitalism and global warming. 

 

RB: Who are the writers and artists that you’re passionately engaging with these days?

A poet who is writing the kind of intersectional Anthropocene poetry I want to access in my own way is Dana Levin and her book Banana Palace. Another book in that vein is the searing, wonderful Holy Moly Carry Me, Erika Meitner’s newest book. From books published in the last year, I also keep coming back to the poems in Diane Seuss’s Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (which led me to the incredible sonnets of Wanda Coleman), and Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here. Two recent books that I think are important contributions to the discussions of sexual assault and violence are Michael Collier’s My Bishop and Joshua Mensch’s Because, which is really an accomplishment of sustaining narrative across a book-length lyric poem.

Since Trump got elected, I’ve been looking for joy in poetry, which feels like a deep physical and psychological need, and the poems of Ross Gay, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Constantine Cafavy have provided me with some of that. For Cavafy, it is the erotic poems, not the historical or mythic poems, that I keep returning to for joy. But it is a joy tinged with just a little bit of nostalgia’s melancholy, which suits my temperament. Because of cancer, I’ve also been looking to the poetry of Max Ritvo, Tony Hoagland (two poems of which appeared in NER, Vol. 38. 3), and C.K. Williams. I also read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, which has me thinking about the inadequacies and harms of the metaphors we use to frame cancer. I’ve never felt like a cancer warrior. I’ve felt more like someone in the witness protection program, trying to hide out in the crowd, hoping my past doesn’t catch up with me.

For artists, the photography of Edward Burtynsky and the work of Marina Zurkow have been influential on my thinking about being an artist in the Anthropocene, working with the sticky shadows of hyperobjects. In the new book, there is a long poem about a participatory performance of Zurkow’s that I attended in 2014, which she titled “Outside the Work: A Tasting of Hydrocarbons and Geological Time.” The performance was a dinner in which we ate things like algae and jellyfish.

Being ill for the past year has prevented me from visiting museums much, but during a pause in treatment between radiation and surgery, I did get to see a Mona Hatoum exhibit at The Menil Collection in Houston. I still think about the works in that show. I’m also kept company by books, like a collection of Caravaggio paintings I’ve been looking through again. I’m also reading Stanley Plumly’s new nonfiction book about John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, which has me hungry for landscape paintings. It’s hard to experience a dynamic landscape in Houston, except perhaps in the sky. I look to museums here for that, like sitting before Cy Twombly’s “Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor.”

♦

Paul Otremba is the author of two poetry collections, Pax Americana (Four Way Books, 2015) and The Currency (Four Way Books, 2009). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch, Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, and Copper Nickel. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Rice University and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Behind the Byline

Dilruba Ahmed

NER author Dilruba Ahmed          Photo: Mike Drza

NER poet Dilruba Ahmed (“Underground,” NER 39.2) talks with Editorial Panel member Angela Narciso Torres about public acts of resistance and private acts of opposition, the music and mystery of her own mother’s poetry, and the wonder of a new collaboration with an old friend.

 

Angela Narciso Torres: Like many of the poems in your poetry collection, Dhaka Dust, “Underground” addresses contemporary social issues while also being deeply rooted in history. Can you talk more specifically about the origins and the historical/societal context that gave rise to this poem?

Dilruba Ahmed: The word “resistance” has been on my mind recently: what does it mean to engage in very public acts of resistance, such as protests and marches, as well as more subtle or even private acts of opposition? Part of the lesser-known history of the South Asian immigrant community here in the US, for example, includes families organizing fundraisers together to support Bangladesh’s war for independence. Women prepared pounds and pounds of “chana chur” (a spicy and savory snack) in Philadelphia and the tri-state area to sell at a large gathering in Washington, DC, and then sent the proceeds back home. I’m interested in the ways that—particularly during difficult times—a seemingly small act can contribute to a greater purpose. And how those acts, even when they occur in relative isolation, can bind people together toward a common goal.

On a more public level, I only recently learned of my aunts’ participation in anti-government rallies in the ’50s, during a time of Pakistani rule in present-day Bangladesh. Crowds of women involved in the Bengali language movement shouted in the streets, wearing black saris—with even my mother (just a child at that time) swept along in the tide of vocal resistors.

In this particular poem, I was thinking of the various forms of private and public resistance by women under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and the risks involved. I was interested in conveying the notion of resistance as not only fighting back, but also finding ways to thrive under very difficult circumstances.

When I consider the incredible resurgence of civic engagement of the last two years here in the US, I find it very humbling to dwell on the lives of women in situations like this. Doing so certainly lends some perspective to the present challenge of organizing and/or participating in protests and other calls to action, engaging lawmakers, placing phone calls, etc. in the midst of the demands of work and family, but still within an existence (for many of us) of relative privilege, comfort, and/or freedom.

ANT: This poem uses anaphora (“they are turning,” “they look on,” “they paint,” “they are stripping veils,” etc.), achieving a cumulative, incantatory power. Can you discuss how you decided to employ this device for furthering your intentions for this poem?

DA: An early draft of the poem emerged in past tense from the point of view of one woman. But midway through that initial draft, the poem slipped into a third person POV, and shifted to the present tense. Since—for the women in this poem—navigating everyday existence is a continual act of resistance and survival, moving toward a more active and immediate verb tense seemed truer to the material. The repetition came about as the scene unfolded, as I tried to depict action after action that embodied the courage, strength, and perseverance of women under continual threat. I hoped to convey their sense of agency within that realm.

ANT: I’ve often noticed themes of motherhood and family weaving through your poems. They’re especially significant in this poem in which mothers serve as both nurturing/protective and empowering figures for their daughters in a society that fails to provide the freedoms and opportunities they rightfully deserve. How has your own experience of daughterhood and/or motherhood influenced your writing?

DA: My mother was one of my key writing inspirations—as a young woman in Bengal, she had participated in Bengali poetry recitation competitions and also composed her own poems. During my childhood in Ohio, she continued to recite, record, and compose Bengali poetry. Because I could neither understand the formal Bengali of her recitations, nor read the Bengali script I found on her drafts around the house, some of my early experiences of language were imbued with both music and mystery. I think that notion of language as music deeply affected me. Even now, many of my draft poems are initially driven more by sound than by content. In some ways, I think that her interest in poetry gave me permission to be in tune with something I couldn’t really articulate at the time.

ANT: Meena Alexander writes, “We have poetry/ So we do not die of history.” What I admire about your work is that while it may sometimes be rooted in autobiography, it always remains keenly aware of both the contemporary moment and the undercurrents of history. What do you see as the poet’s responsibility in our current political climate?

DA: I love those lines! Going back to the idea of resistance in acts large and small, public and private, I tend to think that the poet’s responsibility remains unchanged in some ways—that is, to create: to transmute emotional truths into art, and to follow one’s creative impulses. In our earliest stages of writing, this freedom to follow our poetic impulses is sacred.

That said, I think that we truly honor our responsibility as writers when we continually strive to hone our craft strategies so we can better serve our poems—and that part of that growth is acknowledging the social, political, cultural, and historical contexts that can and should inform our work. I guess both of these aspects come into sharper focus during the revision phase, when we try to scrutinize what our work is attempting to do, how and whether it gets there, and what’s missing.

Personally, I often find myself drawn to topics that are overtly political. However, I would never deny that a poem about the sky at dawn, or the love of one’s dog, or a thought experiment that imagines a cross between a crocodile and a kitten—I think that in our current context these poems too, can be a kind of resistance. Given the present conditions in our country—a time of violence, greed, corruption, racism, homophobia, sexism, and so on—I think even a seemingly apolitical poem can assume elevated status as an act of survival. That is, couldn’t we argue that an evocation of humor, beauty, love, generosity, compassion, or even frivolity is also a form of resistance against all of the ugliness before us? Such poems hold the potential to move us to protect what we cherish the most about our lives and about the world, just as more overtly political poems might inspire us through different means to take similar action. I’m thinking, too, of a quote from Auden’s Age of Anxiety: “In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of the peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need.” In a way, any gesture to create might be regarded as a crude affection, or even a form of love—one that just might help to restore our sense of humanity in some small or unexpected way.

ANT: What creative projects are you currently working on, poetry-related or otherwise?

DA: I’m in the midst of a new collaboration with an old friend: we send each other rough material for a poem, and the other person takes a crack at the first draft. We then try to revise and polish the piece together. Working with someone else’s raw material has proven to be a fun and liberating experience—I’m much more likely to consider a wider set of possibilities because my relationship with the material seems more distanced and playful. At the same time, seeing what someone else creates with some of my raw material has been an eye-opening experience that has helped me expand my approaches to revision. Working on this collaboration has definitely restored a sense of fun and spontaneity to my writing process.

Thanks for all your great questions, Angela!

 

Dilruba Ahmed’s book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, PEN America, Poetry, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of the Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.  www.dilrubaahmed.com.

Behind the Byline

Heather Christle

NER poet Heather Christle  (“In Order of Appearance,” NER 39.2) talks to fellow poet and NER editorial panel member Luke Brekke about counterpoint, composition, and managing tone—and how she cannot imagine where she’d be without the work of poetry.

 

Luke Brekke: “In Order of Appearance,” from its title to its final lines, seems to delight in associative energies. I know you’ve been working in a different form over the last several years—on a nonfiction piece about crying. Have you been writing poetry during that time, too? Does this kind of associative movement feel more at home in a poem than in your prose, or does it show up there, as well?

Heather Christle: I did not much write poetry at all for the five years I spent on the crying book, only recently returning to the form this February.

The associative energies—or urges—you mention have been very much at play in the crying book, but I have to keep a different kind of eye on them there, because as they extend over more and more pages they have a tendency to reproduce harmful associative patterns that have little to do with the imagination, and much to do with the hierarchies and systemic oppressions that want to arrange minds. In a poem, I find it easier to maintain the associative energy that—for me—disrupts predetermined movements. I have been so glad and grateful to re-enter that space, to find that it still wants me.

LB: One of the things that always keeps me engaged and charmed and surprised by your poems is the way they manage tone. At times a poem of yours may seem whimsical or playfully absurd, but then there will be a line that runs counter to that, a line that, to borrow a phrase from Marianne Moore, makes “a place for the genuine.” In this poem, some lines that do this kind of work are “I thought of the cowardice / of certain of myselves” or that moment when you refer to your hands as “those most constant of weapons.”

To what extent is developing this kind of counterpoint something you’re conscious of as you compose?  

HC: I do not know that it is precisely conscious in composition, at least in its initial moment. Or rather, that tonal shifting is my consciousness, is always there, and when I am able to access poem-making, the words use what they find in my consciousness to do their strange work. The title of this poem, “In Order of Appearance,” is, quite honestly, a description of how the poem was composed: this thinking, in this order, made to occur by language. And it is also my favorite way for movies to credit their performers, because it occupies a strange space between the arbitrariness of the alphabetical and the hierarchy of privileging stars. It’s just . . . linear time. How odd!

LB: Can you talk a little about your “interior peripheral vision”?

HC: I think of it as a space where much of a poem’s desire is located, one that tends to disappear when gazed at directly, which is why the poem spends so much time trying to look elsewhere, so that the desire can remain alive, present, and unobtainable.

LB: Two forces keep opposing each other in this poem—the “swimming mountain” and the speaker’s hate for various people. I kept thinking of Frost’s poem “The Mountain”—were you thinking of it here? It’s also a poem that is actively working to keep an illusion alive. The final stanzas of this poem seem to privilege the imagination as a kind of antidote to the poem’s hates, and they make me wonder where your latest poems are working in regard to that continuum.  

HC: I’ve read Frost’s, but did not have it in mind (that I know of) while writing this one. I suppose I should say I was not in that neighborhood of my mind. I was just in the space of wanting to preserve the imagined opposite to a swimming hole and letting the poem use whatever it needed to—whether actual or pretend—in order to not let that swimming mountain flicker out of existence. It had made me happy. I didn’t want it to go away.

The poems I’m writing now do a lot of wandering between worlds possible and otherwise. Or rather, my mind feels more these days like a place where many worlds overlap, where reality and the imagination are lovers, live in the same house, even wear each other’s clothes.

LB: Who are the poets you are reading these days? Who has you excited?

HC: I can’t stop thinking about Renee Gladman’s Calamities, which gave me the feeling of running—Wile E. Coyote-style—out past the edge of a cliff, only to realize that an invisible grid was still holding me aloft in the air and everything around me was sparkling with strange meaning. I am still carrying the feeling of the words around with me. They are like a gold net I can suddenly activate around my body and through which I can see the world. I love that book.

I also just read A. K. Blakemore for the first time and felt that good thrill of finding a new alertness. And I am loving Emily Berry’s long lines in Stranger, Baby. (They are tempting me into trying out some of my own.)

A couple months ago I heard Hanif Abdurraqib read, and while I loved the poems it was an essay he read—centering around Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”—that left me reeling. It was just so loving and graceful. And he read it surrounded by Columbus people, people he’d just returned home to, and the room was full of such warmth I felt lucky to be there.

I love poets. Thank goodness for poets. I know they—we—get things deeply wrong too, but I just can’t imagine where I’d be without this work. Thank you, poets!

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Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). She lives in a small village in Ohio.

Behind the Byline

Cady Vishniac

NER author Cady Vishniac

Cady Vishniac, author of “The Jakub Feinmans of the World” (NER 39.2), and NER editorial panelist Evgeniya Dame share an earnest talk on suffering, helplessness, Yiddish literature, and that sinking feeling we all get in response to the bad things out there—both in fiction and in the facts of our everyday lives.

 

Evgeniya Dame: Much of “The Jakub Feinmans of the World” revolves around the hardships of women: raising a child alone, facing strict abortion laws. The protagonist, however, is a man, Aleksy, who is caught between his sister and his girlfriend, sympathetic to their quite different opinions and, ultimately, at a loss how to help them. Did you always envision this story having a male protagonist? If not, what made you choose Aleksy?

Cady Vishniac: I absolutely always intended to tell this story from a man’s point of view. I usually don’t. Come to think of it, this might be my only published story from a male POV. There was a part of me that just wanted to prove I could get into a male character’s head.

Aside from that, I didn’t set out to write a story about the reactions of either women or Jews to their own suffering. It’s been a very dark couple of years, and the thing that goes on in my head is not always a focus on my own suffering; it’s the complete ripping of my heart when children are shot by cops or deliberately lost and tortured in ICE facilities. It’s that a foreign government is violating the human rights of Palestinians supposedly on my behalf. It’s the knowledge that trans people are dying. There’s a special rage and helplessness that comes with the fact that I can’t, you know, predict where the next child will be shot and throw myself in the way. I can’t singlehandedly abolish ICE. I don’t vote in Israel and none of my protests mean shit to its anti-Democratic prime minister, who is actually quite public in his contempt for American Jews. I’m probably not strong enough, physically, to waltz onto the scene to stop the murder of a trans person. And so on.

I can help with some of these issues, obviously, by volunteering my services or going to a demonstration or even voting, maybe sending Bibi Netanyahu another petition to ignore, but no one person, especially a grad student with a bad hip, can ever do enough against the latest worldwide slide into fascism.

What is this rage and helplessness? What does it do to us? How can we do better, but not in a performative way that burdens the true victims in these situations? Neither I, nor Aleksy can answer that question, yet. We’re just exploring. I think the only way out is through.

ED: I wondered what your story says about heroes. Doctor Feinman is a hero of tragic times, the man who opposed Nazis and rescued Jews from the Warszava ghetto. Still, he fails to live up to Aleksy’s expectations, or rather he can’t help Aleksy, who needs to be a hero in times when friends and enemies are hard to define. What are your thoughts on heroes and heroism?

CV: We all need to struggle to be heroes in times like these. It’s hard to contemplate heroism when you have a daughter to raise and an ex who would not necessarily make the best dad in case anything ever happened to you. It’s hard to be a hero when you’re just keeping afloat.

But there is, of course, the real Doctor Feinman about whom Hannah Krall wrote her book: Marek Edelman. He was pretty conscious of being just some guy. Radical left—much further to the left than the majority of people who consider themselves part of the #resistance, or whatever, today, not to be too pointed about that. Actually, let’s keep being pointed: he’d be bemoaned by DNC leaders today for having the temerity to fight Nazis.

There really is a book about Doctor Edelman’s ghetto uprising, and he’s left us plenty of documentation so we can safely say he pictured himself not as special, but present—and maybe morally obligated to shoot some Nazis. He was deliberately not heroic and deliberately antagonistic to the idea of heroism all his life. We should all be this. We should all struggle to be heroes until the idea of heroism is rendered mute, because such behavior is normalized.

Maybe, the best thing for the world would be for this thing we call heroism to die, and be replaced by an unwavering dedication to decency.

ED: Łódź appears a palimpsest of historic periods where contemporary reign of the conservative party Prawo i Sprawiedliwóść overlies earlier, hungrier times and years under Nazi regime. A setting so rich in history can be daunting for a fiction writer. How did you find balance between the real place and the Łódź your characters inhabit?

CV: Well, we come back here to the rage and helplessness, really the depression of Orwell’s vision of the future, “a boot stomping on a human face—forever.” The bad stuff can get to feel cyclical. A great wheel of bullshit, if you will.

We have a character suffering with that depression, someone struggling to deal with the great wheel, and he’s haunted. He has to be. And that haunting is what makes the future feel like every stage of the past. Aleksy’s character and interiority as this depressed person with a fear of recurring evil is what makes it all hang together. He’s not seeing the city he lives in with fresh eyes. He’s seeing tomorrow, his childhood, his mother’s childhood, his grandmother’s. My thought was that if I can make him that way, then I can just go along for the ride, living all time at once with him in a Łódź where everything is always happening.

ED: I just have to ask about the evil eye! I loved the way you describe Wiesława as “conflating the New Testament and folklore in her worldview” when it comes to a belief like that, which is something I witnessed many times growing up in Russia. What is the evil eye for you—a simple superstition, a sign of spirituality, or something else?

CV: I take the evil eye pretty seriously. I have my great-grandfather’s hamsa hanging on the inside of my doorknob and it seems to help.

It’s not that I believe the neighbors are cursing me, although they can be really rude about the shared washing machines. It’s not that I feel important enough to have some all-powerful force after me. Maybe it’s a simple superstition, except that a superstition can never be that simple. They’re a bulwark against the void, a way of enacting control. If I know the evil eye is out there, well, that sucks, but at least I have a realistic idea of what I’m facing and how to fix it. Maybe the fix is a spiritual one, and if I’m spiritually pure, acting in the way that I think my G-d would want me to, then I become someone who can handle the evil eye.

It’s a force for me, not a person. I don’t believe in cursing people. But I’ll tell you this: this guy harassed me in my MFA (which woman writer doesn’t have this story), and some friends of mine cursed him over Facebook, like burning sage on a mirror. That’s their version of the hamsa, I guess. It was one hundred percent magic that I will always be grateful for.

ED: Could you speak about your work as Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center? How has knowledge of Yiddish and the practice of translation affected your writing style?

CV: When we think of Yiddish literature, a lot of people immediately go to Sholem-Aleichem, or whatever bits and reinterpretations of Sholem-Aleichem’s work we get in the US, including, obviously, Fiddler on the Roof. I have read quite a bit of this sort of deliberately folksy stuff in translation and cut my teeth on the Yiddish, and that was a great thing for the rigid fiction writer I was in that moment. I stopped caring about sentence order! I learned to love a good digression! I began to understand folk culture as something we currently invent and will continue to invent, something that helps us engage with the world. This careful invention of folklore is the bread and butter of what academics tend to consider the early greats of Yiddish fiction.

ED: Are you currently reading any authors writing in Yiddish? Who would you recommend?

CV: This isn’t reading, but Michael Yashinsky just produced a Yiddish-Language Fiddler on the Roof, and I’m very impressed with him. There have been a few Yiddish plays in New York in the past several years, including Asch’s God of Vengeance, and musicians like Daniel Kahn are enormously popular. YouTube series like Yid-life Crisis, podcasts like Vaybertaytsh. An episode of Arrested Development and the Broad City one about pegging all translated to Yiddish—”Hostu, oder hostu nisht, gepegt?” So I’d be doing everybody a disservice if I didn’t mention the huge body of great art coming from people of all ages, not just translation, poetry, prose. Eve Jochnowitz and Rochel Schaechter have a Yiddish cooking show whose recipes I have followed. Menashe, a contemporary Yiddish movie, premiered at Sundance.

The Forverts, which was publishing Yiddish fiction in their newspaper just under a century before I was born, continues to do so. Right now they’re serializing a novel by Noah Barrera, Der Nekhtiker Tegnik (The Grave Whisperer), and it’s wonderful. This is what I’m reading at the moment, and I would highly recommend it. I should add that the website is a good learning tool for intermediate readers as well, since it’s designed to allow readers to highlight words and get a definition. So it’s good for many levels of Yiddish readers.

And for those who would like to read Yiddish fiction by a living author but don’t speak the language, Boris Sandler’s work has actually been translated into English recently in the book Red Shoes for Rachel.

 

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Cady Vishniac is a Big Ten Academic Alliance Traveling Scholar in Jewish studies at the University of Michigan and a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Most recently, her work has appeared in Glimmer Train and Salamander, where she won the 2017 Fiction Contest.

Evgeniya Dame studied English at Samara State Pedagogical University before coming to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire. Her MFA thesis received the Young P. Dawkins III award, and her work has appeared most recently in Electric Literature. After returning to Russia to teach at Lomonosov Moscow State University for several years, she’s currently completing an MA in Language and Linguistics at UNH. Evgeniya lives in Maine with her husband.

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