Writing

Pulling at Threads: “Our Astronaut: A Report from the Gravestone Sales Yard” (Personal essay about a Jewish grave-measuring ritual, a Halloween drag performance, and our relationship with the dead – as an extended introduction to a Yiddish poem, 2024)

“We crossed the street from the locked cemetery to the sales yard of a stonemasonry company, H. Albrecht (est. 1883). On display was a selection of uninscribed headstones for sale in different styles and materials: classic arched slabs, rectangular prisms, and sinuous shapes in polished granite, laser-cut quartzite, or hand-chiseled limestone. The yard itself resembles a kind of cemetery-in-waiting, a stark reminder of our collective destination. (Undz tsu lange yorn; may we all live long lives – not to tempt the evil eye here.) Suspended above it is a permanent crane on metal tracks, something like the arcade game where you try to manipulate a ‘claw’ with a joystick to grab a prize, except the crane is for hoisting gravestones into the air before they are inscribed with a person’s name and shuttled to that person’s new resting place. Some prize!”

Stadtsprachen Magazine: “Yiddish Centers, Yiddish Futures” (Essay/talk about the geography and future of the Yiddish language and its literature, 2024, available in German translation here)

“Just as a bagel with a center isn’t a bagel, Yiddish with a center would not be Yiddish. […] To build a strong future for Yiddish, we also need to be focusing on the third, creative network […] We need to cultivate communities where people aren’t just learning Yiddish but speaking it, not just reading or singing or studying it but writing in it. Communities that welcome people who were previously marginalized – women, queer and trans people, heretics, activists. Communities of people engaging with their heritage and history on their own terms. Communities whose members feel comfortable experimenting and making mistakes, whose creativity in the language becomes mutually inspiring. That will lead to more and better art that is relevant to our present lives. ”

The Austrian Riveter: “A Shelving Problem” (Essay about Galician Jewish literature, 2023)

“The disconnect between nations as we imagine them and people, in their messy distribution across the planet, is one reason why, without a more sophisticated and inclusive shelving system, so many important books and authors are left without a home.”

Westopia Festival catalog: “Sprachraum versus Doikayt: Berlin and the Case for Multilingual (Post)national literature” (Essay/lecture in English with German translation, 2022)

“We as linguistic minorities need to acknowledge that these challenges will never be easy and that the only way to achieve a world that celebrates all the little worlds inside it, for all their diversity and all their languages, is to keep creating and publishing, no matter what happens, and to stop apologizing for who and where we are. We’re all in the right country.”

Stadtsprachen Magazine: “Head Ropes: A Life in Translation” (Essay, 2021)

“The agent from the Vienna office of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company was confirming the details of my great-grandmother Irma’s reservation. To emigrate from the hyphen of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire to the United States, one-way, for life.”

SAND: “A Journal from Vietnam” (Travel journal, 2017)

“The subtitles and competing languages on screen made up a kind of motion-picture Talmud, with Chinese and Korean going down the sides, English and Vietnamese on the bottom, Portuguese interludes, the occasional centered quote, and sometimes languages like Thai and Georgian, even Schwäbisch, thrown in.”

Epitext: “International Berlin’s ‘Language Spaces’ in Conversation and Literature” (Essay, 2017)

“Monolingualism is the historical exception, not the rule. Speakers of different languages have always coexisted, often in the same brain, and they haven’t always been sorted into neat national boxes. Although linguistic uniformity does create larger communities of communication, this flatness is always forced.”