Intergenerational Love; Intergenerational Trauma: Introducing the Poetry of Lisa Grunberger
Last night when my partner came in from a quick stop at the kiosk, he told me that two of his friends were there, dressed in their soldier uniforms, putting their duffles into a car. He went on to tell me what he had heard on the news: what Trump said. What Netanyahu replied. “Trust only what you see with your eyes.” I told him. “Everything else is internet.” Is AI. Is Chelm. I remember as a girl reading Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short stories about a land where everything was not as it should be, a meshugganah place, a land called Chelm. This week we in this region are living in Chelm.
The Prime Minister runs to Washington for six (6!) days in the middle of the slow trickle and incredible devastation of the hostage release. Horrible scenes of wounded and emaciated hostages (but alive!) being handed certificates and goodie bags. No second phase in place. There Netanyahu is bequeathed all of the riches of heavy bombs and fighter jets by an American President who also offers to “buy” Gaza, move the people there—wherever—and build a resort. As if the Palestinians are just pieces on a chessboard. As if Israelis are easily bought and sold. (Which obviously we are since Netanyahu thought the idea was “the best he’d ever heard.”) And suddenly not only will there be no second phase, but the current release of hostages will stop, and my partner’s two friends, two Druze men, will be back on the battlefield and all of us…everyone in the region at the center of Chelm and the WWIII it will bring. Do we need to talk about intergenerational trauma since today’s trauma seems enough to suffice?
Well intergenerational trauma is very real for Lisa Grunberger, who is the child of survivors of the Holocaust, another time nothing made sense and innocent people lost everything. Grunberger’s poems are alive with those losses, but also those loves. These poems search for the light. They tell us: hold your loved ones. Hold them with all of your strength. Even in a Jewish State, it is all we have.
Again Never
The days compose themselves.
Against a winter sky,
red scarf, white balloon,
a helicopter on a hospital roof.
By an American river
a Jewish child’s hand reaches
out from an unfinished grave.
Her mouth is full of earth.
The sky is blue witness—
but it's not mine.
God is carving a swastika
into the outside wall of my house.
It makes God thirsty.
He drinks Celan’s black milk.
I drink Celan.
Zohara Zohar – Hebrew, meaning light or radiance The nursing home is dark and the baby, light against my breast, sleeps. We bring dreidels and chocolate gelt. We bring Mom a caramel latte. The older kids play and Mom’s eyes wander. Is it time to pray, she asks. She’s here and not here, since last year, when her mind began to crumble. Are you the merit of my past life, she asks between sips. The tattooed numbers on her wrist catch the light. Last time she asked, Are you sure we can go beyond good and evil? Who are you again? Remind me. I need my roots done. I’m your daughter, Sarah. A soft touch to my chin. You’ve gotten old She seems to speak from somewhere else. Can we go back to before the spine of history broke? Then she flutters her still long lashes like a young girl. I place the baby on her lap. Instinct takes over, her knees bounce, she coos and drools at the same time. What’s her name? Rachel Zohara. Rachel Zohara, she repeats. Is that a Jewish name? I follow her gaze to where my children play by the menorah. I need coffee, she shouts, suddenly loud and angry. I’m so tired, I’m going to rest my eyes. Don’t let them steal your spoon, She says, a bite in her voice. Be so kind, Zohara, be my eyes while I close them now. Give me your arms. Take your little light.
If I lived In Jerusalem If I lived in Jerusalem I’d turn my body inside out. I’d hear the muezzin sing and scribble something sweet inside my gold-leafed notebook, half a falafel sandwich at my sandaled feet. I’d cop a feel of a gun peeking through a soldier’s uniform. If I lived in Jerusalem history would flow through me. I’d wrestle with God in the flesh, get her in a headlock, tumble down a hill as tourists shoot digital photos of this minor war. If I lived in Jerusalem my fame would stretch like a womb from the Negev to Haifa. I’d walk the land like Whitman walked Brooklyn. Are there bridges in Jerusalem? I’d walk those too. I’d find new words for old things: war, sun, mountain, woman. If I lived in Jerusalem I’d rub my body with oil and roll in rooster feathers and ram’s hair. I’d testify against myself and unbury my son again and again with dirty claws. I’d sew a dress out of the paper placemats covered with crosswords puzzles intended to distract restless children and lovers weary from sex and war. If I lived in Jerusalem, I’d infect the world with my twin desire for peace and home. I’d write a thousand poems about wanting to be left alone. If I lived in Jerusalem I’d dream of Argentina, Paris and Rome. I’d dream of the Statue of Liberty cloaked in a veil, her charcoal gaze lowered towards the groundling sea. I’d wake with a mouthful of salt my eyes stony stars, ancient shrapnel from the Wailing Wall. If I lived in Jerusalem I’d put Abraham’s knife to my own throat, kidnap a single goat so the Seder would cycle and cycle with no end of God or Angel or coffee or tea until Eliyahu Ha-Navi’s wine cup never emptied until the afikomen’s secret was forgotten until the children began not to care about its hiding spot until the house filled again with chametz and the Shabbat challahs unbraided themselves and the nine branches of the Chanukiah miracled the windows every night. If I lived in Jerusalem I would become a wooden ornament hanging from a nail inside a house that does not separate this from that.
Variations on Winter Light 1. The wind would not let him sleep or was it his new child? Does Jerusalem shimmer with ice crystals and snow? 2. My Aba, the clock man, in love with the sound of Italian and Irish names— Bozozo, Kitzpatrick, DiGiorno, repeats in a baritone rosary. He shuffles from room to room in worn leather slippers praising mother’s apple strudel, clipping a hangnail with a silver pocketknife. His white fruit-of-the-loom gufiya over his belly like a sky that prophesies snow. 3. There is a well frozen in his mind where lovers meet when the sun is high. There is wine and always will be wine even in the desert. 4. He lost his hands in the war but she knows how to caress them using stars as balm her lips water, her voice touch. 5. Darkness ignores her. An occasional moth. Her mother's voice calls in a new key. I am here, Ema, baking your apple cake. Sit down and open your presents. Rachel wrapped the light.
Pushcart nominee and Temple University English Professor Lisa Grunberger is a first-generation American writer. Her award-winning poetry book I am dirty (First Prize, Moonstone Press) and Born Knowing (Finishing Line Press) are lyrical reflections on life as a woman, a mother, and a daughter of Holocaust survivors. She is the author of Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss and the Lotus Position (Harper Collins); Mercy Wombs, (Finalist in Settlement House American Poetry Prize for first-generation poets).
Her full-length poetry collection, For the Future of Girls (Kelsay Press), was nominated for an Eric Hoffer Independent Press award. Her poems appear in the Jewish poetry anthology Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology (The Laurel Review, 2023). She has poetry forthcoming in The Southern Review. She will be a featured poet in Judith Magazine in spring 2025.
A widely published poet, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Southern Review (forthcoming), The Paterson Literary Review, Mudfish, The Drunken Boat, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Philadelphia Poets, Paroles des Jour, Dialogi, Crab Orchard Review, Mom Egg Review, The Baffler, Fine Linen Press. Her poems have been translated into Hebrew, Slovenian, Russian, Spanish and Yiddish.
Almost Pregnant, her play about infertility and is published by Next Stage Press; “Inheritance” appears in an anthology called Infertilities: A Curation (Wayne State UP). Her play, Alexa Talks to Rebecca won the Audience Choice Award at the Squeaky Bicycle Theatre and is currently being adapted for film. Lisa teaches Yoga and Infertility workshops and lives with her family in Philadelphia. She is working on a memoir called Me and My Makers: A Memoir of Genes, Loss and Love.
Delights!
Five Tiny Delights
1. My husband brings me a perfect rich cup of coffee in bed every morning in my favorite mug with just the right amount of milk and kisses me good morning.
2. Playing soccer with our cavapoo puppy Lia and my daughter Rachel in our urban playground in South Philly.
3. Playing “Sorry” on rainy summer days with “tia” Sandra, Abba, and my daughter and her friends and noshing on gluten free cookies and tea.
4. Teaching my Yoga Flow classes on the weekends and instructing all the adults to rock back and forth and “regress to age 5 and do rolly poly, good for your spine and your soul!”
5. Reading five pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past every day since May, while I linger over a second cup of coffee I drink out of my mom’s good china on our deck with the blue umbrella.
Five Tiny Jewish Delights
1. Walking my daughter to the bus stop in the morning to go to her JCC camp in Medford, New Jersey for the past three years. The moment when all the parents are standing on the corner of our urban street waving goodbye to our bubbelehs never fails to make me kvell.
2. My husband says the Shema to our daughter every morning when he wakes her up and I never tire of listening to his voice reciting this prayer and the two of them giggling and laughing in the morning.
3. Ordering Katz’s Gluten-Free Challah, lemon poppy seed loaf, and marble pound cake for my Celiac daughter so she has a nosh for Shabbat.
4. Lying in the loft bed with my daughter, Rachel, looking at the stick on stars on her ceiling and schmoozing about star’s light, Orion, HaShem, love, and her namesake, my mother Rachel. Do I remind you of her, Mom?
5. Wearing my Jewish star and having other Jewish people, comment on how meaningful it is to them to see this, given the current state of the world.
Beautiful, Lisa. Simply stunning.
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