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Mishpocheh
Stanley H. Barkan
(with paintings by Bebe Barkan)
Cross-Cultural Communications
ISBN Number: 0893047201
Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft
Late in Stanley H. Barkan’s Mishpocheh there is a poem called “The Equality of Death". As powerful in simplicity as its title, it closes with these words
Only those who are left
and their remembrance
are the true monument
of a person’s life.
This is the sentiment at the heart of Barkan’s magnificent book, an epic collection about the author’s mishpocheh—a Yiddish word that roughly translates into the English “clan" (an extended family including grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws and ancestors). In these thirty-seven poems and short prose pieces, Barkan evokes the memories of family members living and deceased, from his ancestors living in the 19th Century Russian Pale of Settlement to his recently married children in present-day Brooklyn, in all their human frailty, idiosyncrasy and exuberance. But unlike so many collections of modern autobiographical poetry, Barkan is not simply content to create an impressionistic portrait of his subjects, or to detail a particularly amusing or poignant familial anecdote and leave things at that. Instead, he weaves the memories of these lives together to create a rich and compelling examination of the frailty, idiosyncrasy and exuberance of the human condition. Along the way, he also manages to do so with refreshing wit, gentle humor, and guileless honesty.
Barkan demonstrates his concerns with family history and its memory from the first sentence of the collection’s opening piece: “My father told me a story that I will tell to you." The story is “The Holes in the Door," a tale ostensibly culled from the same Jewish folklore that inspired writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer. It concerns Yakov, a disobedient son whose misdeeds of “[breaking] the laws of the elders in all manner of ways, and even [disturbing] the prayers of the most pious" drive his father to give him an unusual punishment. For each cheyt, or wrong, he commits, the father drives a nail into his door. When the door is completely full the father strikes a deal with the boy; for each mitzvah, or blessing, Yakov performs, one nail will be removed. Within a matter of days, the door is bare, yet, Yakov is in tears. “But the holes are still there!" he cries. Though such Singerian folk tales don’t appear so blatantly again in Mishpocheh, “The Holes in the Door" establishes an important pattern. Like Yakov’s door, memories for Barkan contain joys and sorrows, mitzvahs as well as cheyts; without both, memories and people would be incomplete.
Furthermore, the story also beautifully illustrates Barkan’s concern with words. For him folktales, anecdotes, and personal narrative are the stuff of memory and remembering, the thread that binds generations together. This theme is carried into the next piece, the appropriately titled “Words My Father Left Me," in which Barkan recalls his father’s many stories, from fantastical accounts of Indians named “Ug, Bug, and Gug" to his “real adventures" fighting in the European theatre during World War I. These are stories Barkan retells his children at bedtime, “a legacy far richer than all the gold/this waking world has to offer". In their telling, he not only entertains and enlightens, he also keeps his father alive long after his passing.
Ultimately, it is Barkan’s concern with memory as a life-sustaining force that makes Mishpocheh such a moving and monumental work. It is his poignantly expressed belief in the ability of words to sustain that elevates his narratives of family members—their journeys, their loves, their sorrows and sacrifices—into something beyond simple portraiture, into something truly timeless. In the poems “Two Grandmas," “The Thing Left Out," and “Brighton Beach Vegetarian Cafeteria"—two poems and a prose piece that can be viewed as a triptych—Barkan recalls his grandmother Celia in heartbreaking detail. In “Two Grandmas," he evokes her memory using the simplest and most basic thing of all: food.
Grandma, forever cooking:
jarring blueberry jam,
boiling apples for sauce,
spicing herring,
chopping pike and carp
for gefilte fish.
We were always hungry,
anxious to devour
the scents,
the bits and pieces
of chicken with onions,
the shmaltz
on fresh rye bread.
Grandma stirred
and filled
our hunger.
Even now,
as I remember
her shopping,
cooking, singing:
“Alein, alein—
Alles far meine kinder."
[Alone, alone,
Everything for my children.]
In such few and careful words, Barkan is able, almost, to bring his grandmother back to life. The reader can almost smell the soup, taste the shmaltz, and feel Celia’s cooking weighing down his or her belly. As if this simple description were not enough to tell us about Celia’s personality and her importance to Barkan, the poet then turns to the end of her life in “The Thing Left Out" (here reproduced in its entirety), when her kinder reward her everything with nothing.
The thing left out
of the chair
was the rock-
ing back and forth
of Grandma sitting
looking out the window
for the kinder
who didn’t write
who didn’t call
who didn’t come
waiting for the phone
to ring in the voices
that did not speak
until afterwards
until the placing
of pebbles on stones
in remembrance
of things left out
It is this evocation of lonely old age, when parents find themselves forgotten by adult children with busy lives, that makes Barkan’s memory of Celia painfully human , and something more than a simple recollection. But the poet then goes even further, spreading his understanding of Celia—indeed, his definition of mishpocheh—to include people who seem to embody memory, even if they are complete strangers. In “Brighton Beach Vegetarian Cafeteria," the poet eats at a restaurant he’s never visited before “except in the memory of my childhood." Here, he meets an old woman who reminds him of his bubbe. Like her, she is surrounded by scrumptious food.
“What would you like?" I asked for one of the soups of the day: cabbage…borscht…potato. “…Vegetable," I decided; then mused about the pirogen, chopped herring, gefilte fish: “…And vegetable cutlet," I added. “That comes with two vegetables," said Grandma (I wanted to call her that).
After eating and joking with the old woman, the poet is seized by the urge to ask her name:
But before I could utter my thoughts, she said: “Don’t you know me? I’m Celia."—Tsiril! My grandma’s name!—She smiled, nodded her head knowingly (her silver and gold hair-in-a-bun a hazed aura), and said: “Zei gezunt, mein kind!" I left the restaurant but quickly turned back to look (for fear it might disappear). It was still there! I knew I could go home again.
The profound way Barkan articulates constant desire to return home and to bring his readers home by merging them into his own extended and extensive family makes Mishpocheh surely one of the most remarkable poetry collections to be released in the early twenty-first century. The volume’s uniqueness is also emphasized by Bebe Barkan’s colorful paintings—mostly of her family members and her husband’s (including Grandma Celia). Like much of the artwork included in Cross-Cultural Communication’s books, her paintings are warm and colorful, and easily evoke the humanity and individuality of her subjects. Done in a style reminiscent of French Impressionism and American primitive folk art of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they enhance and personalize her husband’s words, just as his poems ground her pictures in context—in words and memory. Indeed, one of the best features in this flawless publication is the sense of genuine collaboration between husband and wife.
Mishpocheh is a complex and captivating poetry collection which deserves to be read time and time again, in hopes that it may help the reader understand and appreciate his or her own mishpocheh a little more. Indeed, a simple review cannot possibly do it justice. One walks away after having read it with a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, to be a finite being who ultimately survives only in the memories of loved ones.
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