by Richard Jeffrey Newman
Crowds of displaced Palestinians at a UNRWA-affiliated school in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on December 19th, 2023. Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP at Jewish Currents.
*
“You don’t need overt bloodshed to cause significant violence that ends people’s lives. Many people will die unnecessary deaths due to deprivation.” —Yara Asi quoted by Maya Rosen in “The Epidemiological War on Gaza,” Jewish Currents, January 5, 2024
*
This morning on my daily walk I met a long-haired shepherd with ambiguous eyes. I slowed my pace, watched the dog’s walker rein the animal’s curiosity in, winding tightly around her hand the tether we tell ourselves protects people like me, who believe all others will of course welcome the friendship we assume they assume we intend, and in that moment, the rage I thought I’d put behind me at the words of the poet whose book I was asked to review sent its own tether out, and I heard myself again reading his lines aloud as I sat some months ago alone among my books, confirming I’d not misread his refusal of history, the willful pleasure he took in a hatred I disowned long ago, no differently, I have no doubt, than that dog, under the right circumstances, would disown its leash, and perhaps its master as well. I don’t remember much about my own opportunity, except that I was standing in my sophomore dorm hallway while a man from a country I knew nothing about, except that I knew nothing, looked at me with disbelief. “You really believe those mothers love their sons so little that they bring them into the world just to make them martyrs?” I had not said exactly that, but it was my meaning, as its hatred was, in poem after poem, the lie that poet embraced. I started to ask if the dog was friendly, but the woman spit out, “Come!” and pulled him hard into the gutter. I let my question sink back into silence, which I thought at first was how I should respond to that poet’s betrayal of this art that saved my life, but then I wrote the review. It’s in the world. I want to know what difference it has made.
*
Richard Jeffrey Newman has published three books of his own poetry, T’shuvah (Fernwood Press 2023), Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions 2017), and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), as well as three books of translation from classical Persian poetry, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications 2004 & 2006), and The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh (Junction Press 2011). He curates the First Tuesdays reading series, is the Executive Director of Newtown Literary, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College.
It’s such a quietly profound piece - like jeffrey’s other work — a touch of lament, sorrow that things are now what they are and the knowledge that we as humans can and must do better — the story does not begin or end w race or religion — but as a member of the human race.