Anniversary in memoriam Louise Glück Some artists die in peace. No such luck for the American poet who nearly shared her Jewish-Hungarian name with Maestro Gluck, he, to whom a young genius was once compared favorably. Lethean music has since lapped over the maestro’s name, while Amadeus has fared well in the waters of oblivion. Wild flowers, trapped in her painterly verse, are now free to bloom and wither, except the tall blue iris of her face. Untapped secrets of her craft will go with her or dither on the brink of time. Such is the destiny of art. I remember a poetry reading in Cambridge. The weather, wretched. Robert Pinsky, David Ferry, and Frank Bidart, known locally as the “poem doctor,” all reading by her side, like aging knights still trying to win her heart. At the end, after waiting for the admirers to subside, I came up. What could I say that she didn’t already know— so perfectly beautiful, lonely, hazel-eyed? About her turns of verb that glut and glow— refusing to grow weary of their own poetry yet surrendering to the universal undertow? I said, “Ms. Glück, I love your poem ‘Anniversary.’” “Which one?” she asked. “I have written two already.” Zion Square A sixty-year-old smiling public man Yeats In the earthly city of Jerusalem I like to stay just a couple of blocks from Kikar HaMusica in Yo’el Moshe Salomon Street, a pathway named after the founder of three Israeli towns and a Hebrew newspaper, a descendant of a messenger of the venerable Vilna Gaon, who in the 1800s left Lithuania for the Holy Land, and was, perhaps, my distant relative, or rather kinsman on the side of my father’s grandfather Rabbi Chaim-Wolf, of blessed memory, who was peacefully murdered in the early days of the war. Orchestras played outside my hotel at night and I listened to the music Jews couldn’t leave in Europe. I felt sheltered by the might of the Iron Dome but also the roof of particolored umbrellas that hang over the street—once the prey of tourist photos and travel agents’ brochures, now the sky of our small warring country. I looked up and cried for all my cousins-in-arms but also for myself. Mostly tears of joy and comfort. Music didn’t end suddenly, it flowed up toward Jaffa Street and I felt someone or something carry me, a Jewish feather, to Kikar Tsiyon. Next morning, as I waited for my muse in uniform, I got to observe a troop of teenage boys in woven kipot, black and white Jews who danced in synch and looked like pale versions of kids from an urban ghetto, vestiges of another world, performing in support of hostages, while girls in long skirts collected donations. Jerusalemites stood and watched, tired of having to care, unfree to let their war fatigue spoil the mood of unity. It was then, weaving my way through a maze of men and women toward the imaginary proscenium that separated the dancers from the dance, I saw a vision of the past. Or was it a vision of the future? I still don’t know. I can only tell you what it looked like: Head to toe, hat to shoes, spectacles to trousers, above and below, black kipa, black kapote, black gartel—meant to separate heart from sex organs—it was all there to reincarnate what I thought my Litvak ancestors had left behind. He was neither tall nor short, neither skinny nor rotund, both redhead and whitehead, eyes both blue and hazel, tousled hair, unevenly clipped beard, blackened fingers, hands in flight, conducting the performance of the universe. Who was he, a local shtetl fool or G-d to all his Jews? Delmonico Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs Dylan Thomas There was a time I used to play pilgrim in New Haven colony where I lived just a block from the theological seminary and I walked valorously to a neighborhood grocery on Orange Street where on Friday afternoons tenebrous Italian wives would buy Delmonico steaks for their husbands. I, too, would order a Delmonico steak and the name of it sounded so triumphantly American, auguring a new home, promising to correct each and every mistake a greenhorn makes. I’ve since forgotten the face of the butcher and the dress of the grocer’s wife, yet I still remember the old Calabrian man in shirtsleeves, black trousers and railroad suspenders, who had founded the business back in the 1940s and now stood at the helm of the cash register and packed brown bags with his tremorous hands… He must have detected something European in the way I conducted myself or in the way I pronounced the word Delmonico— like a nobleman’s name. Where you come from? he would ask, first in English, then in Italian each time he saw me, Di dove sei? Di dove sei? And each time he asked I would answer, eagerly, Nato in Russia, the streetspun Italian I’d had picked up in Ladispoli as a twenty-year-old Jewish kid from Moscow waiting for my refugee visa. In those New Haven days of immigrant innocence I would walk back to my garret under the oaks and Victorian turrets and so acutely, so strongly I felt the daily charms of belonging as I whispered o Delmonico, my Delmonico… How little remains of that fleshy moniker— only deracinated sounds laced with dull pain of the American dream. Our Fathers for Fedor Poljakov How did our fathers survive so many decades of Soviet mendacity? How did they manage to teach us the antidote to memory? There lived in them such an elegant Jewish audacity: how deftly they sidestepped the rules of cruel history, how they tied the knots of their silk neckties a little askance, disliked hollow words, stains on the tablecloth, unpolished cutlery, how they forgave the cowardice of colleagues and despised laziness, how gorgeously they pronounced “a punch in the mouth” or “knock ‘em dead,” and how they hated holidays with bread and games and impure language. After a father’s departure an empty trench remains in one’s head… Our dear soldiers are done fighting, curing the sick, rhyming, singing, and I don’t know how to put it without oversimplification. Instead one evening in June you and I will find ourselves in front of Retsina Café, after traversing Judenplatz, once the center of Jewish life, now an emptiness. We’ll go inside, feel the aroma of resinated wine and see the carefree fa- ces of the Viennese who don’t know guilt. We’ll occupy a table beneath the vistas of Naxos and remember our fathers after the Russian, Jewish, and Byzantine rites. Then we’ll go downstairs into the past, where they are eighteen and the muses wear black narrow skirts, where filterless cigarettes burn like streetlights; where tears are formally banned and sons not allowed to sulk, only to play Biriba and laugh; where grim merrymakers sit around in black vests; where on the kitchen counter in a deep dish sleeps the coarse Levantine salt, where, panting, lie the three fish of sorrow: sea bream, flounder, and red mullet.
Copyright © 2025 by Maxim D. Shrayer
The bilingual author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer (Максим Д. Шраер) was born in Moscow, in 1967, to a Jewish-Russian family, and spent over eight years as a refusenik. He has authored and edited over twenty-five books of criticism, biography, non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and translation. He lectures widely on topics ranging from the legacy of the refusenik movement and the experience of ex-Soviet Jews in America to Shoah literature, Jewish-Russian culture and translingualism.
