 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. I'm here with Arita Cliffvish, luminary in the women's movement, in the political scene, and of course, in the landscape of contemporary poetry. We're here to celebrate the release of her collection, her birth and later years, new and collected poems, 1971 to 2021, but we're going to talk about other things as well. So let me give you a quick biography for those of you who don't know. Irina is a lesbian poet, essayist, political activist, Yiddishist, and a practicing secular Jew. Born in 1941 in the Warsaw ghetto, she spent the war in a Polish orphanage and in hiding with her mother until liberation. They immigrated to Sweden in 1949 to the U.S., settling in the Bronx among Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors who were active Jewish labor bundists, which means socialists in your parentheses here. In interwar Poland, Cliffvish attended New York City public schools, Orchman Circle, Yiddish Shulas, and earned her BA at the City College of New York and her MA and PhD at the University of Chicago. For 10 years, she taught college courses at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She recently retired after 11 years of teaching Jewish women's studies at Barnard College. Welcome, Irina. Thank you so much for having me. Well, it's a delight. And I thought we'd depart from the agenda of many of your current interviews and talk a little bit about your prose. But before we do that, let me ask you about the reception of the book. You've been on a book tour, you've been doing readings all over the place. Well, I've been actually at, well, it's an interesting term, the tour. I don't know. When you zoom a lot, I don't know. Touring, even though you're all over the place, because I haven't done, I've done very few. I'm immunocompromised, so I've done few in-person things. I've done some, a little bit of classroom I can do, but I haven't been able to travel. So I've done a lot of zooms around the country. I have to say I'm very pleased with the reception. I mean, people have been very welcoming. You know, and it's been recognized, the book was recognized by the Jewish Book Council. It was a finalist in poetry, and it got the Audre Lorde Award in lesbian poetry from the publishing triangle. So I can't, I've got nothing to complain about, which is unusual for me. I'm a big fetcher. So, but, so I think, I mean, and the book is going to come out in paperback. I'm thinking, it's in January scheduled to be in paperback. Wonderful. Yeah, so. It's a wonderful collection. Thank you so much. The poem, Stay With You, you know, after you go after one attends a reading on Zoom, the poem, Circulating Your Consciousness, it's really. Thank you so much. It's a really fine, rich work, but let's switch gears now, if we could. And I'd like to talk. I'm a real fan of the women in print movement and to be autobiographical. I was a member of the collective of the Second Wave between 1980 and 1982. And so I was able to participate. I was living in Boston, which was one of the hubs, New York. Yeah. But you, illustriously, were a co-founder of the journal Conditions. So I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about how you happened to found that journal and its influence on your writing. Well, this is a sort of a story of the personal and the mixture of the personal and the political. I didn't come out until I was until I was 33. I came out like 1973, like a few just a few years after Stonewall. And I had this fantasy of being a poet by the sea. And I always want to go to the ocean. I didn't know how to drive, but I taught, I learned how to drive. I was, I had just been axed by Long Island University. I was a budgetary cut and I was collecting unemployment for a year. And I decided I was going to go to the ocean and be a poet. And I had just had a brief affair for the first time with a woman. And I was trying to figure out if I was a poet and if I was a lesbian, and what was I. And I went out to Montauk. And this is really the beginning of conditions because what happened was that I decided in Montauk that I really was a lesbian. I came to that final conclusion. I was writing a lot of poetry and I bumped into a friend of mine who had come out in a group therapy group that I had been in ahead of me. So I was following Kathy and Kathy introduced me to a couple. She said, you should know this lesbian couple. Living in, they were outside of Amaganset. I'm not quite sure where. But anyway, the couple turned out to be the future, Blanche Cook and Claire Koss. Of course, they were just a couple at the time to me. And I got introduced to them. And at some point. They said I said I was returning to New York and they said, well, why don't you get in touch? We know someone who's forming a lesbian poetry group. And so I said, sure, I'd like to do that because I was a very secretive poet. I didn't really show my stuff around that much and whatever. But so they introduced me to Joan Larkin. And this was a support group. And in that support group was Jan Klosson. So there was Joan and Jan. And there were we didn't I don't know. We were all dykes, but we called ourselves seven women poets. I don't think we were ready yet to publicize ourselves or whatever. And Jan was getting had gotten involved with Ellie Balkan. This is why I say the personal and the political. And I was involved with this woman with the remassure. And and. And at the time, Joan was thinking of publishing self. We didn't really know what to do with our work, because we knew nobody would publish us. So I don't remember. Joan came up with the idea and was really became her press. But initially what happened was we four of us, Joan, Jan and I published our own individual books of poetry. Mine was period of stress. Joan was hard work and the and Jan's, I believe the first one was after touch. And and Joan and Ellie put together the first version of what ultimately evolved into a much larger volume. Initially was quite small, lesbian poetry. So and we put it all under one imprint. We call it. Joan called it out in our book. So it looked like we had been published by someone. We were all really self published. We paid for each of us paid for our own, made it as expensive, or least expensive as we could. And so that was, you know, that was the beginning. And of course, Joan went on to publish other people. But in the meantime, Jan and Ellie and I and we know I was involved with remassure got together, of course, were fetching and bemoaning the lack of publishing. I mean, I think sinister wisdom was the only thing around at the time for us anyway, immediately. Ellie had been asked by sinister wisdom to they were going to give her every for every issue. They were going to give her a certain amount of space for poetry. She decided she didn't want to do that, that she wanted more control over the whole thing. And we decided to form a magazine. I mean, it was selfish in the sense that that I think a lot of activism is we had our own self interest in mind. We want we needed a place to publish. And so we got together and we did conditions. And that's the long story. I mean, it's very involved in my coming out. I was very, very lucky. In some ways. We were I personally felt so almost ahead of myself in a way that I had plunged into this without really totally realizing all the implications. And we certainly didn't realize how successful the magazine was. I mean, it became very influential. And, you know, when you look at some of the people that it published and, of course, evolved, I mean, I left the collective and the collective expanded and then Jan left and Ellie left, I think. So, I mean, it expanded. It included people like Cheryl Clark and Joel Gomez and Dorothy Allison and lesser known people that work very, very hard on the magazine. And then it became really, really successful. So I think for all of us, I mean, we were all sort of baby dykes many ways, you know, despite our differences in ages. We wouldn't like I say when we when I was in the group with Joan and and Chan, we didn't call ourselves seven lesbian poets. We called ourselves seven women poets. So it was a very the whole thing with conditions and stuff was a big complicated and complex, I think, coming out story. And, of course, because of Blanche, also, we got in touch Blanche, new Audrey Lord from high school. So there was that connection. Ellie was able to contact. Adrienne Rich was coming out, you know, was being very public. And so Ellie nabbed her for two interviews for the first two sessions. And also Ellie asked that Ellie was at an MLA convention where where Barbara Smith was and asked her if she would write something for the magazine. She didn't know what Barbara would do. She wanted her to contribute. And Barbara came up in the first so we had you know, towards a black feminist criticism. I mean, so it was like, what can I say? It was a kind of coming out for all of us at the same time. It was turned into a literary event and a very political one as well. I mean, this was a political both a literary and a political magazine. And I remember the second wave was just an arena of eroticism. People were getting involved with other collective members. They were breaking up. In fact, I met my partner there. Yeah. But it also folded. And this leads me to my next question. How would you describe the publishing scene now? Well, I don't know that I can. Actually, I don't feel like I've been. You know, I've been first of all, I went through a long period where I was very, very involved, sort of personally with caretaking of both my partner, who was sick for many, many years and my elderly mother. I was totally responsible for her. And so I kind of dropped out of everything. I mean, I sort of continued teaching at Barnard, but I was about my only activity. I think, you know, for me, publishing this last collection with Wesleyan has been a very, you know, was very different. I had never published with any kind of mainstream what I would. I mean, a university press is obviously not the main mainstream, but it is part of a sort of academic mainstream. The tribe of Dina, which I co-edited with Melanie K. Hancher was originally was a special double issue of sinister wisdom. And it was and it was later picked up by Beacon Press. That's the closest I've come to sort of dealing with that. Everything else was published by women or lesbian feminist or lesbian presses for me, including even when I wrote the introduction for the Yiddish stories, found treasures. That was published by a Canadian feminist press. You know, I mean, I just feel like that. So this was a very, for me, it entered a different experience. And it's interesting because a lot of the people from that initial sort of sinister wisdom, conditions, hub, if I can call it that, of writers that appeared there, of the lesbian writers, a lot of them have gotten this really wonderful recognition, I think, and have been accepted into a kind of mainstream. I'm going to think about Gloria Anseldura. I mean, just now, as you probably saw the article about Joel Gomez on the on the Guardian, I mean, that's just amazing. Who would who to think, you know, who to think? And so I think it's changed from that point of view. I don't think I'm as up as I probably should be on younger writers. And I don't know really because of because I'm at the stage in my age where I'm sort of at the end of things rather than at the beginning of things. I'm not sure I know really what's how somebody, if I was starting out now, for example, I'm not sure how I would begin, because I don't know how the, you know, the whole internet element, which is so, so dominant in our lives now. I don't know how that would play. You know, what someone does, I think there's much less self consciousness about putting out your own work as it was like we were trying to hide the fact that we were self publishing, because I was considered vanity press, right? And that was the dirtiest words you could say about something. Oh, it's just a vanity press. But now people, you know, they post things on the internet. Everybody just self promotes, kind of. So I'm not sure I don't really have an answer for you. I think it's much more complicated. I think the communities are not as defined. I mean, we had a whole, I mean, the whole imprint movement was backed by distribution, bookstores, newspapers that reviewed the books. You know, it was a very, it was a very enmeshed. It wasn't just books that we produced. We published a book. The book I really distributed in a lot of bookstores across the country. And if I went and I traveled to a city, if I went to Oregon, or if I went somewhere south, I knew what my audience. I mean, even though I didn't know anybody, I knew that everybody was reading off our backs or gay community news. And I knew we knew all knew the same thing. If I walk into a bookstore now, you know, it's very, I mean, there are still a few, obviously, that are like that. But on the whole, they just, you know, when I taught my first Women's Studies course ever in 1979 at Brooklyn College, it was a summer course, it was an introduction to women's studies. We made it up. One of my assignments was to go visit one of the five women bookstores in the city. I mean, there were five women bookstores in 1979 in New York, you know. So I can't really, I can't give advice on this. Well, I think, I don't know if you read Julie Ensar's article in which she talks about the legacy of the women in print movement. But I know Julie and I know how she thinks. I am such a fan. Every time she's pen to paper, I'm searching up. But anyway, she suggests that university presses are kind of taking up picking up the slack and publishing a lot of people. I think that they I think university presses have tapped into a kind of alternative that they weren't. I was really surprised that Wesleyan took me. I mean, I never had any kind of expectation like that. Julie was the one actually who sort of helped me navigate that. And I think she's right. I think they are picking up on that as sort of as looking towards that. But whether that's still a hard beat. I mean, that's I'm sure they get endless, endless manuscripts. And just, you know, a lot of it is just, you know, my introduction. I mean, I consider my whole career kind of dependent on the fact that I bumped into Blanche Cook and Claire Koss and in patches one night at, you know, when we're in a bar that was in a bar in patches in East Hampton. And we all dance together. And that was the beginning of my career. Well, I have, of course, your collection of essays, dreams of an insomniac. And I opened it to reread it. And there was a beautiful bookmark from New Words, the feminist story in Boston. It was a nostalgic moment. But I'd like to talk about your essays if you don't mind. This is a really stellar collection in my view. And I talk with you at some, at some point, I learned that you're still writing essays. And I was able to interview Cheryl Clark about the special conditions issue of sinister wisdom. And she said, oh, no, essays are too hard. I'm just going to write poetry. Are you still writing essays? And do you have the same experience? One thing that's curious, I think, is that you ask advice about essays, but not about poetry. You don't consult a community. I think that's really interesting. Would you mind talking about that? Yeah, well, I mean, Mike, you know, I turn to poetry. I have this sort of, sort of a little bit of a complicated linguistic background because I was born during the war and I spoke my first language. My mother tongue was Polish and and it remained my mother tongue literally talking to my mother. That's the language I continue talking to my mother and to wait deep into my teens, if not even later. Now, I grew up in a community. I mean, right after I said, I never heard Yiddish until right after the war, of course, because if you were passing, you weren't speaking Yiddish. So I started hearing Yiddish in Poland right after the war. And then when we moved to Sweden, we lived in a kind of communal house and people mixed Yiddish and Polish, but I went to Swedish schools. So I learned Swedish. I was fluent in Swedish and writing, reading and speaking. I had Swedish friends. And then we came to the States. And that was a very big break for me because I was really very happy in Sweden. I felt very safe and comfortable. And in New York, I became an immigrant and it was a very tough experience for me. Even though it was a Jewish neighborhood, I was sort of the Greenhorn and I had a really hard time with language, with English. I mean, it was my worst subject in high school. They threw me out of honors English when I was in every other honors class. I had to talk my way back into it when I became interested in literature. So poetry became my ex. I really had no language because Polish didn't develop, you know, I never it was my mother. It's what I'm not talked about with my mother. It wasn't intellectual. I didn't read it. I couldn't write it. And Yiddish was newly acquired in a certain way, even though I understood. I don't understood Yiddish from from a very young age. I didn't speak it, but I went to a shola and then English became like a problem. And I was constantly failing these essays with grammar. And so I turned to poetry as a way of sort of trying to find a way of expressing myself because I couldn't do it. So writing essays were always was always associated with to me with high school and even in college when I majored and I got a PhD in English literature, I had tremendous problems with American with English grammar. And so writing essays was like the last thing on my mind. I was interested in perfecting my poetry. And one of the things about writing poetry was that I felt that nobody could tell me anything that was wrong. You know, I didn't want to see that wrong red pencil anywhere. And so I I it took me a long, long time to start writing essays and to have the nerve. And I wrote my first essay actually for conditions about not having a children. That was my first essay that I ever wrote. And it was a struggle. And it has remained a struggle. I think I'm more comfortable right now than I've ever been with prose. And in many ways, prose has seduced me. I mean, I like it. I feel really comfortable in it. I do ask for feedback on essays. I mean, I feel I'm dealing with ideas. I want to be sure I'm expressing them well or I'm arguing well or maybe I'm wrong about something. Poetry is a different bag. I'm willing to take if it's not good, OK. But I don't want anybody telling me how to write poems or how to change them. So, yeah, I'm interested. I mean, there are and also I became interested, you know, in the 90s. I became really interested both in Yiddish and then the whole Israeli Palestinian issue came up and my, you know, people were looking to me. It was not something I really initiated. People were looking to me. I mean, they probably because I was a child survivor and they saw with that kind of background, it's not a credential. I mean, I've always said that to people. It doesn't predict what your politics is going to be. You know, it just doesn't. But people did look to me, I mean, to sort of try to articulate certain things. So I worked on it and that's how I, you know, I've since since that book of essays, I've accumulated more essays, actually. And I'm interested in in doing some kind of a couple of things still that I feel sort of unfinished that I don't want to say because I don't want people asking any questions about. Well, are there particular people you go to? Or does it depend on the subject matter? I have to say this is really painful. I mean, the people I went to were Minnie Bruce, Ilana Dyke woman. I learned Meredith tax. I don't know, you know, Meredith's work is the three of the closest friends. And the three of them have died like in the last year and a half. I mean, literally, those are the people, you know, that over the years that I I mean, Ilana certainly and Meredith for a long time. So, yeah, I mean, I other writers or other personal friends than I have. I run stuff by. Julie's become a friend and I trust her. And so I feel comfortable asking her. It's I'm not I'm not as I'm not as gun shy about about essay writing. I just poetry. I just I'm willing to take my lumps of people don't like it. Fine. I don't I don't want I don't want to have to. I'm always kind of I have to say I'm always kind of amazed because I do workshops and I always tell the workshop that the aim of the workshop for me is to get them to make their own decisions. I always say, don't, you know, in a group, one person will say, I like that line. Another person will say, cut that line, you know, you're going to have to decide what do you want to know who you're going to listen to. In your. Amy Beck writes the introduction to your essay collection. And she said, when when you were asked to contribute to the excellent anthology, nice Jewish girls, which was groundbreaking and came out in nineteen eighty two that you initially were reluctant to because you felt it would fragment your identity. I have the quotation I can read to you. But they're rich. Remind me what I said. Sure. Happy to. I write as much out of a Jewish consciousness as I do out of as I do out of a lesbian feminist consciousness. They are both always there, no matter what the topic I might be working on. They are embedded in my writing, totally embedded and enmeshed to the point that they are not necessarily distinguishable as discrete elements. They merge and bleed and blur for in many ways they are the same alienated, threatened, un-American, defiant to me, they are ever present. Yeah. But then you change your mind. Well, you know, it's interesting because I think what happened was, I mean, I totally believe what I said, I still believe that. I mean, the whole issue of what's a Jewish piece and what's not a Jewish piece, what's a lesbian piece, what's not a lesbian piece. I think that's true. I think what I didn't really take in or that I mean, I don't remember this. I'm just I'm guessing at what was in my head. I mean, you have to remember this is like 1982. What is it 50 years ago? So I really I remember that I said, no, I don't want to do this. I'm not interested in doing this. I think what I skipped and what I finally got to was that in a way, that's not even the question she was asking me that what was really needed was a political there was a political issue here. There was a social issue here. There was the issue of homophobia in the Jewish community. What do you what do lesbians do? And that has almost nothing to do with the writing in a way, you know, that those are two like separate topics, you know, the way I see it right now. And it took me a while to realize, I think that I didn't realize that when she first called that what was being really asked was a political issue about also, you know, how the Jewish community functions. Where do lesbians go? Never mind your writing, never mind what you write, you know. So I think I think that was part of the reaction that there was something that I was that I thought she was asking me to define something about my own writing. And in fact, she wasn't. I think she was talking about something totally different and that it took me a while to recognize that that political dimension I don't know how long that was, whether it was days or weeks. So I remember she probably remembers it better. Well, you have four entries in that collection. Yeah, I mean, well, you know, the collection changed because they've got there was a different edition. That didn't it was the first edition was not what the final edition was. One of the things that happened was that Israel came into the picture and I had started writing about Israel and that was later. I mean, that was a later. Those were later pieces, but it happened. I mean, we were nice Jewish girls came out at the same time that Israel had. And there was the invasion of Lebanon and there was the Saab, Sabra and Shatila massacres. And just when those headlines were running, we were we were trying to promote nice Jewish girls, which was very uncomfortable. It was a really uncomfortable moment for us. And and we had had this small group, the Vildahias, which was this political group that was trying to address. And every was in that group was part of that. But that was already when I had already accepted sort of being in that in that kind of category. I don't know what to what to call it. So it was a very different. I mean, it was a time when we were both thinking about our identity, but also dealing with the political, you know, the sort of what was happening around Israel for the first time. I grew up in a very, I wouldn't say I mean, the bond, the Jewish labor bond was in the between the war was anti Zionist, and it fought very very fiercely against it was against any nationalism. That was the issue, basically. And they had a there was a Yiddish term called doikite, which means here in us and meant that Jews should be able to be Jews wherever they were. They didn't need to be in a special place. And that's what I grew up with. And so Israel was never very much in my consciousness. And suddenly, and I was quite ignorant, actually, about the history because it just wasn't I was not interested in it. But. And political, I mean, when you start reading the paper, you become more conscious and all of us had to start dealing if infiltrated into the movement. And there was that book, Yours in Struggle, which Ellie Bulkin and Minnie Bruce and Barbara Smith put together. And that was also a part of the anti Semitism that was being conflated with anti Zionism. And it was very complex, you know, complicated. So I felt compelled to write about that. And that was the second edition of nice Jewish schools included some of them. Well, that was going to be my question. How did you become involved in the struggle of the Palestinians? Well, I think we all I mean, we were all dragged. I mean, we would I didn't want to. I mean, you know, I it's not what I really wanted to do with my life. And and I just couldn't ignore it. I mean, it was there in the movement. We had to deal with it. And I became aware. I mean, in many ways, I identified with the Palestinians. I mean, I understood what it meant to be out of control and be controlled by other people. And and I did not like the policies. I did not like I didn't like nationalism. I didn't I mean, I basically believed in a one state solution. Though I have to say, I didn't advertise that. I think if I advertise that, I wouldn't been able to talk in the Jewish community at all. And so, you know, when you think back to 40 years, I mean, think how difficult it is now to talk about Israel, it was a hundred times more difficult 40 years ago. I mean, 40 years ago, you weren't even allowed to use the word Palestinian or PLO or anything. And it accelerated. I mean, the other thing that happened was because of feminism. I found out about women in black. A friend of mine came back from Israel in those in the late nineteen eighty seven when the first into father started. Um, she came little moored. We we memorialize her and and and a tribe of Dina came back and said, you know, there's these women who are standing and against the occupation. This was during the into father and the way the government was responding to the into father. Of course, we didn't know it at the time. They were practically all dykes. I mean, it was always always so. And she said, you know, and I said, well, we should be supporting them. And I talked to Grace Paley and Claire Kinberg. And we created the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation. And so, I mean, that was a response to feminists working and melon before that, Melanie and I, before the tribe of Dina was published, Melanie and I made a point of going to Israel to connect with left wing feminists and dykes. And we did and we reflected that in the tribe of Dina, which came out in eighty six. And that was, you know, that was very important because Israel was being presented as totally monolithic. I think it was one of the great failures of the American left that it didn't recognize any and he didn't support the left in Israel at all. And we we wanted to highlight some of these people who were struggling even before the interfaater and who were against the occupation. So, you know, you can't ignore these things. You want to ignore them, but they they come at you and you've got to deal with them. Well, you were part of a vigil every day. Is that a question? We we've been we did what women in black did, but we did it differently because in Israel, they had a very silent vigil. I mean, in Israel, they were screaming at each other. So they thought having just and they had one sign die like a bush, which means and the occupation that that was it. And people hurled the worst stuff at them. Very sexual Arab whores. I mean, that kind of stuff. We had the opposite. We were in the United States. We were should the community was shut down about talking about Israel. So we encouraged we didn't have silent vigil. We wanted to engage with people to talk to them. But we had the same signs, you know, die like a bush. And we talked about women in black and we were able to. Marcia Friedman helped us and we were able to bring some speakers. We got speakers on. Israeli Jews and Palestinians to go women to go on tour in the United States to talk about reconciliation and possible visions of the future. So I think and we put out a newsletter and there were a lot of groups. We didn't we're not interested in forming a national organization. We wanted people to do their local thing, which we had a newsletter, which we just told everybody where everybody was meeting, you know, like, tell us where you're meeting. We'll publish it and we'll let other people know if they're visiting the city. And that happened. People would go somewhere. They go to St. Louis and they'd know that on Friday or Thursday, there's a group of women standing at such and such a corner and protesting. So it was one of the more successful things that I feel that I did that I was involved with and it picked up. I mean, a lot of people and a lot of them became women in black. We wanted we wanted to be emphasized that we were Jews opposing this policy and that it was important to say that other people didn't. I mean, other women's groups didn't. I mean, so they had all they had the Anna Hannah Aaron peace patrol. There was all kinds of names of groups. And a lot of them were decided to call themselves also women in black. You know, you mentioned Navy Shalom in one of your essays. I was able to visit it when I was what an intentional community. It was really there is a lot of groups like that in Israel. Now there's schools, their communities, there are tons of them. There's a lot of people really longing for an end to this. When one of the worst things I mean, that this new government has done, there's a group and I apologize. I can't remember the name now. It's about it's about families, both Palestinian and Jewish that have come together, all of whom have lost somebody in the struggle, you know, and they have they have representatives that go around to schools to talk to young people about this. And the government has now said that they can't go into high schools because the life of it amounts to the life of somebody dying for Israel is much more important than somebody who is rebelling or whatever. They, you know, but there are lots of groups like this. It's not, you know, there's some of them are small, but there are tons of them. And that's they're being crushed. I mean, it's it's very, very depressing. But I wish I could say something optimistic, but though that, you know, the protests in Israel are going ongoing all the time now. We just don't hear about it anymore. Exactly. And I was just thinking, you know, National Mainstream News does not cover it. Only Amy Goodman has seemed to be in democracy now. Seems to. Yeah, they just totally stopped. It's boring because it's the same. You know, it's not. But going, they're ongoing. I mean, you know, well, let's return, if we could, to the role of the artist. And I have one of your a quotation that I'd like to read back from you, if you don't mind, for more of your essence. The afternoon this afternoon, plan to finish some poems and to work on my Yiddish translations. But Deborah, the editor at Beacon, called about the tribe of Dina. She added that the deadline for the Israeli peace for nice Jewish girls is February 1st. I panicked. Israel has taken over my life. One more speech, one more essay, one more press release, another meeting, another rally to prepare for my Yiddish work in poetry got postponed again. But you've been able to maintain that balance. I don't know if I have actually. I mean, I was kind of fetching there. I mean, it's a common dilemma, though. It's so true. I mean, you have to you do have to make decisions. I mean, if I mean, many Bruce and I used to talk about that actually a lot. And I think it's hard. I mean, I do I do think that. You know that we have an obligation to do what's needed to be done. And if we have certain skills to give, then we give them and we use them. We don't let them, you know. So I think I mean, and of course, it's all political work is not about organizing the next protest or giving a speech. Some of the work is actually poetry and some of the work is actually translation, you know, or even scholarship or even scholarship. I mean, people have to I think that kind of work. I think, you know, we're experiencing this now. There's so many problems to be addressed right now. I mean, they're just coming at us. It's like whack-a-mole. You know, I mean, it's just popping up. You do you just do a little bit and something else pops up. And but I think it's also important to to remember the arts in a way because I think they are political, whether they address a political issue or not. I mean, they're very necessary. They're kind of a reminder of normalcy of and they're also a reminder of what we feel, that we shouldn't deaden ourselves, that we should remember, you know, and to be engaged in a in a kind of emotional way, not just mechanically, because we're obliged to do certain things, but to be really passionate about what we're doing. So I think I mean, I think when I wrote that, I was felt feeling pretty weary. And I think a lot of us do have different polls, but I don't think that's really any different than, you know, a mother having three kids and having to take care of them and deciding she can only write at one o'clock in the morning, you know. So in some ways, I think we're all kind of on the edge of of sort of doing kind of both. There are very few people I think it's interesting. I mean, a lot of people complain about movie stars getting involved in issues. I think it's good. I think it's good. I think if they can bring publicity of their name to something that people don't want to pay attention to, I think it's good. And I think artists can do that, too, with their work. So I think we do, you know, we have different. I'm I'm at an age where I feel time pressure in a very different way than I did. I don't complain about other things, but I complain. I wish I wasn't eighty two. I wish I was seventy two right now, you know. You know, I turned seventy. I don't know about you, but when I turned seventy, I told a friend of mine. I think this age business is getting serious. So so, I mean, there's that kind of, you know, there's that also, you know, there's time and the time is one of the most precious things. And we don't know we it gets lopped up and chopped up for all different kinds of reasons. And I certainly look at it differently than I even did then. I mean, when I wrote that, I mean, I wish I was back there and think you've got plenty of time. Don't worry about it so much. Let me ask you, what are your current projects? Oh, you can't ask me that. No, no, I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why, because whenever I when I've learned that when I tell people what I'm working on, they come back to me and then they say, well, have you finished it? Where are you at? What are you doing? When is it? When am I going to see it? I don't like the pressure. I mean, I have enough pressure within me about it. So I do have some things I'm not totally. I mean, I have the other thing right now, for example, that has nothing that's taking up a lot of my time is I'm trying to get my late partners artwork better known or known period because she's virtually unknown and she left a huge body. She was a painter and she left a huge body of work. And I just spent six weeks with a friend who came from Europe to help me catalog some of Judy's artwork. And I discovered much to I just amazed at how prolific she was. I hadn't even realized because she had squirreled away a lot of work and not in hiding places, but because we didn't have normal kind of places to put stuff. So when we when we moved to certain paintings, we found other things that we didn't even know existed. So like that's that's taken up. That was like 100 percent of my time for six weeks. And we're not done with it because we want to do some we want to create certain things around her work and I'm working on it. So that's taking up an enormous amount of time. And you're teaching a Yiddish course. Is that right? No, I'm teaching a translation course. I'm going to start in October. I'm going to start a translation. I love translation, so I'm I'm eager to do it. And so I don't know, it keeps me sharp a little bit. I don't absolutely have to do it, but I chose to do it. So that's the thing of the beauty of retirement, you know, you don't have to do it. You choose it. And so right. And this is a lot of work, actually, because I like to create these readers. So and it's a 10 week course, so it's going to be a hefty reader. And I have to do that in the next few weeks also. Well, we're getting to the end of our conversation, unfortunately. We could talk forever, but let me ask you, if you would be kind enough to things, would you give us a concluding of last words for the audience? And then we'd like to end with one of your wonderful poems, The Shared. OK, well, the only thing I have to ask that I would add that I think is really, really important is to try to remain engaged. I mean, it's very difficult because it's so depressing and it does make you want to just withdraw completely. I'm someone who's immunocompromised, so I can't I don't go to a lot of indoor places or even marches, make me nervous. But you try to you try to be in there somewhere in whatever way you can. Somebody asked me once about tactics, and I just had no answer. But the only answer I really have is engagement. You have to find your way of how to be engaged so that you feel like you're doing something because nothing is really what I don't. I'm a real believer that nothing is wasted. It makes its mark in some way. And you never you never really know. How you how you affect things. I mean, you really don't. You don't know who you influence. You don't know who's going to change how they behave in certain ways because of something you said or did and I mean in print. I mean, like in personal contact. So that's my that's my if I have any wisdom at all. That's my final word is is definitely some form of engagement. And the poem. OK, this is the dedication to a long autobiographical story and it's called by Shat, which is a Yiddish word that means predestined and or inevitable, and I always it's used very often. It was used very often when you couldn't explain why something happened. You would just say by shared that somewhere in the universe, whether you believe in a God or goddesses or electrons or whatever. This made it happen. It's it was interesting because by shared was originally the whole poem, which is about basically about me as an immigrant Jew, both born in Poland and traces me. I had as four sections comes to the United States and tries to figure. I try to figure out where I belong in the society was originally published in Sinister Wisdom, when when Michelle Cliff and Adrian Rich were the editors and they published the whole thing, which was like amazing to me. And but at the time that when they published it in 82 when after they published it, what I'm going to read is the dedication, which has no hint of the Holocaust in it. I got numerous requests for it to be read at memorials for for gay men who had died of AIDS, which was really interesting. They found that it was it was appropriate for that. So I thought I wanted to just give that as a background because it was really published in a lesbian magazine and gay men responded to it. So this is called Basiat and it's two dedications. These words are dedicated to those who died. These words are dedicated to those who died because they had no love and felt alone in the world because they were afraid to be alone and tried to stick it out because they could not ask because they were shunned because they were sick and their bodies could not resist the disease because they played it safe because they had no connections because they had no faith because they felt they did not belong and wanted to die. These words are dedicated to those who died because they were loners and liked it because they acquired friends and drew others to them because they took risks because they were stubborn and refused to give up because they asked for too much. These words are dedicated to those who died because a card was lost and a number was skipped because a bed was denied because a place was filled and no other place was left. These words are dedicated to those who died because someone did not follow through because someone was overworked and forgot because someone left everything to God because someone was late because someone did not arrive at all because someone told them to wait and they just couldn't any longer. These words are dedicated to those who died because death is a punishment, because death is a reward, because death is the final rest, because death is eternal rage. These words are dedicated to those who died or shared. These words are dedicated to those who survived. These words are dedicated to those who survived because their second grade teacher gave them books because they did not draw attention to themselves and got lost in the shuffle because they knew someone who knew someone else who could help them and bumped into them on a corner on a Thursday afternoon because they played it safe because they were lucky. These words are dedicated to those who survived because they knew how to cut corners because they drew attention to themselves and always got picked because they took risks because they had no principles and were hard. These words are dedicated to those who survived because they refused to give up and defied statistics because they had faith and trusted in God because they expected the worst and were always prepared because they were angry, because they could ask, because they mooched off others and saved their strength because they endured humiliation, because they turned the other cheek because they looked the other way. These words are dedicated to those who survived because life is a wilderness and they were savage because life is an awakening and they were alert because life is a flowering and they blossomed because life is a struggle and they struggled. Because life is a gift and they were free to accept it. These words are dedicated to those who survived but shat. I read in a clutch fish. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, Anne. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us. And until next time remember resist.