This is the first time I’ve actually felt like I might have something I want to “blog about.” I wonder if anyone’s listening? If you are, let me know.
A conversation with Eleanor Lerman about my current manuscript, Aleph, broken, raises the issue of whether there is an audience any more for “Jewish” writing. My poems wrestle, in a part that seems pretty central to the whole, with what I mean by thinking of myself as Jewish. It is apparently not the same thing more conventional Jews mean—by conventional, I mean members of synagogues, although I am one; people who, unlike me, think of the synagogue service and the religious tradition as meaningful to them, for whatever reason; Zionists; people whose identity is shaped more than mine was by the Holocaust. I don’t know if secular Jews think about these questions much, although I know that at least a few do, probably many of them subscribers to my friend Larry Bush’s magazine Jewish Currents. The fundamental question: if you don’t believe, what do you think it means to consider yourself a Jew?
Someone who commented on my collection said it’s about the way my experience of being Jewish is not what I was told it would/should be. That was very useful. More broadly, I think it’s about the way life has not been the way I was told it would/should be. Eleanor questions whether I should focus my “pitch” for the manuscript on a potential (or theoretical) audience of secular Jews who feel the same perplexities I do. She’s not convinced that I should, purely from the point of view of finding a publisher and, later, an audience.
(Wonderful to use, in a slightly different form the word “perplexed,” which seems to have been patented by Maimonides.)
Anyway… Here’s what I’ve been thinking of as my “elevator pitch,” the short speech you make to a captive audience “in the elevator” to pitch your project. I’m going to follow up, maybe tomorrow, with some thinking about a broader question – what does the second generation of any immigrant group make of its “roots,” when they have begun to attenuate but still have some resonance? Does my book deal with issues other descendants of immigrants might recognize?
The”elevator pitch” for my poetry collection, Aleph, broken, that I am currently using:
Many collections of Jewish poetry take the religious tradition as a given. However, this leaves out the large percentage of American Jews who are secular and whose relationship to Judaism is ambiguous or conflicted. Aleph, broken, a collection of poems by Judith Kerman, will appeal to such readers. It explores an unconventional but not atypical Jewish identity, one that is scientific and secular but yearning for connections usually found in Jewish observance, history and belief.
These poems, which explore the ways in which life and Jewishness are not what Kerman was taught to expect, reflect both real and imagined personal experience. Beginning with her family origins, the book grapples with such contemporary issues as sexism, antiSemitism, the Holocaust, aging and death, ecology and social justice. Kerman’s explorations of other cultures, especially Latin America, bring her back to questions of her personal identity.
Kerman was raised in an atheist home with a sense of history and progressive politics as part of Jewish identity. She acquired a broad knowledge of both the Hebrew Bible and Jewish culture through reading. In her late forties, she became active in Jewish religious and community life. However, the conventional understanding of Jewishness remains problematic for her, while the tradition of argument, exploration and dispute remains compelling—a challenge faced by all those who still feel rooted in their culture of origin while finding a deeper meaning in the great scope of human experience.
This is actually a little scary – might it lead me to have to revise the book again?
Judith Kerman 
Because ritual observance and the form of prayer that becomes the handed down recipes and the preparing and doing is not part of your childhood and young adult history, does this in itself take from the joy of being Jewish. It’s the joy that I feel in the doing that keeps me from questioning.
The questions have been asked many times in many ways across time and space. And they have been answered many times and in many ways. (Many of the answers were (sometimes purposefully) not responses to the questions asked. Indeed, many of the ways the Question was asked were themselves misstatements, improperly formed questions misidentifying the central issues or questions for which an answer was being sought (– or polemically concocted).
But the act of asking — improperly stated or not — is itself a partial answer. If you want to ask the question then the nature of your relationships to the Jewish people and to Jewish civilization and to the many Jewish traditions is a set of relationships that have meaning for you and asking the question and seeking the answers is part of your personal search for meaning.
Every Jew rejects more Jewish traditions than they accept. And much of the myths about what constitutes “real” or “traditional” Jewish traditions are in fact modern mythologies about a past that never existed. And many of the “radical” breaks over the past couple of centuries were merely continuations of an evolving Jewish civilization that has once again (as it has many times) embraced coexisting within multicultural societies. The radical break has been that it has once again been possible for Jews to live as Jews within multicultural societies and that contemporary multicultural societies have partially embraced democratic ideals. But the process of Judaism evolving whenever possible to embrace living in multiple civilizations and embracing the richness and diversity of multicultural societies is, from a historical perspective, “normative”.
And we see this normative process in “Jewish” poetry. And it is manifest in the “Jewish” languages in which this poetry has been written (and preserved). “Jewish” languages include Hebrew, of course, but also Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, English. Throughout our history most of our non-liturgical poetry that has been written (or at least preserved) has been in the Jewish vernaculars. And this poetry was, for the most part, written when Jewish society and traditions lived in multicultural societies (including those Biblical periods when this was true).
I personally relate to Judith Kerman’s poetry as within this evolving Judaism. It is “Jewish” poetry. It is also “American” poetry. And her poems can be placed into a myriad of other categories that poets and literary critics and English professors need to create in order to continue the processes of critiquing, constructing, deconstructing, and finding meaning and inspiration — and a livelihood — in poetry. And for those of us who, like J. Kerman, are struggling with the often unparallell and incongruous processes of drawing meaning from Judaism and negotiating our relationships and affiliations with contemporary Jewish organizations and institutions, her poetry resonates within us in a very special way as “Jewish” poetry.