Author’s Notebook | The Seven by Ellen G. Friedman

The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story by Ellen G. Friedman, Wayne State University Press, 2017, 280 pp.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What were your greatest challenges in writing The Seven?
Ellen G. Friedman (EGF): I’d like to thank you for inviting me on your wonderful blog. The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story is an account of my family during the Holocaust. I had been interviewing family members since 1985, some of them multiple times. I thought of it as my “last” book—an end of career project. Time has a way of taking you there before you expect it, however. My family members began to die off, and I was not getting any younger, so in the last few years, I just started writing. The delay in writing the book really had not much to do with the end of my career. It had to do with the story I could tell. My memoir is kind of badass. I do not sugarcoat the characters or events in it. It’s a tone I could not have taken while they were alive. Even so, I was nervous about how the children and grandchildren would feel about my characterization of their parents and grandparents. In the end, I changed names and some locations. That was the emotional challenge. I was also determined not to tell the usual Holocaust story in which survivors are viewed through rose-colored glasses. I wanted to accord them the dignity of their full humanity, warts and all.

Another challenge was the lack of information on or other accounts of this population of Holocaust survivors. As soon as one says “Holocaust,” death camps and concentration camps come to mind. But my story is a different story of the Holocaust. The Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust were saved in the Soviet Union. Once they crossed into the USSR, Stalin banished them to remote prison camps and as a result, many of them survived. Their suffering was enormous, but compared to the camps, they had landed in paradise. Ninety percent of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The ten percent who survived did it in Stalin’s USSR. The Seven finally tells that story. When my memoir was published, it was one of the very few that told that story.

Author Ellen G. Friedman

Perhaps the biggest challenge for me was my relationship to this story that I was telling yet was not based on my own experience. It was based on experiences that I had inherited, that were transmitted to me. Since I teach the Holocaust and Memory, I have done deep reading in the transmission of traumatic memories, especially Holocaust memories to subsequent generations. It’s such a complicated topic. Like me, the children and grandchildren of survivors have a living connection to the memories that are passed on to us. Survivors’ memories become our memories. We also become imperfect vehicles on whom this history depends for survival. As we transmit it to the future, we filter this history through our own words, our own consciousness, and give it our own meaning. When that happens, have we betrayed the generation who told us these stories?

TWM: What were your greatest satisfactions?
EGF: The Seven was a very satisfying book to write. It is a literary memoir, so that style, voice, imagery, all of these elements kept my attention as much as the story itself. The style is unconventional, modernist, juxtaposing various elements and also times so that the story does not unroll in a linear way. I loved writing in this way. Once I found the voice for the book, that voice took over and did the writing for me!

Telling this little-known story, getting it out into the world, was also a great satisfaction. The book is a way to add this chapter to the story of the Holocaust, one that reframes it in some ways since it is a story of exile. Once the Seven left their home in Warsaw, they never returned. They traveled half way around the world. They had to learn the language of each country they went to in order to earn a living, and never saw the family and friends they left behind. In each place they went, they had to figure out where to live and how to live. They could not take anything for granted. They were not citizens of the countries they found themselves in and so had very few rights and very little protection. They were always vulnerable.

TWM: Is there anything you would have done differently?
EGF: My one regret has to do with a small detail of description—with my uncle, whom I call Dov in the book. I describe him as having brown eyes. But my cousin, his daughter, pointed out that he had very, very blue eyes. If there’s ever an opportunity, I’ll change that detail. These things matter. I wrote this story to get it out in the world, but I also wrote it so that the generations that follow me know their history in as material and correct way as possible.

TWM: How did you decide on an academic press as your publisher?
EGF: I did try for a trade publisher, but all of my experience in publishing has been with academic presses. In the end, I went that way because I felt comfortable. It turned out to be a big advantage since academic publishers send manuscripts to experts for their comments. Through comments from historians, I learned a great deal about t. I’m a literary critic of modern American literature so I was happy for the advice and suggestions of the experts in that history.

TWM: What did you learn about the Holocaust through your own family history that was perhaps not mentioned in any of the scholarship?
EGF: When we read history books, the focus is on the general experience of people. What a memoir contributes is the history from the point of view of people who experienced it, so it’s much more varied and complicated. My uncle Dov described the Soviet gulag where my family was serving out their sentence of “banishment” almost as if it were a summer camp—although he suffered a great deal as well. Within the hardship, there was also music, dancing, friends, the adventure of a new place, new culture, and new romances. Writing about the Holocaust from an inside perspective, I learned so much about the textured, lived experience. The Seven were so lucky since theirs is a story of survival. But their fortune also reminds me of the rest of the family who didn’t leave Warsaw for the USSR and were murdered in Treblinka or in Warsaw.

TWM: Please talk about your visits to your family places. How did they inform your writing?
EGF: One place I visited was Brest-Litovsk, where my great uncle harbored the seven refugees from Warsaw, Poland—including my father and his two brothers and my father’s girlfriend Lola who would become my mother. Going there, I felt like I was “returning,” but the natives treated me like a stranger, a foreigner, which I was. It gave me a sense of what my family must have felt time and time again as they were pushed from one place to another. Each time they had to begin again as strangers, foreigners amongst natives who looked upon them with suspicion, and each time they had to learn the native language. There’s was an experience of exile. They never got to go home again, and I don’t think they ever felt at home again. Loss was always at the center of their identities.

TWM: Which authors inspire you?
EGF: The tone of my book was influenced by Art Spiegelman’s Maus I and II. His graphic memoir is both about his father’s experience and about his own relationship to his father’s story and his father, a Holocaust survivor. It talks about the transmission of memory and trauma and how the pain and stories move through the generations. I was also influenced by Virginia Woolf who said that women writers have to undo their social programming that encourages them to please people and not offend. To be a good writer, you have to try and tell the truth and not just say what people want or expect to hear.

TWM: Any words of advice for those writing family histories/memoirs, especially related to the Holocaust?
EGF: Write the book and if there are people to interview, to talk to, do it now! There are so many untold stories, and if anyone reading this blog has access to one, get it out into the public. Each story counts.

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Author’s Notebook | All Eyes on Alexandra by Anna Levine

All Eyes on Alexandra, written by Anna Levine and illustrated by Chiara Pasqualotto. 32 pp., Kar-Ben, September 2018.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): In this book, you’ve personified a family of cranes and used Abba, Ima, Savta, and Saba. How did you develop that idea? What led you to create a fictional family of cranes vs. a nonfiction approach?
Anna Levine (AL): I was staying at a bed and breakfast in the old city of Akko (run by the author and translator Even Fallenberg). At 6:00 in the evening Evan invited us to climb up on the roof with his son, two translators from Germany, a writer and her husband, a couple from Paris with two rambunctious young children, and a friend of mine who’d come to visit. As the Muezzin sounded over the loudspeakers, the birds on their way south began to gather above. At first there was only a handful. Gradually, the cloudless evening sky filled, in what can only be described as a Hitchcock-like flock of thousands of beating wings circling above, turning the sky into a dark thrashing cloud. The swallows landed on electricity wires strewn haphazardly between the closely crowded buildings. We watched as they perched, settling in for the night, nudging the ones beside them to move and make room, hinting at an unknown hierarchy of who had rank to the better spot, as they nudged off fledglings to stake their claim. I think at that moment I visualized Alexandra with a very independent spirit and how she would strive to make a place for herself and stand out among the flock.

TWM: What was the most challenging aspect of writing this book?
AL: Getting the migratory flight path right! As I was looking at the final drafts with the almost completed artwork I realized that there was a problem. The birds flew over Syria, Lebanon and then suddenly they were over pyramids in Egypt and then swooped back to the Hula Valley. I was beside myself! I grabbed my computer and basically ‘flew’ over to the Jerusalem Bird Observatory. The director of the observatory, Alena Kacal, was wonderful, calmed me down and sat with me. In the end, it was an easy change to make.

Anna Levine

TWM: What was your greatest satisfaction?
AL: Seeing the art work. I think every picture book author stresses about whether the art will live up to their expectations. When I saw Chiara Pasqualotto’s illustrations, I fell in love with the book as if reading it for the first time. Chiara is so talented. Her art brings the text to life.

TWM: What made you think of Kar-Ben vs. other publishers? Or did your agent submit it?
AL: I submitted it to Kar-Ben. If my book has a Jewish/Israel theme, I think of them first. I’ve been one of their authors for many years, since Judye Groner brought me in. Now I enjoy working with Joni Sussman and Amy Fitzgerald. Jill Colella is very hands-on when it comes to thinking up creative ways to promote my books. It’s exciting to be part of the whole process. Kar-Ben feels like home.

For more about Anna Levine and her work, please visit her website.

Three-in-One Notebook | Resistance by Jennifer Nielsen

Resistance by Jennifer A. Nielsen, Scholastic Press, 2018, 400 pp.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What inspired you to write Resistance?
Jennifer Nielsen (JN): I stumbled upon the story while exploring the former Jewish ghetto in Krakow. A sign on one wall referenced the theater underground during the German occupation. Being a theater major, that intrigued me, so after I was home, I tried to find out more information. That research led me to the story of a little known resistance group in Krakow, largely made up of Jewish teenagers and known as Akiva. The more I learned, the more I knew their story had to be told.

TWM: How did you conduct your research?
JN: Solid research was vital to writing Resistance. I wanted to keep the details as close as possible to actual history and unfiltered through the lens of other retellings. Certainly, I drew upon all that I had learned and observed in my own travel to Poland, but for additional research, whenever I could, I used first person resources – the story as told by those who lived it.

For example, the story of the Akiva resistance movement was first documented by a woman named Gusta Draenger, who was part of the leadership. After she and her husband were arrested, she recorded her story on scraps of toilet paper which were smuggled out of the prison. Her words later became a book, Justyna’s Narrative, and was a primary resource for me in understanding how Akiva thought and operated.

As much as possible, I went into the extreme details. I have a sewer map of Warsaw from 1943 and overlaid it with the ghetto map to find entrance and exit points. I found a video of a woman who had survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising who described fighting from what had once been a furniture store, so that detail is noted in the book. I followed actual train lines, roads, and ghetto boundaries.

When first person narratives weren’t available, I turned to resources such as the archives of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives, the Jewish Virtual Library, and other organizations dedicated to recording and preserving Holocaust history.

At the end of my research, I had such a thick stack of notes, I needed a way to organize it. So I created a timeline out of poster boards, and placed it on the wall of my office (now known as the Research Wall), and created a second poster board of pictures of the actual people who resisted. I wanted a constant reminder that I was writing about real people who lived actual lives.

Courtesy Jennifer A. Nielsen

TWM: How was the research vetted?
JN: Resistance went through many layers of vetting, and was fact-checked by Tami Rich, a Historian and Cultural Heritage Advisor, who was formerly a curator at Yad Vashem and is currently on the faculty of Haifa University’s Holocaust Studies MA program.

TWM: What were your greatest challenges and satisfactions in writing Resistance?
JN: Even from original concept, this was the most challenging book I’ve ever undertaken, because I knew I was writing about real events, and sensitive events, and I understood that I had to get it right. I also knew that I was writing in a topic where much has already been written, and where much has yet to be written, and my hope was that this story would stand out on its own.

As I immersed myself in the writing and the world of 1943 Poland, I grew to love these characters so much and became emotionally attached to their journey. One of the greatest satisfactions for me came late in the story when these same characters begin to define their victory—finally taking back control of their lives, regardless of when and how they ended.

I have such deep respect for the couriers and resistance fighters, to have been able to write about them at all, adding to their three lines of history, is the greatest satisfaction of my career.

TWM: What do you hope readers will take away from Resistance?
JN: I hope readers will see that there were many ways in which the Jewish people resisted the Nazi regime. Resistance was continuing Sabbath worship, it was setting up safe houses or hiding in them. Resistance was singing in the prison yard to mask the conversations inside the barracks, smuggling food into the ghettos, and sabotaging German goods on work duty. Resistance was risking one’s life to pass on forged identification, or shouting Shema Yisrael in defiance at the end of life. There were some who fought, but many more who resisted.

I want readers to see the courage, heroism, and valor that defined the young Jewish couriers, those who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and all those who determined that if they would not kneel to the enemy, then they had to resist him.

TWM: What writers inspire you?
JN: I read widely and draw influences from many sources. The authors that may have impacted me most heavily for Resistance include Ruta Sepetys, Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, and Markus Zusak.

TWM: Thanks so much, Jennifer. Now a few questions for Lisa Sandell, Editorial Director, Scholastic Inc. and Ammi-Joan Paquette, Literary Agent with Erin Murphy Literary Agency. Lisa and Ammi-Joan, thanks for joining us. What attracted you to this story?
Lisa Sandell: The story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising has always compelled me—the determination of a handful of young people in the face of unimaginable terror and violence to survive and resist is remarkably inspiring. And I knew that in the very capable and talented hands of Jennifer A. Nielsen, those lives (and deaths) would be honored and represented with dignity and truth.

Ammi-Joan Paquette (AJP): As Jennifer’s agent, I have the distinct honor of getting a sneak peek at her projects earlier than most readers. When she described this project and its origins to me, I knew immediately that this was a story that must be told—but what really drew me in as I began to read the finished draft was the power of these characters. Truly unforgettable!

TWM: What is your general reaction to Holocaust narratives for young readers?
LS: As the great-granddaughter of Holocaust survivors I have been immersed in Holocaust literature my entire life. I know that these narratives hold immense power for young readers, as they relate stories of courage in the face of unlikely odds, survival despite the most devastating of circumstances, and portraits of the furthest extremes of human behavior. Moreover, I think it is crucial to continue to educate young readers about this corner of history, so that we never repeat it.

AJP: It is so important that these stories are preserved, that they continue to be told. As the years go by, I truly believe that the only way to keep the horrors of the past from being repeated is to keep them alive, so that future generations can know, and learn, and hopefully do—and be—better.

TWM: What do you hope readers will take away from Resistance?
LS: I hope readers will come away from reading Resistance with a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, of the Nazi occupation of Poland and what that meant for the country’s Jews, and I hope that this portrayal of Jewish resistance offers inspiration and a sense of promise in the knowledge that young people can make an important mark on history. And I hope readers find themselves captivated by an extraordinary story.

AJP: The power of the individual, that strength takes many forms, that quietness and endurance can be as powerful as force. That there are many unsung heroes, many untold stories. That we must never forget.

Author’s Notebook: Not Our Kind, a Novel by Kitty Zeldis

Not Our Kind by Kitty Zeldis. HarperCollins, September 2018.

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What inspired you to write this book?
Kitty Zeldis (KZ): This book began in the 1970s, when I was student at Vassar, although I didn’t know that the story was taking shape then—I was too busy living it. Though there certainly were Jews at Vassar, both students and professors, even as a 17 year-old freshman I was keenly aware that it was an institution built on excluding people like me—I was the not our kind of the book’s title. And yet it was also a place I loved, and where I thrived. I’d long wanted to write a book with a larger canvas and broader scope than any I’d attempted before and this, I realized, was the way to do it. I was writing not so much about anti-Semitism, though that was certainly a part of it, but more about the intersection of two cultures. How do Jews make their way in the wider world? And how does that wider world bend and stretch to accommodate them? These were the questions that interested me before I began work on this book and they are questions that interest me still.

TWM: How did you decide on alternating point of view characters?
KZ: I’ve always liked novels that offered differing perspectives; I find it enriches and deepens the experience as a reader, and so I was striving for that effect in my own work. And in this particular story, I wanted Eleanor and Patricia to be equals, and for each to have the authority that comes with having her own point of view. I wanted a book that allowed for a subject-subject relationship, not a subject-object one.

TWM: What was your greatest challenge in writing this novel? Your greatest satisfaction?
KZ: In an early version, Wynn went so far as to rape Eleanor and is ultimately put on trial for his crime. But I came to feel that once that happened, the book veered off in a different direction; it became less about the two women, and more about a woman and a man. So I basically scrapped the entire second half and started over. It was the hardest thing I had done as a novelist, but when I felt I had pulled it off, also the most satisfying.

TWM: What do you want readers to take away from it?
KZ: I didn’t want to blame my Gentile characters and I don’t want my reader to blame them either. Instead, I hope the reader will see the characters—and the world they inhabit—as comprised of many shades of gray, all of them subtle and nuanced.

TWM: Was any of the novel based on your own family’s experience?
KZ: Only bits and pieces. I rarely create a story or character from whole cloth; it’s always more of patchwork.

TWM: How did you conduct your research?
KZ: I already had an affinity for the period—I love the films and fashions of the 1940s—so I was drawing on material that was already familiar to me. But I consulted many photographic books to get a crisper picture of the period details and character. I also read Gentlemen’s Agreement, which mined a similar vein, and read other books of the period, just to soak up the small details that would help bring the story to life.

TWM: Did you ever consider a DP [Displaced Persons] refugee camp character? Why/why not?
KZ: No, I never considered such a character, though now that you have suggested it, you’ve sparked my interest—maybe I’ll write such a character one day!

TWM: How did a critique group/beta readers help you?
KZ: I’m no longer part of a writing group but I do have a few trusted readers with whom I shared the manuscript. Their insights were invaluable. I don’t believe it’s possible for a writer to edit her own work because she always knows her own intentions, and can never not know them. Whereas the reader doesn’t know anything about intention; she only knows what’s on the page.

TWM: Whose writing inspires you?
KZ: Where to begin? Pointing to books from way back in my childhood, the ones that I re-read over and over (and who has the luxury to do that as an adult?) I would have to say Betty Smith, L.M. Montgomery, Frances Hodges Burnett, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher were some early favorites, along with Tennessee Williams and John Steinbeck as I grew a little older; these were authors that came to define me as both as reader and future writer. Novelists who delve into the past and use historical settings have had a lot to teach me, and among them I number Kathryn Harrison, Jennie Fields, and Sarah McCoy. For creating fully rounded, flawed but wholly sympathetic characters I’d have to say Elizabeth Strout. And finally, for old fashioned-can’t-put-it-down-story telling, nobody does it better than Donna Tartt.

TWM: What’s next for Kitty Zeldis?
KZ: I’m working on another book with a historical setting but I don’t want to say any more about it—can’t risk a kina hora!

August 2018 Jewish Book Carnival

The Whole Megillah is pleased to once again host the monthly Jewish Book Carnival!

Here are this month’s links:

• At Life Is Like a Library, Chava Pinchuck looks at some books that are appropriate for the month of Elul, a time to review the past year and prepare for the new one.
• Deborah Kalb interviews a wide variety of authors on her website, Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb. Here’s a link to a recent interview with Cherise Wolas about her new novel, The Family Tabor.
• A true life mystery, The Lost Artist is a book about the illustrator of a classic Hebrew book written for children, which had been very popular in the early days of the State of Israel. In The Lost Artist, Book Review, Batya Medad on Shiloh Musings tells about  The Lost Artist LOVE PASSION WAR (PART 1) by Eric Hausman-Houston.  She writes that the book is suitable for older children and adults.
• The Book of Life podcast presents a panel discussion on Social Justice and Jewish Children’s Books!
• Over on the My Machberet blog, Erika Dreifus posts weekly “Pre-Shabbat Jewish Literary Links.” Here’s one recent example, featuring an interview with author André Aciman, Erika’s own take on a debut novel by Hilary Zaid, and much more.

 

Tidbits

The New Yorker Article about Children’s Holocaust Books

Folks have been buzzing about Ruth Franklin’s New Yorker article, “Transported.” You can read it here. You can also access information about children’s Holocaust books published in the United States and Canada between 2002 and 2018 at my Holocaust Kidlit website.

Lilith’s Fiction Contest

Submissions are now open until September 30, 2018 for quality short fiction (3,000 words or fewer) for Lilith Magazine‘s Fiction Contest. See details here.

Poet’s Notebook | Because I Cannot Leave This Body by Carol V. Davis

The Whole Megillah (TWM): What inspired this collection?
Carol Davis (CD): I don’t ever think in terms of a collection before I put it together so I can’t say there was a specific inspiration for the collection as a whole, but as I realized I had any new poems (since the last book), it started to come together. On a National Parks Service artist residency on the Navajo reservation, I wrote a number of ekphrastic poems using paintings by the British painter Lucian Freud. I knew that would be one section of the book (with other poems about art). As I started going through poems and thinking about choosing a title, I realized that there were a number of poems that dealt in one way or another with the body and so this title seemed to fit the collection. There are about various themes that weave their way in this collection: faith and doubt, poems of place, poems engaging with history, ekphrastic poems, family history and nature.

TWM: What were your greatest challenges and satisfactions pulling this collection together?
CD: For me the hardest part in putting together a collection is deciding on the order of poems. For my first book (or rather first book published in the United States as my first collection was published in Russia), I found this particularly daunting. If I can talk about that first book for a minute, I think it would illustrate the problem. That book, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, covered a 10-year period when I was living on and off in St. Petersburg, Russia. Originally, I had organized the book chronologically. The wonderful poet, Brigitte Pegeen Kelly, who sadly passed away in 2016, had agreed to read the manuscript to look at the order. She suggested I mix it up. After re-ordering it, I sent her the new T of C and she did the same to me. Interestingly both our new reorderings were almost identical. I used this as an example for subsequent collections, including this one. Usually a reader does not read a poetry collection front to back, but when you are submitting a manuscript to a competition or to a publisher, the editors do read it that way and the ordering ends up being very important. I start out by making piles of poems that I want in a book. I then move the poems around. The satisfaction of course is when it’s close to being completed.

TWM: There’s an “other-worldliness,” moving freely between realms, to some of your poems in this collection, which subtly adds layers to the verse. Were you aware of this when writing?
CD: One of the worries or challenges for any poet is themes that run from one collection to another. Being Jewish, of course I worry about everything! In working with this manuscript, I tried to calm down and not berate myself for continuing some of the obsessions that were in the previous collection, Between Storms. So in this collection there are also poems about faith and doubt, so the otherworldliness comes not from having answers but from the search. I can’t say I was aware of the otherworldliness consciously in writing these poems but certainly in revising them and looking at the manuscript as a whole I did see that as one of the themes.

I hope I think especially for where does one feel inspired in terms of Judaism or religion or poetry for me offering music is a draw including Russian orthodox church music which of course makes me uncomfortable religiously but I am still drawn to it.

TWM: You show a great range of style in this collection. Was that intentional? How do you determine what style to use?
CD: As poets I think we sometimes get in stylistic ruts, whether it’s writing one stanza poems with short lines or couplets or four-line stanzas. I do like to play around with the poem on the page and yes, I was aware of that variety in this book. Because a number of poems had what you called otherworldliness, giving the poems a more fragmentary style and breathing space through placement on the page seemed important.

TWM: Who inspires you?
CD: I read a lot of contemporary poetry and often someone else’s work will inspire me. I have gone on many artist residencies. Being in a new place and with time inspires me. When I go on a residency, I often take a project with me in case I get writer’s block. I never do but having a project is comforting for me. That’s what happened with bringing a book of Lucian Freud paintings did. On an artist residency in Boise, I put together this manuscript. Having a whole month to really concentrate on putting this manuscript together was great. As for poets who inspire me they are many and the list gets added to, but I always can go back to the work of Bridget Pegeen Kelly, Jean Valentine, Yehoshua November, Christian Wiman as well as discovering younger poets. Classical music often is a muse for me, including some religious music, especially by Arvo Paart or Russian Orthodox music (ironic, I know, as a Jew).

TWM: How/when did you get interested in writing poetry?
CD: I didn’t come to poetry through an MFA. I had written bad poetry in high school but did not pursue it. I had been a dancer actually, trained in ballet and then modern and actually took a leave from grad school and joined a small company in Seattle. I studied Russian literature in college and grad school so studying literature was my entry to poetry. After my MA exams, I started writing poetry and corny as it sounds, I just knew it was right for me.

TWM: How do you decide where to send your individual poems for publication?
CD: This is a difficult question. Of course, there are places I always hope to get published in and there are times when I think a poem would be right for a literary journal. But that does not mean the poems will necessarily get accepted there. It is getting harder and harder to get into very good magazines. There is just so much competition now. Also there seems to be a sea change in style (or taste) that is going on. I have noticed this, as have poet friends too. If our work gets to the editor, we have a chance, but often it is rejected by the first readers – grad students – and I think their taste is different than for readers of a little older generations. As for Jewish-related work, there are not that many journals. There are a few that also cater to a more “spiritual” bent. That said, a poem with Jewish themes (or any other) does not have to go to a magazine of the same bent.

TWM: What advice do you have for poets of Jewish content?
CD: My advice for poets of Jewish content would not be different than for other poets, to read many literary journals. Journals always say to read their work before submitting. This is good advice but really most journals have similar styles and themes, minus the journals on the fringes. Also don’t be afraid to submit to journals abroad. Some poets don’t like to publish more than once in a lit mag. I don’t agree with that. If you have a connection to the editor, point that out.

About Carol V. Davis

Carol V. Davis is the author of Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State University Press, 2017), Between Storms (2012) and won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio and the Library of Congress (U.S.) and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Ulan-Ude, Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches at Santa Monica College, California and Antioch University, Los Angeles.