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POEMS: FOUR SYNAGOGUES | AUTHOR Q&A | AUTHOR BIO
Hi everyone,
I’m so very excited about this week’s guest writer. Joanne Limburg is the author of, among many other books, one of my favorite books in at least the last five years, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism. This book transformed how I understand disability, how I advocate, and how I relate to my own autistic history and therefore the world around me. I think differently because of Joanne’s writings. They’ve influenced me profoundly. I am so happy she said yes to chatting with me about some of her recent poetry, this around another of our shared identities: Jewishness.
This quartet of poems is, Joanne said to me, “an attempt to find a home for my Jewish self, which feels pretty homeless right now.” Each of these poems sparked something new and different in me, which you’ll see a bit of in our Q&A. I deeply admire the way their poet manages to hold the awful weight of antisemitism alongside the equal weight of Jewish simplicity, humor, and hope.
After sitting with these poems and reading through our Q&A, I turned to my wife and said, “Man, Joanne Limburg is so f*****’ cool.” It’s with the utmost appreciation, enthusiasm, and gratitude that I share this post with you today.
PS: In a happy coincidence, today is Joanne’s birthday. Happy birthday, Joanne!
Poems by Joanne Limburg
The Synagogue Filled With Unremarkable Things
There’s a plastic tumbler next to a silver Kiddush cup next to a Pyrex dish next to a pair of Shabbos candle sticks next to the letter ‘a’ next to the letter ‘aleph’ next to an Andy Pandy book next to a pop-up children’s Haggadah next to a maroon velvet tallis bag with gold Hebrew letters next to a bottle of Heinz ketchup next to a bottle of Palwin’s kosher wine next to a Hostmaster soda syphon next to a white silk matzo cover with gold Hebrew letters next to a bag of Smiths salt and vinegar crisps next to a box of dried Lokshen next to a Lolly Gobble Chock Bomb next to a Snowcrest pareve ice-cream block next to a school Christmas Carol sheet next to a Menorah next to a grey Vauxhall Viva next to a marble plaque in memory of the six million next to your mother in a hat next to your brother with a tiny kuppel on his head next to your Dad in his tallis with the fringes you can plait when you are bored on unremarkable Saturday mornings.
—
Fisher-Price Synagogue
I remember it as my lost Temple,
its plastic wings open like arms
offering me the comfort
of its familiar, moulded pews,
its ark with the pretty scrolls inside,
the wooden Daddies in their tallises,
the wooden Mummies in their hats
all the fidgety wooden children
waiting for sweets, or biscuits
or for the songs they knew:
Dovid, Melech Yisroel
Chai Chai Verkayom!
I started school – a brick building,
closed to the imagination.
The children here were not for playing with,
especially not the bigger boy
who asked if I was Jewish
and when I said yes, pushed me over.
In the sight of my Fisher-Price God
he pushed me over,
and before our helpless painted eyes,
he pulled my Temple down.
—
Duolingo Yiddish Synagogue
A giraffe is in the pyramid.
She needs more lemons.
Her uncle is a broken man.
—
The Synagogue at the End of the World
The world, we’re sorry to see
has a nasty habit of ending.
Again and again, it rages
and destroys itself
and comes to, and repents
and then forgets
then rages and destroys again
and everywhere and everytime
the world relapses
we find that one same synagogue
reduced not quite to rubble.
Q&A with Joanne Limburg
Q: I’d love to begin by asking you about your experience of Jewishness, as I know there will be about as many answers to this as there are Jews in the world. What does it mean to you to be Jewish? In what ways do you find yourself defined, whether internally or externally, by moving through this world as a Jew?
A: This is a question I'm trying to figure out myself, through writing and in other ways, and I don't think I'll ever reach a definitive answer. In a way, that IS what Jewishness is about to me - learning to live with ever-receding answers. That's its intellectual and moral gift to us. Freud called Jewishness 'a convolution of the brain' and he wasn't wrong. How to explain an identity that is ethnic but might not be, that is religious but spreads beyond that?
On a personal level, I could answer that in a number of ways. According to ancestry.com, I'm '100% European Jewish' which means that my DNA can be traced back to a bottleneck in an identifiable population at a particular point in history. But the stories we extrapolate from DNA are to some extent socially constructed, so this doesn't 'prove' anything beyond doubt.
I am certainly culturally Jewish, in that I was raised in a fairly observant Reform Jewish household in a part of NW London that had a large Jewish population. We kept the holidays, my parents lit candles and made kiddish on Shabbat, my brother and I were sent to Jewish Sunday School. There were Yiddish words peppering the speech of some of the older members of my family, and we ate foods like fried wurst and cottage cheese with sour cream. Over and above all this, I was brought up with a story about who I was, and it was a European Jewish story.
Externally... there's always the question of 'looking' Jewish and what it means. 'Looking Jewish' was and is something I don't want to do, which is undoubtedly down to internalised racism. During my teens, I wanted a nose job - my nose doesn't even look 'Jewish' to anyone except me, but I was obsessed with it. Anyone whose been brought up around NW London Jews would probably clock me - my voice, face, mannerisms all correspond to a certain identifiable type, I think - but to anyone else, I pass, and that's something I feel - strange about.
My father used to say 'You might as well remember that you're Jewish, because if you don't, the anti-semites will remind you.' Make of that what you will.
Q: Was there anything in particular that catalyzed this quartet of “Synagogue” poems?
A: These last few years have been difficult. Anti-semitism is on the rise. In the UK, where I live, Brexit has uncovered this very reductive sort of Britishness and, especially, Englishness, in which words like 'indigenous' are used to distinguish who belongs from who doesn't. That's on the Right. On the Left, there's been a lot of controversy over whether certain people are anti-semitic and what anti-semitic means in relation to Israel. In the community where I grew up, you were brought up to be Zionist without even realising it. I've come to think differently, but that visceral sense of Israel's being part of a collective body of which one is also a part can't be so easily intellectualised away. That's painful, and then there's the feeling that, as a group, one's become a weapon in someone else's culture war - a debatable existence. (Solidarity with trans people, by the way.)
I hadn't written poetry for a while and was going through one of my phases of thinking that we were done with each other. Then one day I was clearing out old drafts and thinking over everything and these words came into my head:
The pain in your Jewishness wants to be poems.
You don't ignore a thing like that. These four are part of a much larger group of synagogues-in-progress. Each one represents an attempt to find a home for my Jewish self, which feels pretty homeless right now.
Q: As we get into the specifics of these poems, I’d like to start at the very end, where “we find that one same synagogue / reduced not quite to rubble.” I can almost hear my bones creak under the weight of this stanza—that every time the world goes and destroys itself, we see our holy places crushed. I read this as both literal and figurative, because it’s our bodies too that suffer. I hear in this line both resilience and resentment that so much resilience is required. I hear expectation, repetition, “that one same synagogue.” It brings to mind the uniqueness for Jews of the moment we’re in, and its utter redundancy. Am I putting too much on this single couplet, or is this reflective of its meaning? What does “that one same synagogue” represent for you?
A: In the Book of Jeremiah, which deals with the destruction of the First Temple and the exile to Babylon, the prophet is told by G-d that 'a remnant shall remain', meaning that everything will be destroyed but not quite. A remnant of the Jewish population remained in Judea. A remnant of the Jewish population survived in various diasporas for many years. Survived the killings that happened as part of the Crusades, and as a result of being blamed for the Black Death. Survived the Spanish Inquisition. Survived the pogroms. Survived the Shoah and the Farhud - you get the picture. Put more prosaically: we get knocked down, but we get up again.
I wrote that particular poem after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. My mother's mother was born in an Ukrainian city called Kremenchuk. I knew there were still Jews in Ukraine, but in my head, that was the old country, that was then. It was only when the tensions started and I read about Zelensky that I discovered how large and varied and active a Jewish community there was still in that part of the world. I knew some of them must be related to me - that feeling of excited discovery was followed immediately a by a sense of terrible loss, and survivors' guilt. But they had built up before, out of what I had ignorantly thought were total ruins. So I wanted to remind myself of the stubborn toughness of that remnant, and its latent generative possibility.
Q: Relative to the previous question, how do you experience the complexity of being a Jew in this particular moment, as age-old antisemitism takes on modern shapes?
A: To some extent, I think I answered this a couple of questions back... I experience the complexity as incredibly painful but I don't want to have a sense of Jewishness based around the fact that we're hated - how tragic would that be? So I'm trying to focus, also, on the rich cultural and intellectual heritage that Jewishness brings. There's so much GOOD stuff. And so much that's funny, let's not forget.
Q: I’m currently using Duolingo to learn Welsh, and I know so many of the phrases they construct for us have to do with commonly recurring words and sentences in the language—in my case, Owen peddling parsnips from his nightclub. Reading your poem here with that in mind, “Her uncle is a broken man” takes on deep meaning. I’d love to hear a bit more about why you wrote this poem.
A: This is a follow-on from the last answer really. I'm learning the language of my ancestors on Duolingo, so I can talk to them. My grandmother spoke it fluently, my mother understood it, but by the time you get to me we're only left with a few words. And that means there are worlds and worlds left untranslated and inaccessible to me. Literature and activism and newspapers and... you name it, it's been written in Yiddish. I've been learning now for about two years and the lessons are still pretty basic and I'm still pretty crap. The sentence 'Her uncle is a broken man' made me laugh because it had that tragi-comic Ashkenazi mournfulness about it. Like the line in a Seinfeld episode about an old woman's pony having been 'The pride of Krakow!' where the plot revolves around Jerry's lack of respect for the nostalgic mournfulness of his elders. Don't laugh at the pony - it's everything we lost!
Q: In “The Synagogue Filled With Unremarkable Things,” you paint such a wonderful picture of the mundanity of a Shabbat morning in a Jewish household. Did this come from your own memory? What did it feel like to look more closely at all these varied “unremarkable” artifacts? What does the unremarkability of so much of Jewish life look like to you when contrasted with the specificity of Jewish history? (A sidenote: I have to say I chuckled at the surprise of the Christmas Carol sheet).
A: I was thinking not only Shabbat mornings, but all mornings, and all days, how my ordinary life was threaded through with both secular/gentile and Jewish things side by side. We didn't go to synagogue every week but we went often enough for me to have these habitual memories. I was aiming to conjure up a 1970s English Jewish childhood. We lit the menorah at home and then next morning I went to my state school and sang from the Christmas Carol sheet. And it was all good. It did all come from my memory, and the experience was like going through an old photo album.
The question of unremarkable life up against Jewish history appears in the poem in the form of the plaque commemorating the death of the Six Million. That was a huge slab of black marble that literally cast a shadow over me as a child when I was in synagogue. Long before I could have any comprehension of what it meant, there it was - a fixture, a piece of furniture, a constant and consistent part of life and specifically, Jewish life.
Q: Last, but certainly not least, let’s talk about “Fisher Price Synagogue.” Reading it evoked something visceral in me. It’s one of those poems I could almost reach out and touch. I wonder if I’m interpreting this rightly, but I read this as a moment of innocence lost. I see a child who felt safe, comfortable, secure in the familiarity of their Jewishness, only to bring that Jewishness into a world that promptly and violently rejected it. As a fellow poet, I want to hear more about “our helpless painted eyes,” as that line both gripped me and felt otherworldly. As a fellow Jew, I want to hear more about how you’ve held onto your Jewishness among people who were ready to knock it out of you from your earliest days.
I’m a convert, and found Judaism called to me after leaving the faith of my upbringing. In hindsight, I think a tradition based in questions, in ritual, in compassion, with lots of room to be doubtful and odd and sometimes curmudgeonly, was just a match made in autistic heaven. But choosing to become a Jew later in life means that I still have the ignorance to be, at times, shocked and horrified by antisemitic outbursts. It also means that I get to have a glowing newlywed phase where I am reveling in my own freedom to choose, to enroot, to belong. So I suppose my question is, how and why do you keep your Jewish light aglow? How might I do so as I grow into my Jewishness over time? How can I help my Jewish son to do the same?
A: There are so many ways to maintain Jewishness - through observance, through study, through... re-watching episodes of Seinfeld, if you like! And don't forget food - different for Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, but important all the way. I'm still trying to find mine. In my experience, as someone from a Jewish background, the light keeps following you around whether you want it to or not. The Bible is full of stories of prophets who want G-d to go away and leave them alone, but he doesn't, and he won't, so forget it.
I can see how it would be an attractive religion for an autistic person, as you are encouraged to question things. If this had been more to the centre of my own Jewish education, I might have remained more observant.
The memory in that poem is a real one. I remember it without affect but it must have shocked me because it's so vivid. I didn't understand at the time what was going on, why saying that I was Jewish would be a reason for someone to shove me. The 'helpless painted eyes' is a way of keeping to the central image, of the Fisher-Price people, but maybe it also stands for the shock of suddenly seeing yourself and the people you love as static, stereotypical figures, fixed in someone else's malevolent gaze.
But we don't have to stay fixed. We can animate ourselves, and we do.
About the Author
Joanne Limburg is a writer and creative writing tutor, based in Cambridge, UK. She has published non-fiction, poetry for adults and children, and one novel. Her most recent book is Letters to my Weird Sisters: on Autism and Feminism.
READ:
- Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism
- The Woman Who Thought Too Much: A Memoir of Obsession and Compulsion
- Small Pieces: A Book of Lamentations
- The Autistic Alice