Left to right: Drs. Larry Barzelai, Ran Goldman, Mor Cohen-Eilig, Marla Gordon and Maya Rosenkrantz. (photo from Dr. Marla Gordon)
The Jewish Medical Association of British Columbia held its inaugural event Monday evening, Feb. 12, at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue, with 100 attendees in person and 20 via Zoom. Three speakers presented and all were inspiring, relaying hopeful words, with the broad message being to unite and stand together.
Dr. Dynai Eilig, an Israeli-born and -trained orthopedic surgeon who works and lives in Vancouver, traveled to Israel on Oct. 9 to work in Soroka Medical Centre’s trauma centre. He shared heartbreaking stories, but also stories of resiliency. He spoke about the 150,000 reservist army volunteers from outside Israel who came in the early days after Oct. 7.
Dr. Dynai Eilig presenting at the inaugural event Feb. 12. (photo from Dr. Marla Gordon)
Dr. Robert Krell, a retired child psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, explained the correlation between the rise of antisemitism now and that in Europe in the 1930s. He said Holocaust education is needed in all universities and all faculties and that medical and other educators must not resign from their teaching posts.
Dr. Yael Glassberg, an Israel-based pediatric gastroenterologist, joined via Zoom. She spoke on the child hostages who were released and her assessment and involvement with these children.
Planning for the JMA community-building event took place over a two-month period, led by pediatric emergency room physician Dr. Ran Goldman and elder-care physician Dr. Marla Gordon.
The Jewish Medical Association of British Columbia was started by Gordon and family physician Dr. Larry Barzelai in November 2023 as an attempt to get Jewish physicians together to support one another, especially in the current situation of increased antisemitism. The group has almost 300 members.
– Courtesy Dr. Marla Gordon
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Eric Freilich
Eric Freilich was recently promoted to director of legal, private equity and M&A (mergers and acquisitions) at BMS Group and heads the Canadian legal team for the multinational insurance broker.
Eric grew up in Vancouver and is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, where he was a proud and active member of Hillel and of the Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi. Following graduation from UBC, Eric moved to Toronto to work in the film industry. He then went back to school and received his doctor of law and a master of business administration from York University. He worked at two prominent Toronto law firms prior to going in-house, focusing on corporate/commercial work and mergers and acquisitions.
Eric has recently found his way back into academia, contributing to teaching courses on mergers and acquisitions and risk management techniques in transactions at the Schulich School of Business.
Outside of work, Eric’s strongest sense of identity comes from being the best father and husband he can be.
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Adina Karasick (photo from poets.ca)
Ian Keteku (photo from poets.ca)
Adeena Karasick and Ian Keteku are the inaugural winners of the League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Award, which consists of two $1,000 awards, presented annually to two poets for a single poem or suite of poems up to 10 minutes in length.
Karasick won for the poem “Eicha,” featured in Aerotomania: The Book of Lumenations (bit.ly/aerotomania).
“Attuned to sound poetry’s domain, Adeena Karasick’s homophonic translation ‘Eicha: The Book of Lumenations’ unfolds as a dynamic interplay of acoustic and material expressions,” wrote LCP Spoken Word Award juror Eric Schmaltz. “Immersed in the intricacies of language’s auditory, textural and tonal dimensions, Karasick engagesthe original text, the Book of Lamentations, and brings it into dialogue with the multifaceted layers of our present. A simultaneous act of lamentation and ecstatic intertextual exploration, Karasick’s performance traverses sonic texture and electroacoustic manipulation to resound with a symphony of hope and sorrow.”
Keteku was honoured for the triptych: “Mr. Tally Man,” “the space between” and “The Light.” LCP Spoken Word Award juror Andrea Thompson called him “a master of spoken word,” noting: “With impeccable comedic timing and understated affect, Keteku’s performances are a triumph of wordplay and musicality, driven by wisdom and humanity – alive as a heartbeat.”
For more about the League of Canadian Poets, visit poets.ca.
According to the Babylonian Talmud (Eruvin 53b), the Hebrew-speakers of ancient Judea were so precise in their speech that they would never describe a cloak they were trying to sell as merely green, but would tell you instead that it was the colour of newly sprouted beet greens trailing along the ground. Galileans, on the other hand, were less punctilious:
“What do you mean when you say that Galileans are not careful in speaking? It is taught: There was a Galilean who used to go about [the marketplace] asking, ‘Who has amar? Who has amar?’ They said to him, ‘Stupid Galilean, do you mean khamor [donkey] to ride or khamar [wine] to drink? Amar [wool] to wear or imar [a lamb] to slaughter?’ And don’t forget the woman who wanted to say to her friend, ‘to-i de-okhlikh khalovo, come, I’ll give you some milk,’ only to have it come out as ‘tokhlikh lovya, may you be eaten by a lioness?’”
Where the ancient Galileans seem to have had no choice but to sound like themselves, Adeena Karasick has elaborated, over 14 volumes of poetry, a sort of deliberate neo-Galileanism that sometimes bridges, sometimes leaps and, on occasion, just fills the talmudic chasm between utterance and meaning in a way guaranteed to drive any artificial intelligence program out of its simulated mind. As she says in the poem “Talmudy Blues II” that is dedicated to me in her new collection, Aerotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink): “… sometimes the letters rule over her / and sometimes she rules over the letters / cleaving to the light of infinite possibility.” (p.31)
Is Karasick cleaving to the light as she rules over the letters? Or do the letters ruling her do the cleaving? Have her consonants been endowed with the naissances latentes of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”? Or, less goyishly, is Karasick turning Galilean imprecision into an aesthetic approach rooted in the modalities of elementary-level reading instruction – reading silently and reading aloud, the absorption and subsequent re-citation of a written text – as enacted in the traditional East European Hebrew school known as kheyder?
The basic level of instruction had three phases:
1. Alef-beys, literally, alphabet, in which students learn to recognize the consonants that make up the Hebrew alphabet, along with the sundry diacritical marks that take the place of alphabetic vowels. There are 11 of the latter, representing five vowel sounds.
2. Halb-traf leyenen, reading half syllables. Each diacritic is run, as it were, through all 22 of the consonants. So, for example, syllables formed with the vowel komets would be learned by reciting, “Komets alef, o; komets beys, bo; komets giml, go” … and so on, to the end of the alphabet, when the student would go on to the next vowel: “Pasekh alef, a; pasekh beys, ba; pasekh giml, ga.”
3. Gants-traf leyenen, reading whole syllables, i.e., combining the individual letters or syllabograms into words.
Karasick’s traffic is with the last two, the kheyder basics supplemented by the graphemically focused mysticism of Sefer Yetsira and Abraham Abulafia as refracted through a contemporary sensibility and range of reference: “The letter is matter which moves matter … these words are closer than theyappear.” (p.31)
We see halb-traf in full flight in, say, the coda to “Eicha,” the long poem with which Lumenations opens: “In the eros of aching ethos / The caesura screams – / Through cirque’elatory sequiturs, resistances” and continues: “Here, her / in mired err / whose scar is clear // Hear her/here/whose heir / wears err’s // shared prayer / where // care is rare….” (pp.26-27)
All you have to do is imagine a phrase like “hear her/here/” in unvocalized Hebrew, רה רה רה, and then read it as “hair hare hoar,” to realize that Karasick’s poetry, like the airplane she anatomizes in Aerotomania, constitutes “a hybridized syncretic space between cultures and idioms / where that interlingual complexity doesn’t close down but builds dialogue” (p.83), a dialogue rooted in, but quickly soaring beyond, quotidian phonemic reality.
There is an upward thrust to the book, from the dust and cracked earth of “Eicha,” the recasting of the biblical Lamentations (eicha means how, as in, “How sits the city solitary”), through the rising rabbinic commentary of “Talmudy Blues II,” a romp through ways of thought – words, that is – that now stand in place of the things destroyed: Jerusalem and the Temple (known in Hebrew as the Holy House).
An excursus on the idea of house follows, then “Checking In II,” i.e., checking into the Aerotomania flight by stowing readers’ cultural baggage for the duration of their stay on the plane. Having shaken off our dust (Isaiah 52:2), we emerge from the fog of our associations. Our lumen is come (Isaiah 60:1); we rise through the ether to embrace The Shining.
As the dedicatee of “Talmudy Blues II,” it behooves me to say something about the poem. A continuation of “Here Today Gone Gemara” from Karasick’s 2018 collection Checking In (Talonbooks), “Talmudy Blues II” consists in large part of elaborations of dialogue (and dialect) culled from our ongoing conversations about the ways in which the Talmud is reflected and refracted in Yiddish. “Carpe verbum,” reads the epigraph to “Here Today” – pluck that word like it’s a Sabbath chicken, clear away the excrescences and bite into the thing itself, ever mindful that the Hebrew davar means both word and thing, utterance and entity; my honeyed words solidified into raw material, ore for Adeena’s gold, one davar turned into another. But, as it says in the Talmud (Megillah 15), “Whoever credits a davar to the person who said it brings redemption to the world.”
Amen. Thou hast conquered, O neo-Galilean.
Michael Wexis author of three books on Yiddish, including Born to Kvetch. His songs have been recorded by such bands as the Klezmatics, and he has translated The Threepenny Opera from German into Yiddish. His one-person shows include Sex in Yiddish, Wie Gott in Paris and Gut Yontef, Yoko. I Just Wanna Jewify: The Yiddish Revenge on Wagner was recently revived (on Zoom) by the Ashkenaz Festival. His most recent major project, Baym Kabaret Yitesh, a recreation of a 1938 Warsaw Yiddish cabaret, was the surprise hit of Ashkenaz 2022 in Toronto. Bas Sheve, the long-lost Yiddish opera restored by Wex and composer Joshua Horowitz, was the not-so-surprising hit of the same festival. This book review was originally published in New Explorations: Studies in Culture & Communication, Vol. 3, no. 2 (2023).
Inscribing what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might call espace vital (the space we can survive), Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings (2023) is an exploration of openings in a (never quite) post-COVID world. Written by poet, performer and cultural theorist Adeena Karasick and visualized by designer/author and vis lit creator Warren Lehrer, both the title poem and “Touching in the Wake of the Virus” track the trepidations and celebrations of openings read through socioeconomic, geographic and bodily space.
Both poems explore a range of intralingual etymologies laced with post-consumerist and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and kabbalistic aphorisms. They foreground language and book-space as organisms of hope – highlighting the concept of opening and touching as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transported through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light.
In this first collaborative book, Lehrer choreographs Karasick’s words on the stage of the page through typographic compositions that give form to the emotional, metaphorical, historical and sonic underpinnings of the texts. Together, the writing and visuals engage the reader to become an active participant in the experience/performance of the work. The book also comes with a soundtrack recording (via QR code) of Karasick reading the poems with music composed and performed by Grammy award-winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London.
Produced in a smyth-sewn, three-colour foil stamped, three-piece hardcover binding, printed on acid-free paper, Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings bridges the gap between art book and trade publication that will speak to lovers of poetry, philosophy, art, design, new media, performance, and anyone trying to navigate opening and touching in the wake of pandemics and other mass maladies.
Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings can be purchased from most online booksellers.
I always look forward to reading whatever Adeena Karasick writes, even though I know I won’t understand all of it. To be generous to myself, I’d say at least 20% of her latest publication, Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Institute of General Semantics, 2022), went over my head – or will require a few more reads and some discussions with friends to get the most out of it.
Massaging the Medium is part of the Institute of General Semantics’ Language in Action series, which “publishes books devoted to creative modes of expression that can open the doors of perception and foster better understandings of the nature of language, symbols, communication and the semantic, technological and media environments that we inhabit.”
The preface is written by Maria Damon of the University of Minnesota. She explains, “For anyone still unfamiliar with the format, pechakucha – Japanese for ‘chitchat’ – is a highly stylized presentation form that comprises a public speech accompanied by 20 slides for visual demonstration, each of which is shown for 20 seconds, while the speaker addresses their (his/her) topic. Initiated in 2003 by a pair of architects working in Japan, the format (trademarked and copyrighted, by the way, in true contemporary entrepreneurial style) has spread to encompass a worldwide enthusiasm for a storytelling/info delivery style that relies on the visual as much as, or even more than, on the verbal.”
Given Karasick’s “dazzling linguistic pyrotechnics on page and stage,” writes Damon, the pechakucha format is ideal, “as the propulsive energy that characterizes her writing and reading style is given sharper urgency for being trapped in a small temporal space…. These seven tours de force of serious play celebrate meaning and unmeaning, communication and miscommunication, the happy errors/eros of semantic and sonic slippage, the glories of the im/p/precise.”
This description is better than I could ever give. I had to look up several terms, such as ’pataphysical – “a ‘philosophy’ of science invented by French writer Alfred Jarry intended to be a parody of science,” according to Wikipedia. “Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the ‘science of imaginary solutions.’”
I also had to look up some of the names of people Karasick cites as if they’re old friends. While I’ve heard of folks like Jacques Derrida and Marshall McCluhan, and of Jewish texts such as The Zohar, my knowledge barely touches the surface. I think that’s part of why I have such fun with Karasick – I’ve no preconceptions going into my reading of her work and, while I don’t take it all in, I do feel as if my mind expands from the experience. She is at once academically rigorous, poetically versatile and sensically nonsensical, or nonsensically sensical (I’m not sure which would be most accurate).
In her introduction, Karasick notes that the seven pechakuchas comprising this book were originally created for and presented at academic literary conferences that took place during the period of 2013 to 2019. For a printed publication, she had to adapt them.
“The visuals,” she notes, “consist of both found and original collaged material which both speak to and against the text. And each of the original slides were embedded with audio and video clips, gifs, other forms of kinetic digital media such as montages of sound poetry,” pop songs, movies and more. “What is illustrated here, however, are stills from the digital live motion presentation and, although originally all consisting of 20 separate components, they are now of slightly varying length.”
I can’t even begin to simplify any of the pechakuchas, in order to give an example of their content and form. Best to experience them yourself. Not everything will land – I enjoyed the first few most – but they do offer the possibility of changing how you think about many things. The list includes but is not limited to language, technology, physiology, time, space, cyberspace, mysticism, consumerism, reality, truth. As does any good Jewish text, it will raise more questions than it answers.
Over the last three decades, poet and performer Adeena Karasick and composer and trumpeter Frank London have each transformed the worlds of poetry and music with work that is sensual and political, steeped in Jewish mysticism, exploding notions of high and low culture. Their first collaboration together, Salomé: Woman of Valor, the debut recording of London’s NuJu Music label, was released on Oct. 15.
Karasick and London’s Salomé takes its inspiration from the historical figure, who has become typecast as a lurid femme fatale, especially via Oscar Wilde’s play and Richard Strauss’s opera, which depict Salomé as the seductress who danced the infamous “Dance of the Seven Veils” for her stepfather Herod and had John the Baptist beheaded.
“Salomé: Woman of Valor addresses the social and political necessity to speak the unspoken, resist outdated notions of identity and ethnicity. It critiques a received narrative, historically accepted as truth, and opens up a space where difference and otherness can be celebrated,” said Karasick and London in the press release about the launch.
Karasick’s libretto explores, exalts and reclaims the figure of Salomé in a feminist light to reveal an apocryphal figure who refuses to be locked into a world of subjugation and misrepresentation. London’s Salomé score is drawn from many musical traditions – klezmer, bhangra, Arabic and jazz, with a big nod to Miles Davis’ electric work and to trumpet innovator Jon Hassell.
Featured on the recording are Punjabi percussion virtuoso Deep Singh and Middle-Eastern jazz electronica guru Shai Bachar, with guest appearances by actor, director and ubu god Tony Torn and singer Manu Narayan.
Salomé: Woman of Valor is the culmination of seven years work. Karasick’s text was published in 2017 in English and Italian, and sections have been published in Bengali, Arabic, Czech and Malayalam. In 2018, Salomé: Woman of Valor was performed internationally. For an article published prior to the Vancouver show, see jewishindependent.ca/salomes-rightful-place.
Salomé: Woman of Valor can be heard and bought at AppleMusic, BandCamp or Amazon.
Almost half of Adeena Karasick’s latest volume of poetry, Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018), is comprised of whimsical Facebook status updates, most of which have deeper meaning on second and third thought. Together, they speak, as the book’s description notes, “to our seemingly insatiable desire for information, while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.”
“It was a totally compulsive exercise over four years, where literally everything I read or watched or where I went or what I heard was fodder for the text,” Karasick told the Independent about the faux updates’ origins. “And, I must admit, I threw away as many lines as I kept.
“Sometimes, it was just that I couldn’t get a song out of my head and then would just riff on it,” she said, giving as examples, “Ulysses is listening to Siren Song on Spotify”; “Gustave Klimt is listening to KISS”; and “Salvador Dali is doing the Time Warp. Again.”
Sometimes, she said, it was linguistically driven, such as, “E & G are saying F off” and “Bold italics are refusing to move into an upright position.” Or, “it was just pure, silly fun” to create updates like “William Wordsworth is wandering lonely on iCloud,” “Edvard Munch is watching Scream 3,” “Google is mapping the territory” and “Narcissus is using his selfie stick.”
“It was so obsessive,” said Karasick, “that even now that the book’s been published, my brain is so wired to creating those one-liners, I walk around the streets reading every sign and riff on them: ‘Thin Lizzy is watching her carbs,’ ‘Fatwa is doing a cleanse,’ ‘The Pre-Pesach Jew is clearing her cookies,’ ‘The Long, Long Sleeper is Woke.’”
Karasick’s sense of play is evident throughout Checking In. Even when describing heartbreak, confusion and other emotionally charged states, the joy she derives from words, from language and from constructing layers of meaning, is obvious.
“I think I’ve always had a really dark sense of humour,” she said, “and there’s something about taking that which is frightening or deeply disturbing and disempowering it – by not so much making fun of it, but ironically or parodically making it strange, decontextualizing it, hyberbolically defamiliarizing it.
“A lot of my work takes hard-hitting political issues, whether that be the Holocaust in Genrecide (Talonbooks, 1994) and superimposing it with the policing and massacring of language, or dealing with 9/11 in The House That Hijack Built (Talonbooks, 2004).… ‘There was a Big Building that Swallowed a Plane … How Insane to Swallow a Plane….’ A sense of jouissance (pleasure, play) really permeates all that I do. There’s nothing more exhilarating for me than playing inside language, finding unexpected liaisons, connections, sound clusters. It’s a type of erotics of the text that is for me very jewy; that jouissance, a jewy essence: all diasporic, nomadic, exilic, ex-static.
“I see this ‘play’ as operating with an ‘assimilationist’ brand of Jewish humour,” she explained, “not of bombastic neurosis, but one that threatens to unleash chaos, creates unsocialized anarchy, embodies unpredictability – impassioned, engaged, shticky, outrageous and earnest all at the same time – in a post-Woody Allen/Jon Stewart/ Sarah Silverman/Sandra Bernhardish kind of way. And, sometimes, it’s audacious, subversive, provocative and, in the true definition of ‘irony,’ explodes ontologically and cuts into the fabric of things; the smooth functioning of the quiet comfortability or the ‘homeyness’ of our world. That is the role of art.”
Adeena Karasick’s newest collection of poetry is Checking In. (photo by Safia Karasick Southey/talonbooks.com)
And one cannot separate Karasick’s art from her Jewish heritage – it’s “part of my DNA,” she said – and from her study of Jewish texts. With a PhD in kabbalah and deconstruction, it is not surprising that, in speaking about the concept of play, she pointed to 13th-century kabbalistic mystic Avraham Abulafia’s Science of the Combination of Letters, in which, she said, “we are instructed to play inside the language, using ancient practices of recombinatoric alchemy, gematriatic (numerological) substitution, combination, and, through lettristic ‘skips’ and ‘jumps’ slippage, meaning is infinitely re-circulated.
“According to kabbalistic thinking,” she said, “we are commanded to permute and combine the letters; focus on them and their configurations, permutations; combine consonants into a swift motion, which heats up your thinking and increases your joy and desire so much, that you don’t crave food or sleep and all other desires are annihilated. And nothing exists except the letters through which the world is being recreated, through a continual process of constructing and reconstructing borders, orders, laws, mirrors, screens, walls…. And, in accordance with the strictures of Abulafian play, to properly play is to travel inside the words within words, traces, affects, projections, sliding and slipping between the forces and intensities distributed through the texts’ syntactic economy. And this very play speaks both to how everything is infinitely interconnected – reverberant with our social, consumerist, communicative patterns – generating a contiguous infolding of meaning.”
She connected this type of play to “the actual conversation habits of Yiddish.”
“According to etymologist Michael Wex – in his Just Say Nu (Harper: New York, 2007) – Yiddish itself is inscribed in derailment, evasion, avoidance, where the norm is not to be ‘clear’ but to ‘seduce and lead astray,’ to say the reverse of whatever’s been said. For example, as we know, to say, ‘Hi, how are you,’ ‘Shalom aleichem,’ the answer is ‘Aleichem shalom.’ Answers are answered with a question, repetition, reversals, circumlocutions, interruptions, insertions (ptoo, ptoo, ptoo). Compliments are avoided in favour of their opposite. Or, like how you should never say what you mean because naming something (such as cancer, leprosy, pig) could bring it into existence.”
As for her own existence, Karasick said, “All my life, I’ve been fiercely drawn to all that seems enigmatic or paradoxical, and get great pleasure in connecting the unconnectable; drawing from different genres, lexicons or mediums and reveling in ways they inform each other in radical and innovative ways, inviting us to see the world anew.”
While she has spent years teaching philosophic and critical theory, and media and pop culture at various universities, as well as attending lectures on media ecology and ontology, she also watches “a lot of trashy TV,” she said. “I like classical jazz and MTV videos. I read [Louis] Zukofsky, [Slovoj] Zizek and Vogue magazine. And my favourite thing to do is to mash these language systems together into a kind of linguistic tzimmes; each flavour, taste, texture informing the other, expanding the palette.
“It’s especially exciting for me to break down that binary between high and low culture; draw from the music hall and the circus, erotics and spirituality; and play with ways all of this information erupts as a palimpsestic web of both sacred and secular echo-poetic referents.”
Karasick writes “on the road, on buses, trains, subways, boats; in motion,” she said. “I write best amid the bustle of life and, oddly, when I’m really busy is when I’m most inspired. I’m always hunting and gathering, drawing on the world around me. Though, I must say, when drenched in aching nostalgia, frustrated by contemporary politics or steeped in throbbing desire is when the work especially flows.”
Approaching the poetry
“Contour XLV: With Asura,” “Lorem Ipsum” and “In Cold Hollers” are all “homophonic translations, and so they all fall under the same rubric,” said Karasick of three of the poems in Checking In during a brief poetry lesson over the phone.
She explained, “Each of these [works] take the same sounds of an original poem by somebody else and I’ve translated them. I’ve done an avant-garde, post-modern translation by using the same sounds and rhythms of the original poems but changing all the words, so that if one read it simultaneously with the original poem, it would sound like the same poem, but it’s completely different. It’s a way of commenting on the previous piece; it’s translating it, moving through and across different modes.”
“In Cold Hollers” is a translation of Charles Olson’s 1953 poem “In Cold Hell, In Thicket”; “Contour XLV: With Asura” is based on “Canto 45 with Usura,” a poem by Ezra Pound, which Karasick described as a “famously antisemitic, women-hating, Jews and women are pigs kind of poem”; and “Lorem Ipsum,” which is in English, but plays on the sounds of the Latin of Cicero’s “De finibus bonorum et malorum” (“On the Ends of Goods and Evils”). “Lorem ipsum is the standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation,” writes Karasick elsewhere. “I am interested in exploring how the notion of ‘place holding’ gets reworked through an impossible relationship both in love and in language.”
As to how to approach a poem that you’ve never read before, Karasick said, “On one level, it depends on how deeply one wants to penetrate the text. The way I like to read is to not worry about what everything means per se, but rather … in reading, I think the most important thing is to feel the text, to go inside and feel its rhythms, its textures…. I work a lot with sound, so I’m really interested how sound itself communicates meaning and so, therefore, a lot of this type of work is about moving with the rhythms and the textures and some of that crazed emotion, how that bleeds through, just through the way that it sounds and feels in your mouth.”
Turning to the poem “Lorem Ipsum,” she said the words mean “pain itself.” She has translated Cicero’s treatise on the theory of ethics into a “passionate love poem” about the “difficulties and grueling angst that one traverses through that. Just like love itself, or pain itself, isn’t something that’s easily definable, so it is with the poem itself, which takes us through this journey of multiple ways that are easily comprehensible and other parts that are strangely defamiliarized and confusing because these very strong emotions are fiercely that…. Just like in life, you come across things that are completely foreign and impenetrable, so, similarly, the poem interweaves through the familiar and the defamiliar, the expected and that which completely takes you into new arenas of wonder and confusion.”
Karasick similarly takes Pound’s “Canto 45” and, playing with the Yiddish word asura, which means forbidden, and the English word usury, creates a new work that’s both a scathing commentary on Pound’s, as well its own poem, with its own meanings.
About “In Cold Hollers,” Karasick said she used the word “hollers” because it’s “homophonically related to hell, but it’s hollering in, calling back into Charles Olson’s original ’53 piece; and his original title, ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket,’ refers to the opening of Dante’s ‘Inferno.’ What seems simple, it just has layers and layers and layers of history, literary history, philosophical history, as well.”
The title of Olson’s poem refers particularly to “selva oscura,” she said, “which is the dark wood that Dante wanders into in the middle of his life … so Olson’s poem, which riffs on that, is a similar excursion into a visionary experience, where he struggles to come up with a new understanding … from his own midlife … putting a voice to his own time. It is a personal drama of experience, conflict; it really speaks to the wrenching process of living and loving that, by turns, is grueling and funny and dramatic and trivial. My translation of that is dealing with all of those things and, in a way, it’s like, do you remember that old Gwen Stefani song, ‘I Ain’t No Hollaback Girl’? – I am a hollaback girl. I am hollering back, in cold hollers, to this cold hell, and basically calling into that history of both Dante and Olson, the history of post-modernism, 65 years later.”
In talking about Olson’s work and hers, Karasick said, “I sometimes like thinking of translation as trans-elation because you can never really translate anything because of culture and all the different references – in my piece, in my trans-elation, the attention is focused on a world of connected life, the personal, the political, the poetic as a system of relations. And, lastly … highlighting how the words themselves are imaginative participants; the words themselves are creating and recreating the sense of connecting the personal, the political, the poetic.”
And it’s not just the words, but how they are placed on a page that matters in poetry. So, for example, Karasick’s “In Cold Hollers” not only plays on the sound and meaning of Olson’s poem, but also mirrors its typography. “I wanted to keep it very much as he had it,” she said of where the lines break and other aspects of the formatting.
“The notion of the physicality and the materiality of where the words are placed on the page has just as much meaning as what they are communicating. We’re so often used to looking at the left margin … but I want the phrases to be moving and fluid, and that sense of how the white space between the words is equally as important as the words themselves. We can go back to kabbalah and the black fire on white fire, that the whole page becomes a series of fiery energy.”
Salomé: Woman of Valor will have its world première at the Chutzpah! Festival March 8-10. (image by Anya Ross, graphics by John Greenaway)
There have been many interpretations of Salomé – thought to be the woman whose alluring dance persuaded King Herod to honour her request that he have John the Baptist beheaded – but none quite like that of Salomé: Woman of Valor, which has its world première at Chutzpah! March 8-10.
The creation of this complex, multilayered work that combines poetry, music, dance and film was led by composer and trumpeter Frank London and poet and performer Adeena Karasick. It features live music by London, percussionist Deep Singh and keyboard player Shai Bachar. The poetry is written and performed by Karasick, the dance choreographed and performed by Rebecca Margolick and Jessie Zaritt, and the video analyzing Charles Bryant’s 1923 silent film Salomé was made by Elizabeth Mak. The whole production is directed by Alex Aron.
“Frank was intrigued by the Salomé story due to the visual cornucopia of the Bryant film, and because it is a story where dance was at the centre, motivating the complex chain of events, and thus ripe for reinvention as a contemporary dance-theatre piece incorporating Bryant’s imagery,” Karasick told the Independent about why the work focuses on Salomé and not another Jewish historical or literary woman. “However, he was only aware of the [Oscar] Wilde retelling of the Salomé story and thus not really interested in her narrative. He came to me to see if I could reenvision her story in a more compelling way.”
It has always bothered her, said Karasick, how, within Christian mythology and entrenched in history by writers like Wilde, Gustave Flaubert and Stéphane Mallarmé and artists such as Gustav Klimt, Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley, “Salomé was seen as yet another Jewish temptress/Christian killer – but, in fact, there isn’t any evidence to substantiate this claim. According to apocrypha and Josephus’s Antiquities, she came from Jewish royalty and there is no evidence she murdered John the Baptist or even danced for Herod,” said Karasick.
“The only historical reference that [Herod’s wife] Herodias’s daughter’s name was Salomé is from Flavius Josephus, who makes no other claims about her – not that she danced for Herod, not that she demanded John’s head, but only that she went on to marry twice and live peacefully. The other apocryphal reference is that a daughter danced for Herod, which caused him to lose his mind and kill John the Baptist. Thus, the conflagrated Salomé that appears in the Wilde play, [Richard] Strauss opera and all subsequent productions, is an amalgamated construct, so we felt it was our duty to set the record straight.”
In fact, added Karasick, there are three women named Salomé in Jewish history: Salomé, daughter of Herodias and Herod II (circa 14-71 CE); Queen Salomé, her great-aunt (65 BCE-10 CE); and Salomé Alexandra (139-67 BCE).
“Her great-aunt, Salomé I, was the powerful sister and force behind Herod the Great, king of Judea and Second Temple rebuilder,” said Karasick, while Salomé Alexandra (also known as Shelomtzion) was one of only two women who reigned over Judea.
“I wanted my Salomé, Salomé of Valor, to carry the weight of both her genetic lineage and the cultural heredity of her name, embodying the legacy and power of the women that came before her,” said Karasick.
Karasick, who was born in Winnipeg, grew up in Vancouver, earning her bachelor’s from the University of British Columbia. She did her master’s at York University and her PhD at Concordia University. Among other things, she teaches literature and critical theory at Pratt Institute in New York, is co-founding artistic director of KlezKanada and performs her work around the world. The author of nine books – with a 10th, Checking In, published by Talonbooks, on the way – she has been awarded for her contributions to feminist thinking and, last year, the Adeena Karasick Archive was established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University.
London – a member of the Klezmatics and the group Hasidic New Wave, who has performed with countless musicians and made numerous recordings of his own – saw Karasick perform in New York in 2011. He then hired her, she said, “along with Jake Marmer to design and lead the poetry retreat at KlezKanada…. We hadn’t yet collaborated before this, but I was always compelled by his music and the breadth of all he created as a masterful revolutionary himself, not only as a spectacularly fierce trumpet player but virtuosic composer, reinvigorating klezmer music, transcendentally intermixing it with aspects of world music, jazz, Chassidic new wave, punk – and always felt it would be a thrilling and highly symbiotic artistic match.”
When Frank approached her about the Salomé project, said Karasick, they both “fell in love with the Bryant film but were so perplexed” about Salomé’s “reputation in cultural history.”
So, Karasick started researching, “poring through the multiple and conflict[ing] narratives – through Josephus and the apocrypha, locating the many discrepancies between Christian and Jewish mythologies, speaking with specialists in the field, and became fascinated with how there are so many ‘truths,’ stories, misreadings, and how imperative it is to question these grand narratives, problematize traditional cultural, moral and religious perspectives.
“For millennia,” she said, “Jews have been portrayed as the murderers of gods and prophets in other people’s mythologies, so Salomé: Woman of Valor deconstructs this mythology, exposing how she was not a demonic murderess, and opens up the possibilities for infinite retelling and how truth itself is always a construct of veiling and unveiling.”
About the magnitude of the project, Karasick said, “As the author of nine books invested in issues of ethnicity, gender and ways to construct meaning, as professor of poetry and critical theory, gender images in the media, and poetics and performance, Salomé: Woman of Valor is a logical progression in my 30-year career, and has allowed me to integrate my experiences in one work – something that I have never done before.
“Due to the scope of this show,” she said, “I’m able to weave together the multiple styles of writing that I’ve experimented with over the years – sound poetry, homophonic translations, post-language conceptualism, kabbalistic and feminist revisionist practices, all syntactically playful, polyphonic, ironic and rhythmically complex – a fusion of my esthetic passions and expertise; opening a space of female empowerment.”
While London has been involved in many projects, Karasick said Salomé might be the first for him with performance poetry at the centre.
“We created Salomé: Woman of Valor as an integration of performance poetry, dance, music and video exploring the dialectic between narrative and abstraction – it is a quantum leap forward in collaborative artistic development, challenging my conceptual processes of making an artwork,” she said. “I couldn’t be more excited.”
Salomé: Woman of Valor is already being presented in an array of venues and contexts, said Karasick. “Its form and content make it appropriate to be presented at jazz, dance, poetry, new theatre, literary and electronic literature festivals; in performing arts centres, universities, avant garde text-based multimedia events, as well as events focusing on new media and cross arts,” she said.
“With its feminist and mystical kabbalistic take on Jewish historical subject matter and a live score which draws from East European Jewish music (klezmer) with jazz, Arabic and Indian musics, our Salomé is especially attractive to Jewish culture festivals and to presenters of Jewish music, language, dance and art.”
The libretto has been published in Italian and in English, and selections of it have been published in Bengali, Arabic, Yiddish and German. It is “being taught in universities worldwide in departments of global literature, Jewish studies and humanities and media studies,” she said.
The artists bringing Salomé: Woman of Valor to Vancouver are all “at the forefront of their respective fields,” said Karasick, “and so I feel so fortunate to be working with such powerful creators, all revolutionaries in their own ways. Frank works with Shai Bachar and Deep Singh on a number of musical projects – Deep and Frank started the internationally acclaimed bhangra-klezmer fusion band Sharabi; and [Frank] co-developed Night in the Old Marketplace with Alex Aron, so bringing her on board as a director seemed a natural fit.
“Over the five years of envisioning the piece, we tried on a number of dance styles, ranging from tribal belly dance to sword dance/swallowers, and, with the advice of (Merce Cunningham protégé) Gus Solomons, Jr., settled on the avant garde modern dance of Israeli superstar Jesse Zarrit and the stunningly poetic Rebecca Margolick, with a shout-out to the Dadaist Loïe Fuller stylings by Jodi Sperling.”
Mak’s video on Bryant’s silent film, notes the project’s promotional material, is “punctuated with Jim Andrews’ stunning vispo [visual poetry], with special video appearances by … Tony Torn as Herod, lit by Nicole Lang.”
“Together,” said Karasick, “we’re expanding our work in ways only dreamed possible; have created an intellectually provocative, audio-visual sensorium, informed by our (Frank’s and my) ongoing obsession with excess, desire and pushing boundaries.”
And it’s an interest, if not obsession, with many others, as well. The Kickstarter campaign for Salomé surpassed its goal of $20,000, about half of the project’s budget.
“The show has been garnering a lot of love and support from colleagues and patrons,” said Karasick, “perhaps due to ways that it addresses the social and political necessity to speak the unspoken, resist stereotypes, misrepresentation and outdated myths, and fosters a thinking that leads to a hybridized syncretic culture, one that honours the intermixing of blood, belief, rhythm, texture and being. Content-wise, it addresses outdated notions of identity and ethnicity, and carves out a space where difference and otherness can be celebrated. We feel incredibly grateful, and hope that we can keep growing it. Broadway, here we come!”
But, first, the Chutzpah! Festival. They have also been invited to Toronto’s Ashkenaz Festival and the Boston Jewish Music Festival, said Karasick, who will continue to tour with the Salomé books. “Frank,” she said, “will record and release the music as a CD. We hope to see it at major festivals and venues worldwide.”
The presentations of Salomé at Chutzpah! are presented in association with the Dance Centre, where the performances will take place. For tickets and the full festival lineup, visit chutzpahfestival.com.
Adeena Karasick has donated her archive to the Collection of Contemporary Literature at Simon Fraser University’s Bennett Library. (photo from Adeena Karasick)
Critically acclaimed poet and Vancouver native Adeena Karasick was in her hometown last month to celebrate the donation of her archive to Simon Fraser University.
The Collection of Contemporary Literature at SFU’s Bennett Library contains one of the biggest selections of avant-garde poetry in North America. “The collection has been building since 1965,” said Tony Power, the librarian-curator who oversaw the addition of Karasick’s works. “The collection features many of the poets whose tradition Karasick is associated with, such as Michael McClure and Robin Blaser. Karasick was influenced by her teacher, Warren Tallman, who also influenced, for example, Fred Wah, George Bowering and Daphne Marlatt. These are all poets who are featured in the Bennett Library collection.
“Karasick has a very high profile for a poet,” Powers added, “and a certain amount of notoriety for her more daring works.”
Karasick told the Jewish Independent that the Feb. 23 event, in which her personal notebooks became, in effect, public artifacts, was “surreal.”
“I was honoured to be included in this collection, one of the greatest collections in North America of contemporary poets and avant-garde renegades, provocateurs and risk-taking challengers of esthetics,” she said.
Karasick, whose work has been called “beautiful linguistic carnage” by Word Magazine, specializes in non-narrative, intimate works that are most concerned with the play of language itself.
“I am interested in using language to create different effects of meaning production, highlighting language as a physical, material, construct. Play, jouissance [delight], as Jew-essence,” she explained with a smile.
Karasick regularly plays with Jewish themes in her work, whether it’s the invocation of the Kotel (a wall made of words in more ways than one) at the heart of Dyssemia Sleaze, or the Hebrew letter mem, which inspires Mêmewars.
“In the kabbalah, the world is created through language,” she said. “That’s also the way I view things.”
Among Adeena Karasick’s donations to the Collection of Contemporary Literature at SFU’s Bennett Library were books and personal notes. (photo from Adeena Karasick)
Karasick’s speech is peppered with words like “intervention,” “transgression,” “disruption,” “nomadicism” and “vagrancy.” She aims, she explained, to “destabilize and subvert linguistic power structures with the hope of instigating new ways of seeing. My poetry uses playfulness and celebrates a sense of creative homelessness, a mashing up of poetry, critical theory and visuality.”
Asked how she felt about being a postmodern artist whose work has been called “an impressive deconstruction of language and meaning” by Canadian Literature, in an age where the American president, it could be said, was much maligned for engaging in similar activity, she pointed to Jewish postmodern philosopher Emanuel Levinas (1906-1995).
“I’m not saying there’s no truth. There is truth. There is what happened,” she said. “The search for the truth cannot be solitary or uniperspectival though, and cannot be an imposition of ‘the truth’ on others in a totalitarian way. Levinas said that truth itself arises out of discourse … it rests in the ethical relation between people, where a search for the truth can take place. Truth requires humility and multiplicity.”
Born in Winnipeg, Karasick’s family moved to Vancouver when she was six months old, and she grew up here. She had her bat mitzvah at Congregation Beth Israel and was very much a part of the local Jewish community. She went to the University of British Columbia for her undergraduate degree, did her master’s at York in Toronto and her doctorate at Concordia, in Montreal, in “French feminist post-structural theory and kabbalistic hermeneutics.”
Karasick now teaches at Pratt Institute in New York and is enjoying a growing distinction as one of the premier avant-garde poets of her generation. She is becoming known for her innovative use of video as well as the printed page.
In 2018, Karasick will release a new book, Alephville, a poem composed of faux Facebook updates. “I was un-nerved by the timing,” she said, referencing the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, “by the fact that it is basically a poem composed of ‘alternative facts.’”
Also next year, Karasick will debut her “spoken-word opera” Salomé: Woman of Valour, a feminist reinterpretation of the biblical character. She co-wrote the piece with Grammy Award-winning musician Frank London of the Klezmatics. They met through KlezKanada, an annual klezmer camp that has been meeting in the Laurentians for 20 years, the poetry division of which Karasick has been director for the last six years.
Karasick wrote the libretto for Salomé: Woman of Valour and London composed the music, an original score that blends Arabic, klezmer, jazz and bhangra. The nomadic and subversive piece will première at next year’s Chutzpah! Festival.
Matthew Gindinis a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.
