The Hardship Post, and: From the Fever-World (review)

The continuing memory of trauma that the Shoah (the Jewish Holocaust) specifically evokes in second-generation descendents of survivors is explored by the scholars Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, who claim that this generation identifies with the event through their vicarious witnessing of the event's horrors and their secondhand loss of time and place, of a pre-Shoah Jewish European world that was destroyed after having survived for hundreds of years, engendering in the descendents an "ambivalent" and "rootless" nostalgia.¹ These memories and nostalgias exist as part of what Hirsch and Spitzer call "postmemory": "a secondary, belated memory mediated by stories, images, and behaviors among which [the second generation] grew up, but which never added up to a complete picture or linear tale." "Its power derives precisely," they state, "from the layers-both positive and negative-that have been passed down . . . unintegrated, conflicting, fragmented, dispersed." They explain, further, that "nostalgic yearning in combination with negative and traumatic memory . . . are internalized by the children of the exiles and refugees." For Hirsch, a second-generation descendent herself, the "return" to her parents' home generated "a need to repair the ruptured fabric of a painfully discontinuous, fragmentary history." Addressing the ways in which the second generation responds to and conveys opposing remembrance spawned by "their own act of witnessing," Hirsch and Spitzer assert that this "ambivalent" nostalgia "can serve as a creative inspiration, the "rootless" nostalgia that galvanizes in the second-generation Jewish writer a sense of displacement which precipitates "a process of searching-a creative" means of representation allowing a confrontation "between nostalgic and negative memory."

How, then, are third-generation descendents of the Shoah affected, especially if they return to the sites of devastation, and how do they transmit vicarious witnessing and trauma in their writing, in their own "process of searching"? Does their "postmemory" differ from that of their predecessors, as numerous studies argue?

These questions are addressed in Jehanne Dubrow's boldly sensual and urgently fierce poetry, with its surprising chiaroscuro-its representation of luminosity and darkness. They are the subtext in her two remarkable prizewinning volumes: her first, The Hardship Post, winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Award, and her second, From the Fever-World, winner of the Washington Writers' Publishing House Poetry Award. Her transgressive, idiosyncratic, and unorthodox approaches are means from which her predecessors, second-generation writers, might feel impeded. She treats her unique, large, and complex concerns, her heavy burden of uncovering the past, her high seriousness by steadying these with an ardent friction and vision, yet a light and also firm touch, as well as with a hopefulness that poetry can still strive toward the reparation of the lost, albeit never nearly a complete one, since such redemption is impossible.

Dubrow, the third-generation daughter of Jewish-American diplomats who was raised for several years in Poland, the site of the most widespread Jewish annihilation during the Shoah, states about herself in the opening sonnet of The Hardship Post that she herself, an exile, "trespasses / but never finds a place to rest, / each night the uninvited guest." She was, thus, deracinated from her American, Shoah, and pre-Shoah roots, as she expresses in the same sonnet:

Which skyline does she dream then wake    beneath? Which sorcery? The lightsof a foreign city, the ache,    lodged like a shuttle-point deepbeneath her skin-these are the birthrights    of refugees . . .

Dubrow powerfully demonstrates through her triple displacement the similarities and differences between second and third generations' post-memory. The Shoah is the gravitational force that anchors the works, which operate as bookends supporting her postmemory of the Holocaust and the period just preceding it, while she travels psychological distances to confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct her heritage and sense of self.

In her ironic poem "Cinderella," also in her first collection, she underscores the trauma that her uprootedness causes when she states: "Mis-translated, fur slippers became glass / the vair transforming into verre, with no / concern for...