Poems from the Rubio

By Herb Brin

A moving collection of poems reflecting Herb Brin’s love of nature and his passion for the Jewish spirit. His verses are the cry, the laughter, the little sorrows and the eternal triumphs of a man – and of a people. Praise for Poems from the Rubio:
“How a journalist, how an editor could also be a brilliant poet is a source of astonishment – and of gratitude.” –Elie Wiesel (Nobel winner for Literature)
“Your Rubio poems reverberate in the soul. It is a joy to have your wonderful books grace by personal library...”—Rabbi Alexander Schindler
Herb Brin was well-known as a courageous journalist and publisher. But as an internationally known poet, he also built a world-wide following for his brash style and unflinching passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herb Brin
• Release date: Mar 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476462875

Herb Brin

Herb Brin (1915 – 2003) was born and raised in Chicago. Herb was an investigative reporter for the City News Bureau and Los Angeles Times, a world-recognized poet, and pioneering Jewish journalist. He founded the Heritage, a chain of Jewish community newspapers spanning southern California, where he served as editor, publisher and columnist. His books include: Conflicts, My Spanish Years, Wild Flowers, Nobody Died Laughing, Poems from the Rubio, Ich bin Ein Jude, and Justice, Justice. He is survived by three sons, Stan, David and Dan.

Book preview

Poems from the Rubio

By Herb Brin

Preface by Elie Wiesel

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012

Originally published by Heritage Press

Copyright © 1995 Herb Brin

***

Dedication

For those especially

to whom I sing:

thoughtful Miriam of rare concerns

sparkling Sarah of winsome eye

Nathan of my childhood dreams

And Ben the charmer of ideas

and those who follow as I sing

for Ariana, gentle Ariana

And for you!

***

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Foreword

The hoary head is a crown of glory. – Proverbs 16:31

As an editor and poet, Herb Brin has developed a vision that spans many continents, many landscapes, many eras. Among his tasks has been the redemption of Jewish voices that have been drowned by history—a redemption wrought by poems that express these martyr’s agonies and yearnings with immediacy and passion. Not surprisingly, in this volume, too, Herb is a traveler, witnessing for the slain and the silence in Dubrovnik, Munich, Paris, Hong Kong.

More tellingly, however, Herb has at last come home, home to the Rubio, his canyon-surrounded mountaintop in California, where all is remembrance, home to nature and the relentless, remorseless instinct to live another day, home to his body, to the remembrance of a first kiss while a nurse’s aide preps him for heart surgery, home to my father’s house where eternity is brittle and yet prayers still ascend in mystic ways…

"How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, thy dwellings, O Israel!" And how good to come home with you, Herb! Even during the blackout atop the Rubio, your light shines; even anesthetized and ready for the scalpel, your heart beats strong and warm.

--Alexander M. Schindler

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Preface

To judge a book by its cover, you need a jacket, and the jacket has to fit the author as well as the book. But can the measure be taken of Herb Brin?

Poet, pioneer, hero, eccentric, nazi-hunter, mystic and skeptic, newspaperman (and throwback to the days when to be one meant something!)

And stubborn! Maddeningly, stubbornly devoted to the highest principles; of the world and out of it. This is a man who is not finished, who has not finished with his mission, with his work, with himself, and who will not let his measure be taken.

Don’t expect his poems to be finished, either, because the poems of such a man are never finished. They are forever migrating to new shores of completion and new levels of meaning. But read them on the wing. They will loft you into a perspective which is today all too rare for its innocence and integrity.

These are lines of the lyric master we know from his poem: Odette, possibly the greatest poem of its kind ever written.

Forget Political Correctness (sinister, bigoted and cowardly imposition that it is!) Smash the stylistic conventions of the New Poetry that was supposed to smash all literary conventions. Deconstruct the deconstructionists.

As a poet, Brin just says what he has to say. He says it to you. He says it with the soul’s tongue, and no third party literary-critical theories, prejudices or intestinal hernias will stop him.

Even stretched out horizontal on his way to the cutting room, he continues to write poetry, taking notes of his thoughts like a reporter at the scene of