Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 18, 2022

Poetry and history can seem like perfect foils. History aims toward precision and accuracy; poetry tends to favor ambiguity and subjectivity. If historys staples are dates, borders, and names, poetryespecially contemporary poetrytranscends such details for the sake of the timeless and unnamable. But what happens when the factual history is lost, hidden, or erased. Leaving only whispers and traces? It is then that poetry and history become one, entangled together in a powerful, mythic union.

Rachel Kaufmans debut poetry collection, Many to Remember, published earlier this year by Dos Madres Press, is an example of such entanglement. Kaufman, who is also a doctoral student at UCLA, is a scholar of the Jewish history of Mexico and New Mexico, where she is examining oral testimonies and archival documents of the lost stories of conversosforcibly converted Sephardic Jews from Spain, who attempted to escape the Inquisition by traveling to the New World, so as to sustain their covert practices of Judaism in relative, if short-lived, safety. The tropes permeating the conversos New World history are, broadly speaking, familiar: diasporic wanderings, persecution, resilience, hiddenness, sorrowand yet, few details of these stories are known beyond scholarly circles.

In her introduction, Kaufman writes: In jail, Luis de Carvajal el Mozo, famous crypto-Jew (Spain to Mexico, aboard his uncles conquistador ship), sent letters to his sisters inside peach pits, banana skins. His letters are now a book. The archive remembers and forgetsmyth, history, the weeping of each into the other. Carvajals autobiography is a rare primary source that offers insight into 16th-century Jewish Mexican history. It comprises his letters, which he attempted to smuggle out of his prison cell inside melons. These letters were intercepted by the Mexican Inquisition, which simultaneously preserved these letters with care and murdered their author. Kaufmans writing is an attempt to bring us closer to this history while also depicting what it is like for a scholar-poet to encounter the archive, where deeply personal, precious narratives are buried under layers of violence, repression, and bureaucracy.

Its a hard history to trace because it was a covert religion. It was passed down with fear, it was taught to be a secret observance. Crypto-Jewish observance was mixed with other practices, becoming these entangled observances so it was less clear what you were passing down. And some people say they received these traditions without a name: They werent attached to Judaism or crypto-Judaism, Kaufman explained to me, as we sat in a Los Angeles caf, one late Friday afternoon. There was something otherworldly and surreal about learning history in this manner: Spanish Inquisition, then Mexican Inquisition, Seville, and New Mexico, refugees and colonizers, dangers and hopes, all many centuries old, all unfolding in front of me, as the city traffic continued zooming right by, like time itself. Learning Jewish historyparticularly the parts Id been ignorant ofalways feels like its own kind of ritual, its own kind of obligation, perhaps one that calls for a blessing. So it only seems right that invoking poetry becomes the vehicle for learning these forgotten stories.

The records are the Inquisition records, which are filtered through the Spanish Catholic lens, Kaufman told me. In other words, to study crypto-Jewish history, one has to rely on documents written by the group that sought to erase this very history. Erasure becomes an indelible part of the story, and the experience of gaps in recorded knowledge must be attended to with as much care as any fact one finds. As Kaufman told me, for her, the challenge of the writing was figuring out how to preserve absence while creating presence. Reading the collection, the challenge I found also came in my encounter with the emotional burden of this absence, and what lies beneath it. The poem Trial Number 23 (Translation) is an example of such an encounter:

The poem is built around evasions, which are emphasized through sharp enjambments. Clearly, someone is being questioned here. While the very first lines enjambment he knows seems to momentarily indicate cooperation or assent, on the very next line, the poem veers off, turning the tables around. Instead of answers, those inquiring face a mirror: he knows/the questions asked and those/who ask them. The respondent immediately offers further ambiguity that underlies the complexity of the Mexican/New Mexican converso predicament: running/towards or away. Indeed, running away to find safety, the conversos joined conquistador missions, themselves becoming Spains agents: escaping from the empire, they were further expanding the empires boundaries and possessions. If there is irony in that, it is a very disheartening irony, as is the fact that one may easily surmise the outcome of the trial taking place within these lines. The poem spirals through darkness into dark humor, absurdity and oddity. As Kaufman told me, Inquisition records are laden with violence [The question is] how to translate archival language into poetry and hold on to the elements of history and silence and strangeness of the archivethe way it is reaching me with things Im able to touch and Im not able to touch.

The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

In the first few pages of Many to Remember, we find a visual image of one such archival record from the trial of Leonor de Carvajal. Looking at it, it is impossible not to be struck by the gorgeous handwriting. Who is this scribe, taking the time to seal the verdict of a crypto-Jew while curling his capital letters into pure calligraphic beauty?

All through the collection, Kaufman offers allusions to her own family history, and in particular, her grandfathers escape from Germany as the Holocaust began. There are parallels and resonances there for her, as she writes in the introduction: I am seeing two stories at once, overlaid, overlapping, distinct. Through each, the otherdesert sun reflecting off scrolls. Empathy, rather than comparison. It is as if the two stories, in an empathic relationship, fill each other out, becoming, together, sacred texts, marked by the shared reference to the mythic biblical desert wanderings and revelations the poet invokes. It would seem impossible for stories to be both overlaid and distinct at the same timeand yet, isnt that exactly how history, and our personal perceptions of history, work? As Kaufman said in our interview, analogy is really tricky but with poetry, the distinctiveness can be held more delicately.

Certain poems in the collection, like the title poem below, seem to speak to both of her stories at once, and their entanglement, as well as, perhaps, a more universal story, too:

History is fragile, and to hold it is to risk its breaking, crumpling at the touch. Yet, perhaps, therein one is offered an understanding of the fragility that permeates not only the past but also the presentthe poem, after all, is in the present tense. Here, break becomes a refrain, an implied ritual act, one that subsumes imagery that ranges from mundane to transcendent to personal, an investigation of everything that can be, and has been, broken.

Historys pieces do not arrive to us whole. But in poems, they are set afloat, as the poet puts it in Meam Loez: Were told/our souls will grow/accustomed to hearing echoes/of our customsthese chantings/set apart from myth to keep/some holiness adrift.

To receive these pieces is to experience some of this holiness.

Read more:

Poems for the Conversos - Tablet Magazine

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