Jane Saginaw‘s Not I is a terrific book. An extraordinary book. Not your typical post-Holocaust book. Using a structure like Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 American masterpiece Spoon River Anthology, Saginaw gives us the voices of thirty European Jewish women, full of life and vivacity, telling bits of their stories lifted from the past–with lyric beauty, authenticity, even occasional comedy. Their dates tell us that some are gone; some are still alive at the time of publication. The poet speaks for them. One says, “I had been raised with two maids and a cook.” One says, “I was somersaults and jacks./ In the morning I practiced scales.” One was a partisan, another a plumber taught by a grandfather. One takes the form of a page of Talmud. Several recall the camps. One describes dancing on her first night in Poland, with her head shaved and the numbers on her arm burning, for a “metal-faced” man whom we understand to be Josef Mengele. The figures in this book, including the author writing autobiographically, are alive as you and me. They ask to be heard, seen, known, recognized, remembered.
–Alicia Ostriker, author of The Holy and Broken Bliss
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“Not I brings to life the fully-rounded experience of women whose lives occupy a corner of Jane Saginaw’s own inner being. With deftly rendered detail of memory, sensory experience and emotion, she invites her reader to be, for a moment, not I but you, and through that, you become part of another and of her. You will be engaged, transported and transformed by these powerful poems.”
–Alan Morinis, Founder, The Mussar Institute
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“In this powerful and deeply original poetry collection, Jane Saginaw gives voice to women whose lives, losses, and inner worlds continue to reverberate across generations. This striking collection connects women not only to one another, but also to the reader, and to the enduring contemporary relevance of Holocaust memory. With vivid, contemplative language and innovative form, these poems move between tenderness and terror, music and death, daily life and unimaginable rupture. In doing so, they capture not only the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also the fragile beauty of the ordinary worlds that preceded, endured, and echoed beyond it. Moving across histories, geographies, and generations—from Monastir to Budapest to Warsaw, and into Saginaw’s own coming-of-age as a young Jewish girl in the 1970s and beyond—these poems illuminate the interconnectedness of life, pain, resilience, and remembrance. These poems are not only acts of remembrance but acts of intimate witnessing, allowing often forgotten women to speak again, while also reflecting the poet’s own journey. This is a powerful, original, and deeply affecting collection. Saginaw’s poems invite the reader into an intimate encounter with the women at their center, allowing their voices to linger long after the page is turned. This is a haunting, innovative, and unforgettable collection.”
–Sarah Valente, Newman Director, Wasserman Jewish Studies Center Baruch College, City University of New York
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This stunning volume of poetry tells the lives of women who survived (with the exception of Ettie Hillsum) the Shoah. Some were unknown, such as Charlotte Muller, trained as a plumber by her grandfather, and some achieved notoriety, such as Natalia Ginzburg or Nelly Sacks. But all of them found the will to make a life after the Shoah. In stunning acts of imagination, Saginaw more than tells these stories. She invokes these lives. Cautiously she asks of these women, “How will you/trust me?” as if, only with their permission, can this poet bring their lives forward. We glean a bit of the poet’s own story. During an echocardiogram she asks, “Has circulating sorrow/finally broken my heart?” Yes, of course, and let ours be broken, too. “Maybe the songbirds cried,” she conjectures knowing that this is not a maybe. “Live well, Nelly Sachs,” she concludes one poem. In these pages, all these heroines live.
–Owen Lewis, author of A Prayer of Six Wings
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In Not I‘s opening poem, Saginaw implies that her American life renders her ill equipped to speak of the Shoah. Yet, in the tender persona poems that follow, Saginaw provides intimate and deeply moving vignettes depicting the lives of a handful of female survivors. Along the way, this wise poet skillfully weaves in her own rich story of a very different kind of survival across the ocean.
–Yehoshua November
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