Review: Dancing in Odessa

Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Whatever I say/ is a kind of petition, and the darkest/ days must I praise.” (from “Author’s Prayer.”)

Give me some time to take back the claim, but this may be the best collection of poetry I have ever read.

This collection feels old. Somehow, the paper in my edition is yellowed and stiff. Yet the book came out only five years ago, and Ilya Kaminsky is half a generation younger than I am. In the best ways poetry makes possible, it feels old and new, feels like a universal claim and yet like something only he could have written and only someone like me – a 50-something Jewish guy with an appreciation for history an literature – could fully appreciate.

There are five sections here, and, as I read, I came away convinced that almost each was my favorite.

The first, the one that prompted me to buy the book, meditates on the challenge of narrating history. Called “Dancing in Odessa,” it reflects on what it meant for Kaminsky to leave his native Odessa to come to the United States. He understands himself as a kind of mouthpiece for an entire culture, brimming with stories, that may have no one left to hear them. (That is, these Jews have left Odessa, and they are now in a country where Russian isn’t spoken. But, even as I say that, I oversimplify what Kaminsky says as full-blown poetry.)

Some highlights:

From the title poem,

“At night, I woke to whisper: yes, we lived.
We lived, yes, don’t say it was a dream.”

From “In Praise of Laughter”
“in the secret history of anger – one man’s silence
lives in the bodies of others – as we dance to keep from falling
between the doctor and the prosecutor:
my family, the people of Odessa,
women with huge breasts, old men naïve and childlike,
all our words, heaps of burning feathers
that rise and rise with each retelling.”

Or, from “American Tourist”
“She said, ‘All that is musical in us is memory’ –
but I did not know English, I danced
sitting down, she straightened
and bent and straightened, a tremble of music
a tremble in her hand.”

As far as I’m concerned, that would have been enough – dayenu – to justify the collection, but Kaminsky doesn’t stop there. He uses that section as a springboard for all that follows, trying to translate memories of his Odessa heritage to the one he’s in now. Again, though, that’s a clumsy way to name the project. It’s almost as true to say he takes me to Odessa, that he makes me unsure what year this is and what language I’m fluent in.

In his second section, he gives a poetic biography of Osip Mandelstam. And, if I was at first disappointed to see such focus, I came around quickly. Consider this excerpt:

“on certain afternoons
the Republic of Psalms opens up
and I grow frightened that I haven’t lived, died, not enough
to scratch this ecstasy into vowels, hear
splashes of clear, biblical speech.”

Or, in the separate poem that punctuates the section:

“A Toast”

“In my veins
long syllables tighten their ropes, rains come
right out of the eighteenth century
Yiddish or a darker language in which imagination
Is the only word.

Imagination! A young girl dancing polka,
unafraid, betrayed by the Lord’s death
(or his hiding under the bed when the Messiah
was postponed).

In my country, evenings bring the rain water, turning
poplars bronze in a light that sparkles on these pages
where I, my fathers,
unable to describe your dreams, drink
my silence from a cup.”

Then comes a section called “Natalia,” a series of near-sonnets that come as close to Neruda as any English language poetry I’ve ever seen. I don’t say that lightly, but these have all the bewildering, unlikely comparisons of Neruda that, once said, feel as if they have always existed.

“Natalia, beside me, turns the pages,
what happened and did not happen
must speak and sing by turns.
My chronicler, Natalia, I offer you two cups of air
In which you dip your little finger, lick it dry.”

Or,

“A serious woman, she danced
without a shirt, covering what she could.
We lay together on Yom Kippur, chosen by a wrong God,

the people of a book, broken by a book.”

Then comes a section called “Travelling Musicians” which is a series of shorter tributes to Russian poets, Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Isaac Babel, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Each one accomplishes the same trick, making me think I’ve read their work in the original Russian, when I don’t actually know any Russian.

From the Celan prose poem, “Seven years after his death, I saw Celan in his house slippers dancing alone in his bedroom, humming step over step. He did not mind being a character in my stories in a language he never learned. That night, I saw him sitting on a rooftop, searching for Venus, reciting Brodsky to himself. He asked if his past existed at all.”

Or, from the poem on Tsvetaeva,

“all I want is a human window
in a house whose roof is my life.”

Then, in a final section, “Praise,” Kaminsky tries to punctuate the whole collection by giving a “story with a happy ending” even though he tells the immigrant woman who asked him for it that he has none. Looping back to where began the collection, he acknowledges that there is something intrinsically happy in the capacity to tell a story at all, that history happened and that we – we humans, we Jews, we Odessan latecomers to America – have honestly lived.

As part of that, he writes,

“On the page’s soiled corners
my teacher walks, composing a voice:
he rubs each word in his palms:
‘hands learn from the soil and broken glass,
you cannot think a poem,’ he says,
‘watch the light hardening into words.’ “

I’m somewhat embarrassed to write so long a review; this is actually a very short collection. I doubt anyone will read all I’m writing here, but I hope others will read Kaminsky. This really is extraordinary stuff, and I am amazed to discover such an old voice singing such new songs.


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