Moldovan Hotel

By Leah Horlick

Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora.

In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women's lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.

With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick's poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. "No one ever thinks they might be the dragon," Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together.

"If Leah Horlick's second book invited us to witness, this time she draws from her Jewish heritage and takes us back to show us how to read the landscape and mind-scape and tell us what the texts left out. This is an accounting, a calling, an invocation, a return, a skilful mediation on how to remember when the ‘names of the oppressors are blotted out’." — Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days

"Every poem in Moldovan Hotel is a room thick with ghosts. Here, Horlick takes the language of the past—used to dehumanize and unmoor—and crystalizes it around revelation after revelation. A graceful, striking collection." — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771315463

Leah Horlick

Leah Horlick grew up as a settler on Treaty Six Cree territory and the homelands of the Métis in Saskatchewan. Her first collection of poetry, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012) was shortlisted for both a ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. In 2016 she won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, Canada’s only award for LGBT emerging writers. That same year, her second collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), was named Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association. In 2018, her piece “You Are My Hiding Place” was named Poem of the Year by ARC Poetry Magazine and shortlisted for inclusion in the 44th Pushcart Prize by the Pushcart Board of Editors. She lives in Calgary.

Book preview

A black door-like rectangle sits just below the centre of the page. In the background is a dark purple and blue night sky, clouds shifting against clusters of stars. The horizon is a white line off in the distance, the foreground nothing but purply darkness.

moldovan hotel

leah horlick

brick books

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Moldovan hotel / Leah Horlick.

Names: Horlick, Leah, author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200389866 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200389890

ISBN

9781771315456 (softcover)

ISBN

9781771315463 (

HTML

)

ISBN

9781771315470 (

PDF

)

Classification:

LCC PS8615.O745 M65 2021

|

DDC C

811/.6 — dc23

Copyright © Leah Horlick, 2021

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

A stylized, illustrated blue tree sits to the left of the words 'Canada Council for the Arts / Counseil des arts du Canada.''The word Canada is written out with a Canadian flag—a red maple leaf flanked by two vertical red stripes—situated above the final A.A large red A is bisected by an angled blue C, with a green O balanced between the two letters on the left. To the right of the OAC logo are the words 'Ontario Arts Council / Counseil des arts de l'Ontario' over a red line with the words 'An Ontario Government Agency / un organisme du gouvernement de l'Ontario' below the line.

The author photo was taken by Erin Flegg.

Brick Books

487 King St. W.

Kingston, Ontario

K7L 2X7

www.brickbooks.ca

Contents

For You Shall Be Called to Account

In Rumenye Iz Dokh Gut

A Shtetl, a Shtot

Annex

Two Villages

For Every Animal of the Forest Is Mine

Hodl

Curse for Bright Light

Ritual Instructions for Transnistria

Learning to Read Hebrew

You Are My Hiding Place

Return and Revive Us

Aquila

Census

Moldovan Hotel

Brief Conversation with Dybbuk, Strada Alexandru cel Bun

Every Name Means Across the River

Guilt

City of New Beginnings

Marginal Sea

Customs

Typhus

The Spinoza of Market Street

A Boy, a Girl, a Replacement

Couple Flying Over Village

Europe Eats Itself

Still Learning to Read Hebrew

Barzel

Notes       Acknowledgements       Bibliography

In Rumenye iz dokh gut

Fun keyn dayges veyst men nit

In Rumania, life is good!

No one worries, no one should

Aaron Lebedeff,

Rumenye, Rumenye

For You Shall Be Called to Account

The ancestors of everyone I’ve let into my body

are gathered in a small room with one window,

no lights. Yes, the room is crowded. Yes, there

are no chairs. Yes, they are talking. Why are we

here, says the Nazi resister. Where are the chairs,

says the Viking (no horns). Where is the light, say

the people with their new French name hung

around their necks heavy like a long black cross.

Here, says the grand wizard, and a long white

light descends from a point on the ceiling.

The people of the oldest empire are here, too,

they have brought their own fire (hidden), they

too can speak French, they know in an instant not

to trust that light. They are opening the