Friday, April 28, 2006
Jan Steckel "Underwater Hospital"
Had the good fortune yesterday to listen to a radio interview with Jan Steckel, a remarkable poet whose work, early in her career, appeared in Ink Pot and Lit Pot.
(you can find it in the Archives) She was charming, articulate, extremely warm and
interesting to listen to.
It's not surprising how bright she is with educational credentials like:
B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe in English and American Literature with an Emphasis on Creative Writing, summa cum laude, 1983
She has just published a new chapbook called "Underwater Hospital," published by Zeitgeist Press. What makes Jan so interesting is that she was a physician as well as serving in the Peace Corps, so she has a multitude of ideas about social reform. In addition she admits to being bi-sexual for she also has strong opinions about sexual choices in this society, and supports gay and lesbian rights and literature. Her work is a strong and uncomprisingly pointed viewpoint of what doesn't work in the world besides being astonishingly beautiful in its language and insights.
Jan won Second Place for Poetry in The Pedestal Magazine's 2005 Pedestal Readers' Awards with the following poem which is a nice example of her work. When I receive her new chapbook, I shall likely post more on these pages, as some that she read on the radio out of the book blew me away.
The Maiden Aunts
My grandmother was alive again,
the one who said to me on her deathbed,
“You must write!" and
“Don’t waste your life cooking, honey;
it’s all over in ten minutes."
She told me again
about her rich Latvian aunts
who visited her in the squalor
of the Lower East Side.
Dressed in black, the maiden aunts
bent and kissed her eight-year-old head
saying, “Never forget, Selma,
you are one of the hecher menschen."
What they meant was,
You come from a line of ten chief rabbis
of the city of Riga.
Your grandfather wrote a treatise on Maimonides
that is in the Library of Congress.
Your family, the Widow Romm and Sons,
is the largest publisher of Yiddish books
in Eastern Europe. They own the lumber mills
that make the paper that makes the books.
Though you live in poverty here,
you are part of a civilization.
They kissed my grandmother’s head
and sailed back to Europe.
For two decades, they wrote monthly to their faraway niece.
My grandmother sailed on a steamer to California
and joined the Anti-Fascist League,
but she couldn’t make her gentile neighbors understand
what was happening in Europe.
She remembered the day the letters stopped.
After the war, she learned
that all the Romms in Europe,
every last one,
had perished in the concentration camp
outside of Riga.
She and her sister
were the only ones left.
She dreamed of the last Rabbi of Riga
turning from the door of the gas chamber,
as he shepherded his congregation in.
Beyond him, her two old-maid aunts
clutched each other’s hands
and stared at her past the Rabbi’s shoulder,
whispering “Never forget, Selma."
*hecher menschen: Yiddish, higher people, gentlewomen.
Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician. Her short stories, poems, and nonfiction pieces have appeared in such publications as Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Margin, and Lodestar Quarterly. Her work has won awards and been widely reprinted and anthologized. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic and cared for Spanish-speaking families in California at a county hospital and at a large HMO. In 2001 she left the practice of medicine to write full-time. She is currently working on a collection of interrelated short stories set in the Dominican Republic. Several of the pieces in the manuscript have appeared in print, including “The Wild Boar Baby," which was recently nominated by So to Speak for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital is expected from Zeitgeist Press in April of 2006. For more information, visit www.jansteckel.com
You can order her chapbook from her website or from Zeitgeist-Press.com. You can't
go wrong.
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