Jaime Wendt’s compelling and beautiful second poetry collection, Laughing in Yiddish, meditates on identity, resilience, and the relationship between history and survival. Wendt’s poems move fluidly between the personal and the collective, capturing the struggles and triumphs of Jewish life across different eras and geographies.
Wendt’s language is lyrical and visceral, an ongoing dialogue between past and present. In the poem”Laughing in Yiddish,” women train themselves not to follow “Lot’s wife’s gaze, not to look back at destruction. Why witness / the mass of corpses again / and the remains of a lost world?” The narrator attempts to embrace humor, loneliness, and adaptation, stating, “I tried erasing G-d’s silence like sunshine dries a rain puddle. Ten years / have passed since we left” in a world where “maps change, eliminate and rename the country”. Once in Chicago, the narrator finds herself just as poor, but now she learns “how to differentiate the threat level.” While the strange sun burns her face, she looks up “into the blackened mirrors and laughs.” This laugh is a nod to the Jewish literary and comedic tradition, a mechanism for navigating the dissonance between belonging and loss.
Throughout the collection, we meet a cast of family members and historical figures whose stories are preserved through lyric and prose poems. Ekphrastic works further enrich the collection’s narrative depth, imagistically holding historical moments in time.
In “Ghazal of Red Strings” the image of red appears symbolically, religiously and bodily. Here, red represents both the iconic red string as a symbol of faith and fear, but also menstrual blood. The poem moves fluidly between personal and collective anxieties, offering a nuanced exploration of motherhood and the longing for safety. Wendt’s voice is controlled and urgent, her lines exacting, each a forceful breath filled with life’s deep cadence: “Fear and superstition lie deep within the color red./Women were placed in the secluded, barren tent: ‘Red.’ /
A female space guided by moon and menstruation, the tent / was for resting in piles of hay and warm feathers odorous red.”
Further, Wendt interweaves themes of education, survival, and the cyclical nature of violence throughout the collection, creating a rhythmic structure that resembles documentary poetics. These powerful, erudite poems do not dwell on nostalgia but instead insist on bearing witness and entering the future through the power of love and family. “Kuziai Forest, Lithuania, June 29, 1941” is a painful account of the atrocities committed against Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania. With stark imagery and concise phrasing, the poem transports readers to the heart of a forest, where a mass grave is “easy to miss” if one continues “through the forest / of Europe / toward iron gates, / into ghost chambers.”
Similarly, “To Prevent Forgetting” reveals Wendt’s ability to juxtapose the sacred and mundane artfully. The Passover Seder, symbolizing resilience, becomes a moment of collective memory where “the stranger we once were” is welcomed.
Wendt underscores how ritual sustains cultural identity amid the ever-present shadow of history: “We dip our pinky fingers into glasses of red wine, leave / stains in the center of fine china to prevent forgetting…”
In “Interview with Papa: Bar Mitzvah, 1945,” she contrasts a boy’s coming-of-age ceremony with the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illuminating the dissonance between personal milestones and global catastrophe.
Marked by an almost cinematic quality, Wendt’s poetry frames fleeting moments of beauty and horror in striking juxtaposition. Ultimately, Laughing in Yiddish is a testament to poetry’s ability to hold history accountable while fostering joy and continuity. Wendt’s collection offers a deeply personal yet universally resonant tapestry—a significant contribution to contemporary Jewish literature.
Lizzy Itkin grew up in Briarcliff Manor, New York and studied literature and political science at the University of Wisconsin.