On April 12, 19, and 26, Sixth Street Community Synagogue will be hosting the “Baruch She’amar” Festival of the Spoken Word!
Monday April 26th, 8.15 pm: Samuel Menashe and Stanley Moss!Two poetry titans, Samuel Menashe and Samuel Moss will read their poetry, and afterwards hold court in a panel discussion about their personal Jewish poetics. Curated by Jake Marmer.
Samuel Menashe is the first recipient of the Neglected Masters Prize established by The Poetry Foundation. Born in New York City in 1925, Menashe has practiced his art of “compression and crystallization” (in Derek Mahon’s phrase) in poems that are brief in form but startlingly wide-ranging and profound in their engagement with ultimate questions. Dana Gioia has written: “Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed. Nearly every poem he has ever published radiates a heightened religious awareness.” Intensely musical and rigorously constructed, Menashe’s poetry stands apart in its solitary meditative power. But it is equally a poetry of the everyday, suffused, in the words of Christopher Ricks, with “the courage of comedy, flanked by the respect of innocence.” The humblest of objects, the minutest of natural forms here become powerfully suggestive, and even the shortest of the poems are spacious in the perspectives they open.
See WNYC’s video special on Menashe’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EefUhL2kHkM.
Stanley Moss is a widely acclaimed poet and translator, as well the publisher of the Sheepmeadow Press. John Ashberry called Moss the “American poetry’s best-kept secret, better known as the innovative publisher of other poets than for his own highly charged, stingingly beautiful lyrics.” To read NYT review of Moss’s work, and find out more about him see http://stanleymoss.com/.
Previous Baruch She’amar gigs -
Monday April 12th, 8.30pm: The Night of Jewish Performance Poetry, featuring Vanessa “Hebrew Mamita” Hidary, Matthue Roth, and Jake Marmer.
Vanessa Hidary, AKA The Hebrew Mamita is a native New Yorker, who seems to write a lot about Jews, men, race, and juicy thighs. She has aired three times on HBO’S Def Poetry Jam, was a finalist at Nuyorican Poets Café , and her solo show “Culture Bandit”, which has toured nationally, has been produced by LAByrinth theatre company, Roar @ Nuyorican Poets café, and the Hip Hop theatre festival, among others. She was featured in the award winning film “The Tribe” which appeared in numerous festivals such as Sundance and Tribeca Film. She is the director of the show “Monologues” ; An evening of solo performances exploring Jewish Identity inspired by a 10-day trip through Israel. She received her MFA in acting from Trinity Rep Conservatory. See her signature poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubdGjzzJiVs
Matthue Roth, is the author of the Orthodox Jewish punk-rock road-trip novel Never Mind the Goldbergs, two other novels, and a memoir that isn’t true. His screenplay “1/20″ is in production as a motion picture. He lives in Brooklyn and keeps a secret diary at http://www.matthue.com . See him live here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyk09_rbcrQ.
Jake Marmer is a performance poet who has performed widely in New York and Jerusalem with illustrious jazz greats. Here’s a sample of his work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBWjed_1cx4, and you can check out http://jakemarmer.wordpress.com/ for more.
Monday April 19th, 8.30pm: Yiddish Play! David Mandelbaum’s “Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d.” On the the anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Yiddish Theater on the Lower East Side.
Suggested Donation $18
The show runs 50 minutes.
David Mandelbaum as Yosl Rakover
Directed by Amy Coleman
In the ruins of the ghetto of Warsaw, among heaps of charred rubbish, there was found, packed tightly into a small bottle, the following testament, written during the ghetto’s last hours by a Jew named Yosl Rakover.
For twenty years the story of Yosl Rakover was believed to be an eyewitness account of the ghetto’s last hours, and the true story of a pious Jew whose fate it was to die fighting the beasts that destroyed his world. In the hours before his death he reconsiders his relationship with G-d and concludes that although his relationship with G-d has changed, his faith in Him remains, and his love for Him burns as strongly as ever.
The story was actually written in 1946, by Tzvi Kolitz, a young Palestinian who as a delegate to the World Zionist Congress traveled extensively to speak on behalf of the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine. His clandestine purpose was to recruit fighters for the Irgun, of which he was a member. While in Argentina, he was asked to write an article for a Yiddish paper in Buenas Aires for their special Yom kippur edition. The result was Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d. Through a set of bizzare circumstances the story was republished in an Israeli Yiddish journal without his name on it, and was assumed to be real. It has since been recognized as one of the classics of Holocaust literature, been translated into many languages, and been the subject of essays by theologians and philosophers. Adapted for the stage and performed by David Mandelbaum, it makes for powerful and compelling theater. In Yiddish with English Supertitles.
