Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Portrait
This is what he must have looked like,
Christ in the autumn, like me with my
twenty-two summers: still beardless,
blond, and the girls couldn’t help it,
dreamed of him night after night!
Translated…
Freckled Childhood
I certainly had an obscure childhood
but intensely my own,
a childhood which wanted to be dashing
but had the features of a caricature.
Yes, a caricature. For example:
that absurd love for Sophie,…
Fabius Lind Is Riding the Wind
Fabius Lind clings to the flowing mane
Of young spring,
Galloping on the free highways of desire.
Voluptuous desert-winds around him,
Voluptuous desert-winds inside him.
Fabius Lind surrenders to…
Fall in Vilna
Yom Kippur, when the narrow alleys of the shulhoyf
cradle the small shtibls, pious and scared,
householders hurry with their taleisim
and old men shuffle along in their socks—
I feel the narrow…
A Joyful Mother of Children
I entitled this volume Em Habanim Semeḥah [Psalms 113:9], based on the Jerusalem tractate of Berakhot (toward the close of the second chapter) which portrays Erets Yisrael as the mother of Israel and…
In the Army
With evening a whistle. Again the sweating store room
opens its throat wide, and we march out in formation
worn down by the heat wave and a day so long:
hard working soldier-women.
And why should…
Half of Nothing
Antisemitism is not an Argentine disgrace; we did not invent it. Other countries preceded us. Not even the far-right Tacuara Nationalist Movement of the 1960s invented it. Before that, there was the…
Second Generation
Child of a lonely traveller
in a strange country
I live towards my doom
closed in a small tight room.
Closed in a small tight room
where whitehaired quiet ladies
claw the walls conspire in lies
and…
Like a Rolling Stone
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you
You used to…
Sheltered by a Crimson Awning . . .
Sheltered by a crimson awning,
All alone, his slaves dismissed,
A lord is bidding farewell fondly
To a black-browed odalisque.
“Sarah, houri of the prophet,
My sunshine, comfort, strength, delight…
Eleh divre ha-berit (These Are the Words of the Covenant)
These are the words of the covenant as a statute for Jacob, as an everlasting covenant for Israel; the Almighty spoke but once—and He will never alter His law—through the Torah and the ruling which…
Feast in Paradise, No. 2
In the early 1980s, Eshel-Gershuni began making what she called “fetishes” or “impossible jewelry,” transferring her skills as a jewelry-maker to sculpture. She combined expensive materials like gold…