Laughing in Yiddish

by Jamie Wendt

(Broadstone Books, 2025) 

Reviewed by Rebecca Ellis

Laughing in Yiddish, the second poetry collection by Jamie Wendt, brings an entire world of immigrant history vividly to life. Wendt uses sure-footed lyricism and deeply evocative imagery to tell the story of Jews living in a vibrant Russian shtetl, enduring pogroms and massacres and finally escaping to a new life in Chicago. She gives us, generously, the very real stories of street peddlers, grandparents, and great-grandparents, the sounds of early Chicago, the urban renewal that remade Chicago, and through it all the people finding strength through tradition and memory to make a new life after loss.  

Wendt uses a variety of formal and informal poetic forms to carry contemporary and historical voices, threading together the present and its past. The poems take risks, using ekphrastic poems, ghazals, pantoums, an ode, and even a triolet to build a nuanced and compelling history. They navigate that history from women working in a cigarette factory or at a spinning wheel, to the pogroms and massacres that the poet’s own ancestors survived in Lithuania, to a contemporary mother interrogating the past in order to build a world for her children. 

The opening poem in this collection, “The Guests,” brings ancestors into the present, giving them like a gift to her children, moving simultaneously “toward the past and into the present” within the context of the Jewish celebration of Sukkot. The poem sets the stage for the entire book, everything framed in preserving people and tradition, and doing it in a frame of richly rendered and memorable poetry.

In the poem that gives the book its title, “Laughing in Yiddish,” the difficulty of leaving one place and going to another, without losing the past, is seen through the eyes of a recent immigrant:

    Other women trained themselves not to follow 

    Lot’s wife’s gaze, not to look back at destruction.

    Why witness the mass of corpses again

    and the remains of a lost world? I tried leaving behind 

    the tall wooden shul, tried not to look back at burning cypress.

    I tried laughing in Yiddish in Chicago.

She gives equally convincing voice to the city itself as it changes under her feet. In “The Eisenhower Expressway Speaks, 1951” the highway tells its own story of coming to life, and how it remakes the city:

    Boys wrestle in the pit

    of me, a playlot 

    after their playground is torn down. 

    Journalists call them morons,

    vandals, and hoodlums, but I like

    their company,…

    After summer storms,

    I turn into a brown river.

    Boys bring rafts,

    float through my stalled construction

    like a vacation cruise. 

After that initial phase of construction, witnessed by the boys, the city, and again the boys, all feel the impact. The moving of a cemetery to make way for the highway is told in visceral, unforgettable detail, even to the highway’s final point of rest:

    The Near West Side sweeps 

    its sidewalks free of otherness

    for me. Free of poor immigrants

    and exiled refugees

    who move North or farther West

    when I intrude, slam the landscape,

    so deafening, so white handed.

    As crews shovel, they excavate and lift

    dead bodies from under my skin.

    I pause patiently, partly severed

    as a cemetery relocates 

    for me. Then workers lie me back down, 

    smooth me out for miles

    with shattered family fortunes 

    directed elsewhere. 

    After the next storm,

    I cough up bones 

    and the boys play

    fetch like dogs. 

The historical depth and range of these poems is riveting. As the woman narrator in “Laughing in Yiddish” shows, the past and present exist in the same layer, informing each other. Personal histories that have been lost, or only partially told, or suppressed are brought into the present with precise language and immediacy. 

Form and language reinforce each other—a poem about the emptying of Jews from a Russian village is told from the viewpoint of the children and in the form of a triolet, providing a chilling contrast. In another poem, about a 1903 massacre in Kishinev, the lines are laid down straight, spaced evenly, resolute, just like the person doing the work of lining up the bodies described. Here is the opening of “Someone Had to Line Up the Bodies:" ”someone had to line up the bodies // connect shadow to shoulder to shadow // patterns of devastation for the photographer."

The massacres included in these poems are not just historical backdrop for the people in the poems. They are personal fodder for the poet’s own experience of family and self; the tragedies are interrogated and kept under a light in order to inform the present. The poem “Kuziai Forest, Lithuania, June 29, 1941” begins:

    Where death is 

    quick, there is

    little story. Pit

    by victim shovels.

    Dig your own.

    700 Jews

    facing the firing

    squad, a mass

    grave, easy to miss,

The poem reveals, in a way that reports or even photographs after the fact could not, the simple courageous acts taken to preserve and protect a sense of self.

    far from a forest cry, 

    a ring of shots, 

    tree rings,

    wedding rings

    swallowed 

    when the time came.

And those acts come forward in history to sit with the poet, informing the act of remembering, and of perhaps creating a poem about it all. 

    Sit under a blood

    tree with poems

    on a nice breezy day

    and not even know.

    Not even know how to 

    have a last thought.

Even carrying that heavy history, the poems propel the reader forward. The easy mastery of form shows in the ekphrastic poems (from paintings by Marc Chagall to woodcuts by Todros Geller), the skillful use of repetitive forms such as the pantoum and ghazal and triolet. This sense of craft shows even in the subtle but very precise selection of language. In “Interview with Papa: The Miscarriage,” an intimate re-imagining of a miscarriage, note the word "corse," which carries both the sound and sense of "coarse" and the literal meaning, archaically, of "corpse." This careful tension with craft and language lifts the tragedy within the poem.

    They were not supposed to talk about it.

    No one did. 

    So, I fill in the blanks— 

            In 1961, in the large bathroom 

            in the house her husband built,

            a young blond woman bends  

            over thick corse blood.

            Two toddler girls scratch at the door, Mommy?

            Or maybe the girls play with paper dolls down the hall.

            Maybe no one else is home. 

            Maybe the mail carrier drops letters onto the mat

            while her body cramps, 

            pulses outward. Little

            slippery thing. 

In the final poem, Wendt comes full circle from her opening poem, again tying generations together. Remembering another grandparent, she writes, "I will record your voice here. // I will keep you. Let me tell you a story." And she does. Reading this collection, I felt a little bit like that Chicago expressway under construction, lifted up in order to look—really look—at every unique life that had been in that path, and laid back down, gently, my mind lit up with the histories, and singing with their language and images. 

Rebecca Ellis lives in southern Illinois. Her poems can be found in About Place Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, Bellevue Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx Journal, and Crab Creek Review. She edited Cherry Pie Press, for 10 years publishing poetry chapbooks by Midwestern women poets.

 

Helen of Troy, 1993

by Maria Zoccola

(Scribner, 2025) 

Reviewed by Katherine Indermaur

In Maria Zoccola’s debut collection, Helen of Greek mythological infamy is recast in the humid glow of rural Tennessee. Caught in 1993 between second- and third-wave feminism, this titular Helen of Troy charges in with a caustic, hilarious, and unmistakable voice dynamic enough to drive the entire book. Watching Jurassic Park, she rhapsodizes:

    i was cheering that damn

    lizard on while it chased down all those folks with their

    miserable problems and unhappinesses and inane little 

    cruelties shared over the dinner table like it’s amazing how

    you spent thirty dollars on blue jeans instead of getting 

    the vacuum fixed it stomped them flat like good night like

    sweet dreams and sayonara 

These persona poems encompass the story of a woman reinventing herself through Zoccola’s reinvention of classic myth, reminiscent of other mythological contemporizing by women like Paisley Rekdal’s Nightingale, Anne Carson’s canonical Autobiography of Red or even Madeline Miller’s bestselling novels Circe and The Song of Achilles.

Myths give us approachable ways into our culture’s narratives and the narratives of our time. As Roberto Colasso wrote in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, “Myths are beautiful muddles and wonderful mirrors in the tangled funhouse of literature where we might glimpse ourselves once more, again and again.” Because we use myths to continually glimpse ourselves, to remake mythological figures as Zoccola does in Helen of Troy, 1993 is to layer and entangle personal endeavors of meaning-making with the broader arc of storytelling that is human history, and women’s place in it. 

Traditionally, Helen of Troy is a tragic and hapless figure. In the myth’s prevailing version, the Trojan War begins when Helen—the most beautiful woman in the world—is abducted from her home and husband in Sparta and taken to marry the Trojan prince Paris. The tragedy does not begin there, however. Helen is conceived when Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, takes on the form of a swan to rape human Leda (famously depicted in Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan”). Greek myth is full of women like Leda and Helen, pawns in the games of men and gods. In the 2024 New York Times article “The Women of Greek Myths Are Finally Talking Back,” Alexandra Alter writes, “Female characters [of Greek mythology] have either been relegated to the fringes, or filtered through the male gaze, depicted as helpless victims, sexual objects, and war prizes. … it makes sense that women are excavating ancient stories and giving new life to female characters whose perspectives have been elided.” Zoccola’s Helen of Troy, 1993 is an assertive part of this movement to vocalize and introduce new agency to these ancient female figures, though it does not require previous knowledge about Greek myth to enjoy the contemporary narrative it presents. 

The best way to introduce the book’s humorous and personable approach might simply be with a litany of its titles: “helen of troy’s new whirlpool washing machine,” “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings,” “helen of troy avoids her school reunion,” “helen of troy cranks the volume on ‘like a prayer’ in the ballet studio parking lot,” “helen of troy runs the station wagon into a ditch,” and “helen of troy reigns over chuck e. cheese,” among others. This tremendous and entertaining debut manages both erudition and approachable ingenuity across its 68 pages.

Amid its Southern setting, Helen of Troy, 1993 triumphantly sings with warmth and wit. Here rural Appalachia is smothering, inescapable—much like the old plot points of myth. In “helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu,” Zoccola writes:

    i walked out into the mass of it, boots

    to my knees against the coiled mines

    of copperheads, my mother behind me,

    watching the sky for a white spread

    of wings. i grew my whole life in a house

    death longed to touch with one soft finger,

    and when i looked out at the building wave,

    i thought, do it.

Here Zoccola complicates the assumption that the women of Greek mythology were helpless or uninteresting simply because things kept happening to them: they got married off, they got raped, they got pregnant, they got murdered. This Helen has a dynamic relationship with fate—do it, she dares. It is less what happens to Zoccola’s Helen that makes her interesting—a lackluster affair that ends in a Perkins restaurant, a daughter’s friend’s birthday party at a Chuck E. Cheese—and more her own psychic vitality.

Helen of Troy, 1993 insists on the storytelling of the overlooked. In the book’s opening poem, “helen of troy feuds with the neighborhood,” helen declares—no, demands—“i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.” The book’s most enchanting passages run away with the ecstasy of their own Southern song to further demand such listening. “helen of troy runs to piggly wiggly” croons:

         

         … beloved land of madonna on the speakers. country

    of women with cursive lists. everyone i’ve ever known nurses

    their children from these shelves, pushing loads of accreting weight,

    everyone i’ve yet to meet. i high-step through the aisles,

    nursemaid to bread loaves, coupons purse-holstered and waiting.

    sing, muse, of the manager’s special, two-for-one on yogurt cups…

This synthesis of highfalutin ode with the Piggly Wiggly-quotidian produces not only the pleasure of surprise, but the joyous realization that good storytelling is less a product of plot than of voice. Zoccola’s Helen emanates an insistent joie de vivre that churns right on through the plot of her life, no matter how uninspiring it may at first glance appear. 

The book not only gives voice to Helen, but to the women of the neighborhood in a Greek chorus-esque crown of sonnets interspersed throughout. These poems color in the landscape around a fictional Sparta, Tennessee, and provide some of the context for the greater story at work in Helen’s family. In “the spartan women discuss helen of troy,” the collective explains, “a girl was born who was not a swan. / thick-boned, earth-bound, she looked every minute / over her shoulder for the real life / she was promised, but her neck was too short / and she could not see it.” Though Helen could not see it, the reader now can.

Throughout the collection, Helen wrestles with this lack of control she, a nineties suburban American housewife, has over the trajectory of her life. See the unwieldy nature of “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings”: 

    bags of gummy sharks. ice cream, like a lot of ice cream,

    cartons of fudge ripple i pound in one sitting

    with a spoon like a dirt mover, scoop scoop

    down the hole, layers of white ounces plugged

    right into the skin, who was that one wizard in salem

    they squashed to death in a tofu press,

    giles somebody, they just kept piling it on,

    and that sucker smiled his bluebird smile

    and asked for more. cheesecake. jelly rolls.

Even the direction of the poem’s garrulousness seems to ultimately slither out of Helen’s grasp. There is reason to rejoice for this slipperiness, though. How else would we get to “that one wizard in salem” and the other figures populating Helen’s inner life? How else would we relinquish, finally, our own desires and simply “listen”?

Helen of Troy, 1993 is a disarming and marvelous book for every kind of reader, from Greek mythophile to those of us looking for a laugh. Zoccola’s poetry renders a joyride of a character out of an old myth and, like the joyride Helen takes just before wrecking the family station wagon, “why shouldn’t your toes itch / on that pedal so sweet / and easy you might as well / be that sugar from the movies?” Have fun reading about one of the world’s great tragedies? Per the dare Helen herself makes, do it. 

Katherine Indermaur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), winner of the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Book Award, and two chapbooks. She is an editor for Sugar House Review and the recipient of prizes from Black Warrior Review and the Academy of American Poets. Her writing has appeared in Ecotone, Electric Literature, New Delta Review, Ninth Letter, the Normal School, TIMBER, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.