GILGUL 1 1976
In 1976 after my grandfather David Kamenetz z”l died and my rabbi from childhood, Morris Lieberman died, my friend Dr. Marc Lieberman gave me a copy of all the volumes of the Rodkinson Talmud from his uncle’s library. I had never been exposed to the Talmud, and though the Rodkinson is an extremely Victorian translation I nonetheless could hear the echo: I heard the rabbis speaking with the intonation and Yiddish accent of my immigrant grandfather.
I took a roll of continuous paper and on my Royal Standard
began typing the first set of poems that became The Missing Jew published by Dryad Press in 1979.
I looked more or less like this then:
The book looked like this:
The Missing Jew was 62 pages, tall and skinny like the poems, and the poems were modular, both individual but part of a larger whole.
The cover was by the terrific artist Cyril Satorsky.
David Meltzer wrote on the back, “A wonder, both on the surface and in the core.”
You can order The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022
Direct from the publisher or from Amazon or benefiting independent bookstores from Bookshop.ORG
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