Night Doesn't Fall, Day Does Not Break
Introducing The Poetry of Susan Aizenberg
EDITOR’S NOTE: In these luminous poems, Susan Aizenberg explores a vast range of themes, tragic and comic: a Jewish poet’s untimely death in the Shoah; a young Jewish sweatshop worker at the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where so many exploited and vulnerable employees perished in a fire; the vividness and creativity of old Yiddish curses; our collective Jewish disposition to anticipate the worst; and the bravely aging Jewish crones of Florida, her mother’s cohort, meeting the indignities and infirmities and losses of their generation with resilience and moxie. In language lyrical and spare, Aizenberg renders these Jewish lives and sensibilities with poignancy, potency and abundant compassion, yielding an indelible and most affecting experience. — Elissa Wald
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FORCED MARCH —What would I have to be in order to speak about him… —Adam Zagajewski 1 I remembered it wrong, the scene in the film within the film about Radnóti—there were no young lovers coming upon the killing in the woods. It was an older man and a woman who might have been his daughter. And the soldiers hustling Radnóti and the other Jewish prisoners too weak to work, and not dying fast enough, to dig their own mass grave, then coolly shooting them one by one, might have been their beloved sons and grandsons. And I may have dreamed those listing skeletons marched through postcard towns, sunshine on rags, the apple-sellers, a blonde child rolling a wheel with a stick past the starving men. The wide-angled views of lush and lovely country— Hungary, Yugoslavia, Germany. Those tracking shots of green swells of pasture and innocent cows grazing, peasants carrying their ancestral hatreds along with the sparse grain and potato crops in mule-drawn carts. Those close-ups of adolescent soldiers grateful someone else is led away. A cart man feeding fresh hay to his horses. The autumn woods suffused with morning light. 2 Everywhere in Hungary there are statues of him— in front of libraries, town halls. In the cover photo of my new translation he’s cast in bronze. Slender and tall, he leans against a wooden rail in a sunlit park, his handsome profile tilted down, as if he’s staring at his shoes, lines forming, perhaps, in his mind. His poems were prophetic, writes one scholar, his gift arising, she thinks, from his Jewish predisposition to anticipate the worst. In the camps, on the marches, he wrote. In his filthy bunk, among the worms and lice. The poet writes, as dogs howl or cats mew. Or small fish coyly spawn. What else am I to do? 3 For the denouement, the director’s framed the exhumation site: a row of pine coffins lined up neatly as shipping crates, on top of each a pile of rags, each man’s things roughly displayed for whoever is left to claim them. On Radnóti’s the famous raincoat, hidden in the pockets, his photos and letters, an exercise book of ten poems. Folded within its pages, a flyer advertising cod liver oil, Radnóti’s final lyric on the back. I can’t stop thinking of how he’d written, five times, in five languages— the French and English … rather blurred and party illegible— on the book’s first leaf, the same message— Please, forward this booklet which contains the poems of the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti … Thank you in anticipation.
TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST COMPANY —Emma, aged 16 I do fine work, my stitches delicate as an eyelash. This earns me a spot by the window. Dirty as it is, some light filters through. Rosie’s clumsy, her fingers thick and fit only for rough cloth stitched by gas lamp. We buy our own needles, pay the electric for our machines. We rent the backless stools we sit on. The bosses lock us in and we’re searched when we leave. Some girls do steal—buttons, ribbons, even whole shirts. But not Rosie and me. Now all I have left of her is the famous photo. She stands unsmiling beneath hand-lettered signs tacked to the wall— No back-talk, no stalling in the Ladies. Don’t come late. Don’t leave early. If you’re not here Sunday, don’t come back on Monday— beside her, and taller than she, towering stacks of unfinished cloth, her day’s quota, endless as the straw the miller’s daughter had to spin.
AFTER READING THE NEWS THIS MORNING, I TURN TO THE CURSES OF MY ANCESTORS
—a found poem
May you live to a hundred and twenty,
without a head. May you grow
like an onion with your head in the ground.
May you crawl on your belly.
May you become swollen and veined
as a mountain, pepper in your nose
and salt in your eyes. May all your teeth
fall out, except one to give you a headache.
May you have a hundred houses,
in each house a hundred rooms, in each
room twenty beds, and may fevers
and chills toss you from bed to bed to bed.
HUNTER MOON This morning my love called me out onto our sunlit balcony to see a fawn, the quick spindles of its new legs as it wove a narrow path through the Bradford pears, its fine head lowered to graze the shimmering grass and then lifted to follow the sound of our voices. And though I felt the sun on my face and my own hand warm on a mug of sweetened coffee, I ruined the moment, thinking of hunters with their rifles raised—I don’t understand how they can do that, I said. Some nights my love has called me out to watch clear skies speckled with far-flung stars, to see full moons so bright they lit up our darkened living-room, cast white or gold squares of light on our floor— Strawberry Moon, Hunter Moon, Buck— and I’ve thought about how we were seeing the past, and how I’ll never understand about the time it takes the light to reach us. Once we watched a lunar eclipse, the legerdemain of the moon’s slow erasure, its slow return. In the sleepless hushed hour of the wolf, together we’ve stood tracking the red lights flashing, like giant fireflies above the live oaks, of the air ambulance heading for Children’s Hospital, and because we are, the two of us, who we are, I felt sad, thinking of the damaged and sick children it carried, and my love felt glad, thinking of their rescue.
UPON READING THAT, ACCORDING TO THE JEWISH CALENDAR, DAYS BEGIN WITH NIGHT I think of my mother’s Coconut Creek buddies, all in their late eighties, clustered around the condo pool in their floppy hats and flowery one-piece suits like so many withered blossoms. Getting old ain’t for sissies, they liked to warn. Meaning the obituaries they scanned each morning on their sun-wrecked lanais over bagels and decaf—Who do we know? Who’s younger? Older? Meaning the blue-and-white ambulances, ubiquitous as the surrey-fringed golf carts prowling their planned community, screaming harbingers among the rapacious tropical blooms and subdued fake lawns. Meaning walkers, nurses, and companions from the islands. Meaning hip fractures, glaucoma. Tumors. Each new day not a beginning, but one day less. At sixty-nine, you and I are babies, they scoff, but hasn’t it begun? This one surprises his wife with new hearing aids in lieu of birthday roses. That one’s darling needs new medications for his fragile heart. Gray hair, less hair, lost reading glasses. Vanity’s the least of it. Making love’s acrobatic, but not in some up- against-the-elevator-wall Cinemax way. And of course, it’s an illusion, and no work for the sun, what we call its rising and setting, as we turn and turn, passing in and out of its light. Night doesn’t fall, day does not break. It’s this fragile earth, endlessly circling and spinning, that we should pity.
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Susan Aizenberg is the author of three full-length poetry collections: A Walk with Frank O’Hara (University of New Mexico Press Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series 2024), Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015), and Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry Series 2002). Her awards include a Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award, the VCU Levis Reading Prize, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship and two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, the Nebraska Book Award in Poetry, a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and the Mari Sandoz Award from the Nebraska Library Association. Aizenberg also is the author of First Light, a fine arts letterpress collection of 11 poems with original linocuts by artist Kevin Bowman (Gibraltar Editions 2020) and Peru, a chapbook-length collection included in the volume Take Three: 2/AGNI New Poets Series (Graywolf Press 1997), and co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press 2001). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, among them The Slowdown, On the Seawall, Plume, The Summerset Review, Nine Mile, Cultural Daily, Hole in the Head Review, Blackbird, The Night Heron Barks, Bosque, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and The Journal, and have been reprinted or are forthcoming in several anthologies, most recently in Poetry Goes to the Movies (Pacific Coast Poetry Series, 2025). Aizenberg was for many years Poetry Editor of The Nebraska Review, served as Poetry Editor for Numero Cinq, and is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing and English at Creighton University. She now lives, writes, and from time to time teaches online and in-person workshops for Larksong Writers Place, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and elsewhere in Iowa City. She can be reached at her website susanaizenberg.com.
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What are five tiny delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?
1. Texts from my kids of photos and videos of my grandchildren;
2. Waking up early enough to catch the sunrise over the trees;
3. Wine on the balcony with my husband in spring and summer;
4. The incredible poetry section at Prairie Lights bookstore here in Iowa City;
5. Coffee with friends in coffee shops where at the next tables you can hear folks speaking Mandarin or discussing particle physics.
What are five tiny Jewish delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?
1. Shabbat Sing at my grandchildren’s day school;
2. Latkes with applesauce;
3. Avinu Malkeinu;
4. Relaxed, laughter-filled Passover seders with our extended family;
5. Reading the poetry of Jewish poets.
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