Dear Yiddish

Description

A culminating extraordinary book exploring the country of old age with candor beyond Yeats.

DEAR YIDDISH is a startlingly brave and candid rendering of life in the shadow of death. "Sex is over and death is soon to come." It is not chilling; it is uplifting. The beauty of the language and perceptions make 'maturity' one with 'excellence.' Or, as Yeats put it, "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom." It is a celebration of the poet's Jewish heritage, of the roots of his love of language, of the whole of his life in a nutshell, of the drop on a nostril that is the last moment of life, the last line of a poem. Like Donne in his shroud, in "Getting Ready," Fein lists the famous writers and the Yiddish poets and his dearest friends and loved ones and says if they can die, or know that they soon will die, "Why can't I, with my poems, get ready to die?" He will live forever in these poems. The book is an affirmation of the power of poems to keep us alive.

Poetry. Jewish Studies.

Richard Fein’s lyric genius is marked by one central searching endeavor: to bring English in earshot of its rhyme with Yiddish. It is the kind of necessary and forthright exploitation a serious poet delights in. And it starts when a curious boy on vacation in the Catskills looked way down into the stream Neversink and 'all he saw was Yiddish letters.' The poetry was writ in that childhood water, the cross-currency of pure recollection and intensely exacting concentration. And now this book of a lifetime, DEAR YIDDISH, which is also dear Yeats, and all of it Richard’s way of translating himself into the magisterial American poet he has become.
—George Kalogeris, author of Winthropos

In a poem appropriately called 'The Connection,' near the beginning of his eloquent and moving new book, Richard Fein writes: 'The tender violence of recall/becomes a tripwire setting off/bits of memory....' The Yiddish language itself and the Yiddish poetry Fein remembers and translates trigger that tripwire. The title poem of DEAR YIDDISH is a surprisingly erotic love poem to an entire language. But as Fein’s readers have already come to know, all of his poems are love poems.
—Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems

Author Bio