From the Editors

This is an “open” issue of Bridges; the editors did not publicize a specific theme for submissions. Yet, as sometimes happens, a theme emerged as if a ball of yarn was passed amongst Jewish women around the globe. Though there is certainly no collective voice here, many of these individual and unexpected stories have a common thread concerning legacies of our mothers, familial and cultural.

The leading essay, “Editing My Mother,” gives us the extraordinary story of the journalist Barbara Board who reported for the British press from the Palestine and Transjordan Mandates of 1936–1947. Written by Board’s daughter Jacqueline Karp, the essay begins in the middle, with manuscripts—published and unpublished—found under her bed when Board died in 1986. Karp has found a publisher for one of the manuscripts, Reporting from Palestine 1943–44, which, after reading this essay, we expect you will want to order from Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, UK ( http://www.fiveleaves.co.uk/jewish.html ).

Laurie E. Levinger’s memoir “My Mother’s Jewelry” (excerpted from a full-length manuscript) also has a material maternal legacy in the middle of the story, and captures many nuances of living as a Jewish lesbian in contemporary America.

Stories by Lorine Pergament and Batya Weinbaum artfully take off from real events that figure prominently in our political history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and demonstrations in Israel by Women in Black, respectively. The poetry in this issue seems to cluster around seasons, of the year and of our lives, as do the reviews of books by poets Robin Becker and Myra Shapiro. Fran Snyder’s review of Naomi Graetz’s two books of and about midrash bring a deep knowledge of Judaica to these pages.

In “Criticizing Women,” Bridges’ Yiddish editor Faith Jones reflects on the lack of, yet necessity of, women writers being reviewed in order to take their place in the ongoing cultural conversation. We hope this piece will stimulate both further submissions on specifically Yiddish writers and also the submission of more reviews of contemporary work by women in any language.

Bridges rarely, perhaps too rarely, publishes work by the women who volunteer their time to edit this journal. We range from phobic to ambivalent on using Bridges as a vehicle for our own work. Yet, Bridges editors are accomplished writers in many other venues. This year we celebrate the publication of Bridges’ fiction editor Carolivia Herron’s book for children of all ages, Always an Olivia (Kar-Ben, 2007), the true story of her Sephardi, Mizrahi, Geechee heritage.

Over the past several months we’ve mourned the passing of two of Bridges’ foremothers: Annette Rubinstein (American Labor Party activist, teacher, literary critic and author of Great Tradition in English Literature from Shakespeare to Shaw) and the incomparable Grace Paley. May their lives and decades of amazingly original work combining literature and activism continue to inspire us. Long time readers may remember “In For the Long Haul: Edith Chevat in Conversation With Annette & Friends,” in Bridges 6.1 (Summer 1996). The section of Chevat’s interview on Rubinstein’s long term as principal of the Robert Louis Stevenson High School in New York, Puerto Rican World War II vets, the GI Bill—and getting blacklisted—is terrifically fascinating, worth more than the price of the whole issue (and can be ordered at http://inscribe.iupress.org/loi/bri .

In October, Edith Chevat sent us this note:

Dear Bridges,

Annette Rubenstein died on June 20, 2007.

The last time I saw her was in May at her 97th birthday celebration which she permitted only as a fundraiser for the Brecht Forum, and only if she could lecture. Her topic was “Radical Poets and Ignorant Biographers” for which she had prepared a hand-out with the poems she was discussing, most of which she could recite from memory.

I had brought a friend who knew nothing about Annette. After the lecture my friend said, “I was an English major at Barnard and I had never heard of these poems.”

It was not that these were marginal poets, malcontents. They were your standard issue “immortals” Keats, Shelly, Blake, Burns...