In this Book
- Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems
- Book
- 2003
- Published by: State University of New York Press
- Series: SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture
summary
Wide-ranging and poignant reflections on literature, art, science, and memory. In this collection of essays, stories, and poems, award-winning poet and fiction writer Myra Sklarew traces a journey across the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Her point of view is Jewish, though her subjects include science, exile, the future, the Holocaust, the remaining Jewish community of Morocco, Yiddish poetry, the visual arts, and teaching. Many of these pieces deal with personal subjects—the search for a grandfather’s birthplace, the death of a mother, the profound effect of a teacher, the struggle of a woman to embrace Judaism. Whether writing about medicine, Messiah, or the first speech of an infant, Sklarew’s work finds its roots in Judaism, a Judaism fashioned in large part by the author’s own hands. Ultimately, the book is about access, about following one’s own curiosity despite the obstacles that might appear along the way. And it is about a kind of belief: that nothing will be wasted, that all that we can learn will have a place in our lives eventually, though we may not know its purpose at the time.
Table of Contents
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- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Learning the Language
- The Landscape of Dislocation
- pp. 3-7
- Learning the Language
- pp. 10-17
- Who Has Not Dreamed of Flying?
- pp. 18-22
- Yiddish Poetry
- pp. 23-26
- What Hasanin M’Barak Said
- pp. 33-34
- Like a Field Riddled by Ants
- In the Afterlife Which Is a Library
- pp. 37-38
- The Messenger
- pp. 39-42
- Getting There
- pp. 43-47
- Like a Field Riddled by Ants
- pp. 48-53
- My Companion the Aleph-Bet
- pp. 54-58
- The World Is a Parchment Scrawled with Words
- A Journal for John Holmes
- pp. 69-75
- Night Watch
- pp. 65-68
- The Howard Poets in Perspective
- pp. 89-92
- Counterpoint
- pp. 93-98
- Life, The Unfinished Experiment
- The Selfish Gene (or, Cortazar’s Watch)
- pp. 101-102
- Human Gene Therapy
- pp. 109-113
- The Puzzle People
- pp. 114-116
- The Statue Within
- pp. 126-130
- A Place Called Gehinom
- Writing the Holocaust: auch ohne/Sprache
- pp. 133-148
- On Muranowska Street
- pp. 150-151
- The Roots of Resistance
- pp. 156-158
- Instructions for the Messiah
- Crossing Over
- pp. 161-162
- Instructions for the Messiah
- pp. 163-164
- What is a Jewish Poem?
- pp. 165-166
- Grandfather: Lost and Found
- pp. 176-181
- Ode to the Czar’s Assassin
- pp. 182-186
- The Messiah Reconsidered
- pp. 187-190
- Index of Names
- pp. 195-198
Additional Information
ISBN
9780791487662
DOI
MARC Record
OCLC
55939296
Pages
212
Launched on MUSE
2012-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No