The Family Kitchen

The Family Kitchen is an album of story and portrait poems drawing on three generations of a family that emigrated from Eastern Europe to America. It travels from a 19th century forest shtetl village outside Vilnius to Boston, Massachusetts. The poems advance into the 21st century when the narrator's parents return in the dream poem, 'The Family Kitchen.' Wearing mother's apron, father is cooking breakfast. 'Dead so much longer, mother hovers.' Other family members come to life with their stories: those who fulfil traditional roles like great-grandmother and grandmother, mother to many, household managers and business women supporting religious scholar husbands; and radicals like Great Aunt Hero who crossed China to teach birth control to peasants, joined the workers building the Moscow subway and, after giving each child a musical instrument to master, created a travelling family orchestra which she conducted. In the transition from the Old Country to the New World, orthodox religion gives way to American reform and detractors. The illiterate immigrant mother sees all of her children through college. But links to the Old World remain. After the war, a cousin who survived Auschwitz joins the family. He does not talk about the Camp until years later at a funeral. When he tells his story it is to school age grandchildren. Half a century after the Holocaust, describing how he survived is as unbelievable to him as to the new generation. Other poems offer a lighter, even humorous note. In 'Apron', grandma, whose childhood was hardship and work, is jumped into the air like a child by her laughing, dancing son-in-law. In 'Love Song for My Father', the same son-in-law pulls his trousers on backwards in his rush to get to the hospital to greet his first-born. And in 'Mother the Storyteller, squeezed into a 1920s Ford jalopy which has broken down on the road to Tip Top House on Mt Washington, the family spills out like circus clowns. The poems are open, intimate, tender, lyrical, unsentimental, by turns, moving, playful and celebratory. They touch on the universal themes of birth, living, death and dying. The collection is in the tradition of Robert Lowell's Life Studies. In its narrative of extended family like Life Studies, The Family Kitchen portrays American social history through the personal and familiar. In 'Storyteller', a two-section narrative about the poet's father as a child street-storyteller in Boston's Jewish ghetto and as an eighty year old recalling a different side of his child self, his story-telling with its recreations of self enlivens him. A day with uncomfortable dark-shadowed memories transforms through his emotive telling into something wondrous. In conversation with the past, in the dialogue narrative, 'A Gift of Going', the poet argues with her mother 'as if you has not gone'. British critic and poet Martyn Crucifix remarked that these poems are a distillation of our disputes with the past that - try as we might - we can never lay aside. British critic and poet Susan Wicks, 'This is one of the most poignant poems I have read.' Of the collection as a whole, American critic and poet Andrea Carter Brown writes, 'this spare but eloquent collection stands out: for its telling details, its lyrical vision, its hard-won generosity of spirit, of affection. Poem after poem, while speaking quietly, astounds, moves. This is one family's saga, particular in its heartbreak, universal in its bounty. Read. Think. Remember. Feel.'