My Father’s Hands

By Karen Shenfeld

My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish' is a powerful collection. Karen Shenfeld's poems are filled with passionate sensuality, triggered by dazzling memories of people and places. There are short lyric poems that focus on a specific symbol to take on larger meanings, and narrative works in which the poet contemplates the Holocaust using the specifics of everyday, named objects. From Shenfeld's controlled intelligence comes an honest recollection of the past, imbued with an expansive hopefulness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781550715569

Karen Shenfeld

Karen Shenfeld has published three books with Guernica Editions: The Law of Return (1999), which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry in 2001, The Fertile Crescent (2005), and My Father's Hands Spoke in Yiddish (2010). Her poetry has also appeared in well-known journals and anthologies published in Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Bangladesh. It has been featured on Canada’s CBC Radio and CKLN, and on 39 Dover Street, a short-wave radio programme produced on the Isle of Wight, England. She has been awarded Canada, Ontario and Toronto Arts Council Grants. In March of 2010, she travelled to Linares, Mexico to participate in the first Festival Internacional de Literatura. Shenfeld has also brought her poetic sensibility to the writing of feature magazine stories, for publications such as Saturday Night and The Idler, and to documentary filmmaking. Her personal documentary, Il Giardino, The Gardens of Little Italy, was screened at the 2007 Planet in Focus Environmental Film & Video Festival. Shenfeld lives in the heart of Toronto’s Little Italy. In the writing of My Father’s Hands Spoke in Yiddish, the poet flies home from far-flung lands to explore the re-imagined terrain of Bathurst Manor, the Toronto suburb in which she was raised.

Book preview

Karen Shenfeld

MY FATHER’S HANDS

SPOKE IN YIDDISH

Essential Poets Series 179

Guernica

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2010

Contents

Brief Note to an Engineer

Land of Milk and Honey

Bathurst Manor

Figure Skates

Confession

Crack the Whip

Spring

Living Room

A Tour of Brighton Street

Nothing More Illuminating

In a Country Called Canada

The Maftir

Remnants of a Dream

The Standing Prayer

My Father’s Hands Spoke in Yiddish

The Golem of Bathurst Manor

How the Golem of Bathurst Manor Came to Be

The Golem and the Rabbi’s Wife

The Mazel Tov Club

The Aesthetician

Sweetheart of Second Avenue

Fanny and Nick

Last of the Red Hot Mamas

Billie Holiday Sings My Yiddishe Momma

These Infinite Daily Things

Ode to Coffee

Skinny Dipping

Canoeing Song

After Labour Day

Elm Tree

On Reciting a Poem by Archibald Lampman

The Ring

My Ruby Slippers

They’re Bulldozing the Bungalows

Notes

Acknowledgements

For My Grandmother

Lena Rotstein Parker

Brief Note to an Engineer

Against protocol

I’m wearing your ring:

cold circle of iron

forged from the tender ruins

of a fallen bridge;

its green residue

tattoos the curled middle finger

of my writing hand.

Land of Milk and Honey

Here,

milk flows

from flat-sided quart glass bottles,

delivered at dawn

to expectant chutes.

And honey’s spooned

from labelled jars –

buzzing cartoon bees

frozen in flight.

Scan the bulldozed land

for the gnarled olive

or perfumed vine,

you’ll find

a wry sapling of maple,

privet hedge.

No groves, here,

but herds of