Review: Birthright

Birthright by Erika Dreifus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m proud to call Erika a friend, so I can’t pretend to an unbiased reading of this, but I also can’t pretend I don’t admire many of these poems very much.

The central project here is Erika’s exploration of “birthright,” of that which she – and many other contemporary Jews – have inherited from our theological, cultural, and genetic forebears. In multiple ways, she explores how we can recognize what those named and unnamed ancestors have left for us. She doesn’t seize; instead, she reaches out gingerly. She doesn’t claim to own; she suggests instead that what we have today others will have in their turn.

Much of that project becomes clear in the opening poems (where some of my favorites are) but it also slowly becomes clear that the project is larger than simply understanding herself as a contemporary Jew. Yes, that’s central, but one moving element of this work is that Erika insists that all of what she experiences is part of her “birthright.” That’s true whether the subject is what it means to buy haircare products, to have a warm interaction with an old crush on Facebook, to deal with surgery for fibroid growths (that one with the powerful title, “Kaddish for My Uterus”), to acknowledge the mixed feelings of seeing armed security at her niece’s religious school, or to imagine various Biblical stories in the fresh light of the 21st Century.

There is in all that, a kind of implicit prayer. If you read the translation of Jewish services, it might surprise you to see how little we ask of the divine. I associate Christian prayer (perhaps wrongly) with petitioning, with praying for some particular blessing or outcome.

Jewish prayers, in contrast, are about gratitude, about acknowledging the power of the divine and praising it. With the exception of our prayer for healing, we spend our worship working to be appropriately grateful for existence itself.

That, I think is Erika’s project here. She names her experiences, her joys, and her disappointments, owning her gratitude for the life she’s been given.

In that light, my favorite of these may be “This Woman’s Prayer,” which begins:

Blessed be the One
who made me.
Yes, the One might have aimed higher:
made me smarter, nicer,
more loving, more generous.
But the One could also have done far less:
given me limitations and burdens
and weaknesses that might have broken me.

Another of the strongest ones here deals with that same owning of what is over what might have been even better. While a number of these grapple directly with the politics of Israel, my favorite is “Sisters, or Double Chai,” which concludes:

Like my younger sister,
Israel shares my blood.
I decided to keep any quarrels quiet,
because those outside the family
do not love her as a sister can
and does.

In perhaps the same vein, and opening the entire collection, comes “Puntlichkeit,” a poem in which Erika considers her family’s habit of being on time, perhaps too much so, to all events. It’s a funny series of reflections, conjuring awkward early arrivals, but it concludes with the revelation that it was just such a compulsion to be early – or some related impulse – that caused her grandparents to leave Germany while it was still possible for Jews to do so. It’s a haunting story, and the gratitude in it still registers even as the tone becomes dramatically more serious.

I have to include one more, the title poem, as a way of reflecting one what I’d sum up as Erika’s praise of a broken world. As she writes in “Birthright”:

Eyesight dimmed, aged Isaac
could nonetheless discern
the sound of one twin’s voice
from the other’s
and detect the scent
of each from his garments;

alas, how the story
might have shifted
could the patriarch have distinguished
Esau’s skin from a goat’s.

What a pleasure to be able to hear the work Erika is doing as she reflects on the wide range of the birthright that she experiences, and that she has shared. There is a lot to be grateful for in this world, and it doesn’t diminish our praise when we see the limits of that which we have been granted.


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