Luanne Castle: Poetry and Other Words (and cats!)

Here is part 2 of my interview with poet Judy Kronenfeld. You can find part 1 here: Judy Kronenfeld part 1

3: I can’t tell you how much I love your poems. They are so honest, bare-faced, and loving. I’d like to share some lines from “Yiddish Kisses” here:

At your luncheon table

in the dementia wing, you’ve clasped

both my hands like prayer

times two above the soup.

Looks like broccoli-cheese, something

inedible. On our right,

a glowering resident twists away

from the looming spoon. Again you touch

my hand to your lips, then deposit

another wet word juicily

on my cheek—not quite missing

my ear—as if to speak

my nickname, katchkele. The papery

dowager on our left tremors down

her spoon and stares: envy? desire?

disgust?

Has your poetry writing style changed over the years? If it has, can you describe the movement and how you think it occurred? Also, I have a theory that a lot of poets who write other genres, as you do, feel in their hearts they are poets first.  Do you feel that way? If so, how does that affect your other writing?

JK: I don’t think my poetry writing style has changed enormously over the years. I like imagery and metaphor, I like using sound to knit together a poem (not done consciously!), I like beauty—in a sense—for beauty’s sake. However, the ways in which I can put myself in a position to create imagery, linking sounds, and beauty have perhaps shifted a bit. When I was younger, and when I was teaching creative writing, incidents and subjects frequently suggested themselves fairly directly as starting points. I was engaging with writing students—which made structural, thematic, tonal poem possibilities occur frequently in response to my own experiences—even if I often had to wait for vacations to find the time to write. I was engaging with my elderly parents, who had moved out to my town from the East coast; our kids were still around, or, in college, but coming home for vacations. We camped with friends. We had more local friends. At this point, our lives are more circumscribed. More doctors, fewer living friends, kids and grandkids on the opposite coast, etc. etc. There are fewer pressing, subjects that drop into my lap. Or the ones that do (those doctors, say!) are clearly not going to help me create poems I want to write. In a sense, I have to court subjects for poems. For this reason, I’ve come to love the process involved in ekphrastic writing, although I don’t only write ekphrastic poems. I still feel the pull of Hopper, whose work still attracts so very much ekphrasis, and most certainly of Vivian Maier, whose photos capture my birth city, New York, during my childhood and adolescence. If I look at a Hopper painting or a Maier photo that attracts me, I don’t know what my subject is at all, until I let it emerge, slowly, from my response to what I see. I am delightfully surprised. And yes, revived memory of aspects of my early life is often crucial in this process.

Yes, I feel in my heart that I am a poet first. In a way, the process of writing a successful poem is more mysterious and harder that the process of writing a successful piece of creative nonfiction or memoir. But poems are usually short. And they can so easily be put away for a time, allowing the poet to see them so much more clearly afterwards. So one can have many poems in various stages of repair and disrepair to work on at one time (nose-to-the-grindstone attention is usually much less effective than a frequent glancing look, at least for me). I might write a brief essay in part for the pleasure of exercising sentence rhythms rather than line or poem rhythms. Or, if life circumstances so conspire, decide to use the longer personal essay to explore and think about an experience. But especially if my time is limited, I will always come back to the gratifying mysteries of writing poems.

4: Finally, Judy, our country’s sense of Jewishness has changed a great deal from the 1960s and 1970s when Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Isaac Bashevis Singer were literary greats. I remember skipping class and reading these books in the library instead. In fact, one of my areas of focus as a scholar early on was Jewish-American literature. But I could already see things changing. Those were all men writing from their own perspectives, for one thing. Then Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick, among others, began to add their voices. But fast forward to now, and very few write any longer from a Jewish cultural point. Young people have no idea what it was like for eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children. You have published a new book which shares that experience, and I am grateful for it.  I’d love for you to sum up what you hope readers take away from your childhood experience, that of your parents adjusting to American culture, and how you handled the cultural difference that naturally evolved between you and your parents.

JK: In some ways my family experience makes me think of Jewish-American writing of a period even earlier than that of Philip Roth, Bellow and Singer. Henry Roth, for example, in Call It Sleep. Another writer just a little earlier than Roth and Bellow, who often spoke to me, particularly of the sometime dreariness of lower middle-class life in the boroughs, was Bernard Malamud, in The Assistant, for example—one of his books without any magical realism, if I am recalling it correctly. There are quite a few Jewish novelists now (including Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, Rebecca Goldstein) but the angst of assimilation, the immigrant experience, are perhaps less salient subjects. And more write from within Jewish community and practices.

Self-representation to the “other,” particularly to the American-born, was such a complex, fearful and fraught thing for an immigrant like my mother. Perhaps the female parent, in an era in which women were even more restricted than now, less able to chart their own lives, was more vulnerable. Perhaps those with more education or indeed with more money were less fearful. My mother—maybe like other immigrants who don’t feel they fit in—always wanted the “other” to think her life, her family, her child, were all perfectly “rosy.” The immigrant is not comfortable enough to reveal her true situation, whatever it may be, to Americans. Perhaps it’s too dangerous to do so.

I suspect this self-protective self-presentation was related to being European-born and Jewish in the 20^th century (or the late 19^th). Anti-Semitism, pogroms, everything that led to the Holocaust, even if one escaped that horror—how could one not be fearful and calculated in how one presented the self? My mother’s degree of protectiveness probably varied somewhat with the environment and group she was in. When my parents moved from a town just outside New York City to my town in California, they were for the first time in their American lives living as a really tiny minority in Christian America. Even when she was in the hospital in her old age, and at least temporarily seeming to lose her mind, my mother tried to disguise her real self—a Jewish woman who kept kosher. She could not eat the “seafood” (containing shellfish) on the hospital menu, but she would not reveal why; she insisted she was “vegetarian.” It’s really possible that her nurse, as I recall, would not have understood my mother’s truth.

As a small, self-protective minority in a Gentile world, Jews like my immigrant mother also feel or felt particularly vulnerable to any shanda, that is, shame, disgrace, or scandal—that could embarrass them in their own group, or could feed Gentile stereotypes of the Jews. A Shanda could be something minor like a husband yelling at his wife in an argument (Sha! The neighbors!) or something major, like a child’s emotional illness (one of my aunts went from doctor to doctor until she found one who pronounced her child wasn’t suffering from such a disorder).

Being a child of parents of modest means and modest education necessarily meant being upwardly mobile, wanting to rise higher in the social hierarchy than my folks, which they surely desired for me as well, although they certainly wanted to improve their circumstances, too. Class embarrassment and ethnic minority embarrassment felt closely related to me as a child and adolescent in my parents’ household. Getting ahead or helping your American child get ahead involved a certain amount of “putting on the dog,” for my mother, in particular, that is, trying to look more cultured than she was, as well as, for both parents, deliberate ingratiation with the American “other.” But it could also involve crouching low, tucking in one’s tail, avoiding eye contact, submitting to the alpha dog.

My mother probably overwhelmed the matrons of the Smith College Club of New York—who interviewed me (us?) in our three-room apartment for a possible scholarship, with a lavish display of fruit, cake, cookies and coffee—though they kept mum. She also spoke to them in what she fancied a “genteel” way. But when I had to go to Smith for my on-campus interview she deputized my favorite uncle’s wife, her American-born sister-in-law, to accompany me, because she knew enough to mistrust her own heavily Yiddish-German-accented English, maybe even sensed her untameably bushy hair might be a strike against me.

A form of calculated self-presentation and ingratiation was even necessary at the doctor’s; my mother flattered hers, and minimized the severity of her symptoms, so that he would not find anything requiring too onerous treatment. (I can’t not feel sympathy for this! It’s so easy to be over-medicalized.)

Putting on the dog—the thing I found so uncomfortable when my mother did it, in a sense misrepresenting herself—nevertheless was kind of what I had to do in the hierarchical social and educational world I wanted to rise in. (My Manhattan high school even helped by providing speech classes to eradicate Bronx and Brooklyn accents.) One form it took was being more effusively grateful for granted opportunities (e.g. that scholarship to Smith), than I felt was concordant with my self-respect. But such behavior was necessary—as immigrants found out. Ingratiation worked. A blasé or cool attitude is much easier to affect when you’re content with your social status. My mother’s fear of being recognized as “different” and her instinct to hide that difference speaks to the history of the world she came from—but also to the angst of many minorities in an America always suspicious of them, in which they have to work to gain their acceptance.

Perhaps all immigrant parents embarrass their first-generation children at one time or another. Perhaps one can only accept the embarrassing and less cultured aspects of one’s parents’ behavior after one has escaped them. Even if not being able to speak honestly about the self was an understandable and necessary part of the immigrant’s self-presentation, being able to speak honestly is required for the writer. Yet, New Criticism seemed to this first-generation child of immigrants to valorize poetry that was in itself almost a version of putting on the dog: controlled, elegant, willed into being out of a disinterested desire to create a perfect artifact.  Like my mother or father giving the rosiest pictures of themselves and their family, unable to trust American strangers with their truths, I could not at first reveal the shanda of my family’s very modest means, or my mother’s superstitious spitting poo poo and saying kinehora (“no evil eye”) when someone praised her American child. I had to learn that my writing could be sparked by the very vulnerabilities I thought might keep me from it. It was necessary to stop feeling this impediment to open the floodgates.

In closing, I must assert how dedicated my parents were to their only child, how incredibly hard and unselfishly they worked so that my future would be better than theirs. And how, in fact, my mother, with her limited education, insisted that I have a nose-to-the-grindstone approach to school work, which, finally, contributed to a certain stick-to-itiveness that has allowed me to reach personal goals. Immigrants who come directly out of threatening or difficult situations have a huge drive to better themselves and their children’s lives. But thankfully, my folks never pushed this “English major” to move towards “Business” or “Economics”— something “practical.”

Author bio:

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2^nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was released by Bamboo Dart Press in June, 2024. Her poems have been published by such journals as Cider Press Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verdad, and four dozen of them have appeared in anthologies. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction.  Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems, was published by Inlandia Books in February, 2025.