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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