But who wants to know that spring is tatters
of dingy whiteness clinging to a briar?
Can’t just one bush blaze with fire—
for a single instant—that does not consume?
Or is this my vision? this stingy bloom?

With her usual poetic intelligence, Osherow succeeds in turning the flower into a double metaphor. First, the whitethorn is an emblem of middle age, with its reduced expectations and loss of “bloom”—a floral cousin to Robert Frost’s oven-bird, whose unlovely call is a reminder “that leaves are old, and that for flowers/ mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.” Then, in the poem’s last lines, Osherow deepens the image by contrasting the whitethorn with the burning bush, from which God speaks to Moses in the book of Exodus. With this swerve, a poem about nature becomes a poem about the divine, and the disappointment that the whitethorn embodies becomes spiritually fraught—and distinctively Jewish.

This is a rarer quality in contemporary American poetry than one might think. There are plenty of Jewish American poets at work today—including some of the most highly esteemed, like Adrienne Rich and Robert Pinsky—but no one, I think, is as successful as Osherow at making Jewishness a productive subject for poetry. This is not because her work is saturated with biblical references, or because she writes piously about a vanished past, or because she waxes kabbalistic and makes play with Golems and gematria—all techniques that have grown overfamiliar in American Jewish writing. Rather, Osherow allows Judaism and Jewish history into her work as problems—as things to think about, with, and sometimes against; as sources of questions and, occasionally, answers. In this way, she comes much closer than most poets to an honest expression of contemporary American Jewish sensibility.

In Whitethorn, the poem that best showcases this aspect of Osherow’s talent is “Todas las Puertas,” the last piece in the book. It is 17 pages long and written in the interlocking tercets of terza rima—and these facts alone suggest some of the most important things about Osherow’s talent. First, she is a natural formalist, whose thoughts and feelings flow most easily into the channels of regular meter; and she is able, as contemporary formal poets must be, to bend and flex rhyme in creative ways. Terza rima is the meter Dante uses in the Divine Comedy, but Italian has many more rhymes than modern English. Turning this difficulty into a strength, Osherow comes up with triplets like “Hebrew/view/parvenu” and “Istanbul/guttural/comprehensible,” which make the most of slight assonances and force words into witty juxtaposition.

Second, Osherow is a poet who takes pleasure in discourse—who thinks and talks in verse, rather than offering isolated images and epiphanies. She needs those 17 pages to do justice to the complexity of her subject, which is the relationship of the contemporary American Jew to the Jewish past. “Todas las Puertas” begins by recounting a trip to a town in Spain, Trujillo, where Osherow read that there is a surviving medieval synagogue now being used as a pharmacy. The poem’s first line—“Even then, I knew it was ridiculous”—captures the ambivalence and self-consciousness that accompanies her quest for signs of the Jewish past. After all, Osherow writes, the Hebrew inscription over this synagogue—“This is the gate to God, the righteous will enter through it”—is “what you can see on synagogue/ doorways anywhere.” Yet she is hungry for some tangible sign of the past:

keeping, all the while, on the lookout

for even the most questionable clue—
a dent (maybe from a mezuzah?) in a doorpost—
that a single house had once contained a Jew.

“I swear I looked at every doorpost/ in every juderia left in Spain,” Osherow writes, wryly, aware of the cliché of the insatiable American tourist. Yet this search for physical traces is really a way of trying to imagine her way into a Jewish past so remote that it seems wholly alien. Visiting “the pink stone mikvah in Besalu,” Osherow explains that she had always found “the monthly rite of women’s purification” to be “abhorrent,” an expression of misogyny. Now, however, she is able to imagine it more sympathetically, not as a repudiation of sexuality but as an overture to it:

a ritual extravagant

with the dreaminess of anticipation—
one’s entire body immersed below
water on pink stone in preparation

for the certain pleasure that would follow…
it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh…

These echoes of the Song of Songs gain power for coming near the end of a book that is largely devoted to the failure of love. In fact, an earlier sequence, “Sonnets from The Song of Songs,” uses the biblical love poem as a bitter counterpoint to the dissolution of the poet’s own marriage—the casualty, Osherow reveals after some hesitation, of her husband’s mental illness. In “Thorns/Forest,” she writes of her inability to come up with a love poem to her husband:

You could read The Song of Songs. I felt like that,
which explains how I lived the way I lived.
I was fearless once; I chose the rarest
apple tree among the trees of the forest.

But the exhilaration of that choice is shadowed by the suffering that came afterward. In “Snow in Umbria,” Osherow finds an omen of her marriage’s fate in the fact that she and her husband honeymooned in Italy just after a once-in-a-century snowstorm had devastated the fruitful country: “It was like a tour through Pharaoh’s dream,/ with olive trees replacing cows and corn.”

The metaphor here is a little too explicit, especially when the poem concludes by finding inspiration in the gradual recovery of nature, “rumors of the slow ascent of green.” Osherow’s insistence on ending the poem on this affirmative note may be a sign that her style, so intelligent and conscientious, can also be inhibiting. “My misfortune’s relatively mild,” she acknowledges in “Autumn Cottonwood,” but one of the privileges of poetry is to show how the objectively mild can be subjectively total—to inhabit a dark or bright moment without contextualizing it.

Osherow is at her best when dealing with more abstract subjects, showing how much emotion can reside in seemingly impersonal words like history, memory, and identity. That is what she achieves in “Western Red Cedar: Missing Psalm,” another sonnet, which cleverly compresses a whole treatise’s worth of ruminations on American Jewishness into a single conceit. Osherow takes two lines from Psalm 29 as an epigraph—“God’s voice shatters the cedars;/ God shattered the cedars of Lebanon”—and then wonders whether God’s voice could have done the same to “these cedars,” the American giants, “nothing like their puny Lebanese cousins.”

Would a David who lived in America, rather than Judah, still have imagined the same God, Osherow wonders? “He might not have heard God’s voice at all/ in the sudden, giddy clamor of his own.” This is the guilty conscience of American Judaism, afraid that it has abandoned God in the search for self-fulfillment. Yet Osherow declines to let guilt have the last word. Maybe, she wonders, God wishes he had placed David in America, to see what new kinds of songs he would have sung there: “now God laments that missing psalm.” Osherow’s poems are not psalms, exactly, but they offer their own powerful model of what American Jewish poetry can be.

***

Some Yiddishist intellectuals in, say, 1958, may have been justifiably pessimistic about the centennial of the 1908 Czernowitz Yiddish conference being celebrated at all. The knowledge that it would, in fact, be commemorated richly, first with a scholarly conference at York University in Toronto, populated with fascinating and wide-ranging lectures on the influence of that event in Jewish history and literature, and then with a volume of essays based on the sessions at that conference—titled Czernowitz at 100: The First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective (Lexington Books, April)—would have been cause for unexpected delight for many such Yiddish thinkers. But what would have probably tickled them most would have been the discovery that one of the conference’s co-organizers, and editors of the volume, would be Joshua A. Fogel, a specialist in Sino-Japanese relations who has published numerous studies and translations of Chinese and Japanese literature, in addition to a translation of S. Niger’s classic Yiddish study of Jewish bilingualism.

***

Bilingualism is no longer something most Jews can take for granted, unfortunately. When Pamela Greenberg, who grew up in a secular Jewish household in Northern California, began to search for religious revelation, she recalls attending “one Friday night service during which I understood virtually nothing (it was all in Hebrew, which I could not read) and everyone seemed to be mumbling the words or singing in unison songs that I did not know.” She persisted, taught herself Biblical Hebrew, and has now produced The Complete Psalms: The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation (Bloomsbury, March), a sensitive translation she sees “as, well, as a kind of prayer.”

***

Two recent books attempt to enrich and expand the Jewish community’s everlastingly contentious conversations about sexual identity. This summer, not only did North Atlantic Books publish a pioneering collection of essays about lesbianism in the Orthodox community—a serious book titillatingly titled Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires (North Atlantic, May) and edited by Miryam Kabakov—but it also released an unprecedented volume attending to the challenges and opportunities facing transgendered individuals committed to practicing Judaism. The latter, Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community (North Atlantic, June), edited by Noach Dzmura, includes contributions from Rachel Biale, Chalotte Elisheva Fonrobert, and Joy Ladin, and ranges from a “Ritual for Gender Transition (Male to Female)” to thoughtful readings of the figure of Androgynos in the Mishnah.

***

While there has been no shortage recently of books about Jews in Muslim lands, and while many more will be published this fall, On the Bookshelf missed two titles chronicling Jewish life in Iraq published this spring. Jessica Jiji’s Sweet Dates in Basra (Avon, April) centers on an Arab girl sent to work as a maid for a Jewish family in 1941 Basra, where she falls in love with her mistress’s brother. For those who prefer memoirs, J. Daniel Khazzoom’s No Way Back: The Journey of a Jew From Baghdad (KOH Library and Cultural Center, August) traces the author’s life from birth in Baghdad, through immigration to Israel, to graduate studies at Harvard and a long career as a professor of economics. While aiming to evoke the rich, vanished culture of his birthplace, Khazzoom accepts that his family’s past cannot be recovered: “Sometimes people ask me if I would not want one day to visit Baghdad, my birthplace. My answer is—and always will be—an emphatic ‘Absolutely Not.’ ”

***

There are few activities more thankless these days than writing a first novel: If the manuscript even attracts the attention of a publisher and makes it into print, precious few people will read it; and even if you poured a decade of your life into the writing process, you’ll almost certainly be paid less than the tuition costs for a semester in a creative writing MFA program. And yet what’s more noble than the courage to persist in these circumstances, in the hopes of making art for art’s sake? Thus On the Bookshelf is most apologetic for failing to mention books like Mitchell James Kaplan’s By Fire, by Water (Other, May) and Alison Amend’s Stations West (LSU, March). The former author, who according to his biography has worked as “a screenwriter and script consultant”—but who does not seem to show up on IMDB (the Mitchell J. Kaplan there has one gig, as “accounting clerk” for an upcoming Jennifer Garner vehicle)—ambitiously ferries readers back to the Inquisition, when the novel’s protagonist, a converso named Luis de Santángel, falls from a position of political privilege while discovering it’s not quite so easy to leave his Jewishness behind. Amend’s novel, meanwhile, focuses on a time and place, late 19th-century Oklahoma, where limpieza de sangre was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Beginning with a Jewish trader who marries an aboriginal woman, and following his son and grandson as they ride the rails, found a town, and drill for oil, the novel insightfully highlights intergenerational conflicts and alliances and the role of Jews in the building the West.

***

Mentioning these eight titles obviously can’t make amends for all the deserving books that will continue to go unmentioned in this column, or for any publications that On the Bookshelf mischaracterizes. Fortunately, even avaryonim (that is, sinners) have permission to pray on Yom Kippur. So, nu, tayere leyners, gmar khasime tova, and while you’re busy this weekend begging to be written in the Book of Life for one more year, spare a thought for the life you can give to a book—not to mention to a struggling author—by shelling out for a copy of your own and reading thoughtfully.

Indeed, it seems like the majority of Jewish liturgy not taken directly from the Torah is made of devotions arranged by permutations of letters, and interpolations of sums: for centuries, rabbis have composed acrostic prayers that spell their own names; and any visit to any synagogue on any day of the week at any of the three daily services will tell you that the number of times a text is repeated is just as important as what that repeated text actually means.

The occasion for these thoughts is no religious epiphany, but rather a rereading of French writer Georges Perec, whose 1978 masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual was just republished in a definitive translation by David Bellos. Perec was a member of Oulipo (an acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “the workshop for potential literature”), a French organization founded in 1960 dedicated to the practice, and publicizing, of new writing techniques. Oulipans, whose ranks included Italo Calvino and movement cofounders Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, turned research itself into a literary art as they sought to identify novel constraints by which novels and stories could be produced.

Those constraints include, but are not limited to: Anagram; Palindrome; Word Limits; Vowel Limits; Word Replacement (in which every occurrence of a noun is replaced by another noun; for example, if noun = umbrella, then that fragment should read “in which every occurrence of an umbrella is replaced by another umbrella”); Vowel Replacement (in which the word ‘noun’ might be turned to ‘noon,’ the hour, or ‘naan,’ the Middle Asian flatbread, or to ‘neon,’); the Snowball (a poem’s verse or sentence in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the preceding word); and the Lipogram, from the Greek lipagrammatos (“missing symbol”), in which a text is generated that excludes one or more letters. Perhaps literature’s most famous Lipogram is La disparition, a detective story of sorts written by Perec in 1969, translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void; its 300 pages omit the letter ‘e,’ as if that vowel—and the book’s antihero, Anton Vowl—was representative of European Jewry, forever disappeared. Further, as the very name George Perec contains more than its share of the letter ‘e,’ the author has effectually self-effaced, having written himself out of his own book. Adair’s translation (which also is without the letter ‘e’) is a virtuosic reenactment of virtuosity: “With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.”

round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

Perec was born in Paris in 1936, the son of Polish Jews recently emigrated west; he was related, albeit distantly, to I.L. Peretz, the preeminent Yiddish writer of the 19th century. Perec’s father was killed fighting for his adopted country in World War II; Perec’s mother was murdered, most probably at Auschwitz; Perec himself survived by hiding with relatives and then died too young of cancer in 1982. I invoke Perec’s Judaism only in the way that he did—by scorning religious ritual, and investigating the esoteric aspects, especially the parallels between Oulipian restrictions and the disciplines of kabbalah. It is kabbalah that is responsible for assigning mystical meaning, and numerical worth, to elements of language, and the majority of Jewish prayers utilizing word and letter permutation were composed coevally with the emergence of kabbalah.

Life: A User’s Manual (originally entitled La Vie mode d’emploi) is Creationdom in microcosm, a depiction of the inhabitants of a Paris apartment block at 8 p.m. on June 23, 1975. A curious Jewish character is Cinoc, whose name was originally Kleinhof, then Khinoss or Kheinhoss, changed to Kinoch, Chinoc, Tsinoc, and finally Cinoc. A cynic? Maybe, but also a Jew with a mezuzah affixed to his doorjamb. Perec’s characters from Cinoc to Rorschach to Madame Moreau to the Altamonts are creations entirely of words, and though the author’s prose manipulations might seem to be the most kabbalistic of his accomplishments, they are not. Forget that each chapter’s length is predetermined, that each chapter’s people are predetermined; forget each list of activities, of physical positions, and reading material; what’s most kabbalistic about Perec, and about the best of Oulipo, is not this technical aspect but the transmutation: the magical turning of one thing, a dead word, into another, a living person.

Kabbalistic practice—which, our sages hold, created angels and golems, animals for food and labor in the fields and even, once, in an experiment the Talmud attributes to Rabba, a walking talking human being—became, by the time fiction and poetry came to be written, a cultural act in which letters and words didn’t create life, but merely simulated it. Perec understood this virtuality, and exploited it to present the Oulipian writer—a writer of orders and systems, of cosmogonies and laws given only to be miraculously broken—as a sort of fallen god. Though in his time the new religion was art, or a religion of art, the mysticism underlying all making remained.