Tuesday, 18 April

Poem: Lyn Lifshin, “Being Jewish in a Small Town,” UA 144

Poetry reader: Mary Tinsley

             Heralded as the “most published poet in the world today” by the Small Press Review, Lyn Lifshin has written over 100 books, edited numerous anthologies, and given hundreds of poetry readings at colleges across the United States.  Her works cover a number of subjects surrounding women’s issues, but she is also well-known for writing “about her living, mythic past—the world of immigrant aunts, uncles, parents who were “seadreamt from Lithuania” and who ended up in the snowy hills of Vermont cut off from their old-world culture and finding, or losing, their way in a new.” 

            In “Being Jewish in a Small Town,” Lifshin pulls the reader into the world of an isolated Jewish girl as she struggles with issues surrounding her ethnicity.  With the application of Course Objective 2a, we are able to view the narrator as straddling two basic stages of the Immigrant Narrative.  The use of the ethnic slur “kike” by her schoolmates, and her exclusion from participation in the “Pilgrim Fellowship” connect Lifshin’s protagonist to Stage 3: shock, resistance, exploitation and discrimination.  Simultaneous to this we discover that the young girl does not (and “will never know”) Hebrew, and she hides a small Christmas tree in a drawer in her room.  These disclosures clearly relate to Stage 4 of the Immigrant Narrative, which is characterized by assimilation to dominant American culture and loss of ethnic identity.  Extending this discussion to Objective 2b, we are able to identify the narrator as a 2nd generation immigrant who follows the standard pattern of exploring the conflict between ethnic and mainstream identities. 

            The young girl in this poem longs for a connection with others, and is painfully aware of her inability to blend in with schoolmates.  Even the Cohen brothers would prefer “blonde hair/blowing from their/car” over the company of the one Jewish girl in town.  However, even as the girl is troubled by her “otherness”, she remains powerfully connected to her ethnic heritage, and struggles to find a balance between who she is and who she wants to be. 

Discussion Questions:

1.  What do you make of the end of the poem?  How are we supposed to interpret the    image of “honey in the snow”?

2.  How does this poem accept or reject the idea of a prototype of white exclusiveness and purity?