Dear Yiddish

DEAR YIDDISH is a startlingly brave and candid rendering of life in the shadow of death. "Sex is over and death soon to come." The beauty of the language and perceptions make 'maturity' one with 'excellence.' Or, as Yeats put it, "Bodily decrepitude is wisdom." It is a celebration of the poet's Jewish heritage, of the roots of his love of language, of the whole of his life in a nutshell, of the drop on a nostril that is the last moment of life, the last line of a poem. Like Donne in his shroud, in "Getting Ready," Fein lists the famous writers and the Yiddish poets and his dearest friends and loved ones and says if they can die, or know that they soon will die, "Why can't I, with my poems, get ready to die?" He will live forever in these poems. The book is an affirmation of the power of poems to keep us alive.