A New England Archive of Jewish History visits Revere!

 





Interview with Doug Holder

While I was having my usual bagel at the Bagel Bin on Shirley Ave., city councilman Ira Novosesky told me about an event that will be presented by the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center. The event will be a presentation regarding Jewish life and history in the city of Revere. Here are the details:

When:
Sunday, Jul 26, 2026 3:00p -
5:00p

Where:
Rumney Marsh Academy,
140 American Legion Hwy #3
Revere, MA 02151

Admission:
FREE


The Center generously agreed to answer a few of my questions.




 You are having an event this month that will deal with Jewish life in Revere. Why is Revere so important to Jewish history in New England?



The Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center (JHC) preserves several collections about families, synagogues, and businesses based in Revere in the early and mid-20th century. Revere had a strong Jewish community throughout the 20th century, and some descendants of those families still live there today. And many older Jewish Bostonians—who may have grown up in other cities and towns in the area—still recall their summers on Revere Beach with fondness and nostalgia; it was a beloved summer destination for Jews to gather, enjoy recreation, and escape urban life within a safe Jewish enclave.



 I am told Shirley Ave. in Revere was the epicenter of the Jewish community. Do you have a lot of materials in your archive concerning this vital avenue?



We have several collections documenting Jewish life in Revere, including the records of Congregation Tifereth Israel, which was located at the corner of Shirley and Nahant Avenues. There are also a number of specific mentions of Shirley Avenue in the oral histories collected for our "Jewish Neighborhood Voices."



. The center asks for archival donations, but it is limited to New England. Why?



The Jewish Heritage Center's archive is specifically focused on New England Jewish history and is the only archive of its kind.

As background: the JHC began as part of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) when it was located at Brandeis. When AJHS moved to New York in 2000, it made an agreement with a group of Boston-based supporters and board members for the New England collections to stay in Boston and to be known as the American Jewish Historical Society-New England Archive (AJHS-NEA). In 2009, AJHS-NEA began a collaboration with American Ancestors (then known as New England Historic Genealogical Society); this partnership was formalized in 2015 with the creation of the Jewish Heritage Center at American Ancestors, a vital center with a mission to preserve New England Jewish history, support scholarly and genealogical research, and offer educational programming about Jewish history and heritage. It was renamed for the Wyner Family, longtime supporters, in 2018. The Jewish Heritage Center continues today to add new collections of Jewish families, businesses, institutions, and communities in New England.

Much of New England Jewish history reflects themes in the wider story of American Jewish life, but there are also unique stories to be told across the Jewish diaspora, including here in New England. American Jewish life and culture does not solely exist in New York or L.A., and we have the privileged opportunity to preserve the stories of families and institutions in Boston and beyond. Their stories matter.



What other cities besides Revere had thriving Jewish communities. Are there such communities today? I can think of Coolidge Corner in Brookline.



Though Jews have had a presence in Boston for much longer, the largest influx of Jewish immigrants came to this area from Eastern Europe in the late-19th century and settled largely in the North End, West End, and Chelsea (with an honorable mention of Lynn). Chelsea, in particular, was densely populated with Jewish immigrant families in the early 20th century and had the second highest per capita Jewish population in the United States, after New York.



In the next generation, many families moved to Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, where they built thriving Jewish communities anchored by synagogues and Jewish businesses. Toward the mid-20th century, many Jewish families on the North Shore with access to upward mobility moved to Swampscott and Marblehead, while many in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan moved to Brookline and Newton—all of which still have thriving Jewish communities to this day.



The highest concentration of Jews in Greater Boston today is in Brookline, Newton, and Brighton; there are thriving Jewish communities within, and beyond, these three neighborhoods. The fabric and atmosphere of most of these communities look different than the tight-knit immigrant neighborhoods of 100 years ago, for many reasons, including acculturation.



The Jewish Heritage Center has many resources available to learn about the history of Greater Boston Jewish neighborhoods. One lively source is the JHC's online exhibit, "Jewish Neighborhood Voices," For researchers interested in studying the demographic and geographic shifts of the Greater Boston Jewish community from the mid-20th century onwards, CJP has conducted community surveys every decade since the 1960s; these can be found in the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston Records preserved in the JHC archives.



The Jewish Heritage Center continually seeks to add the history of more communities—both geographical and identity-based—to its archives, to further represent the rich diversity of the Jewish community in this region. We invite individuals, families, and organizations to consider donating materials representing the fullness of Jewish heritage, identity, and experience.



 Do you collaborate with other centers, such as the Yiddish Book Center in Western, Mass.?



We have many partnerships and collaborations with other Jewish organizations. The “Jewish Stories of Revere Beach” event featured the following partners: Jewish Community Center of the North Shore, Congregation Shirat Hayam, Temple Emmanuel of Chelsea, Walnut Street Synagogue, and Temple Tiferet Shalom. We have had collaborative projects with the Yiddish Book Center, including recording oral history interviews in partnership with the Wexler Oral History Project. We are also part of the New England Jewish History Collaborative, a consortium of Jewish history and genealogy organizations from New England states, whose goal is to raise awareness of the history of Jewish New England and the resources available to study it.



In Greater Boston, the Walnut Street Shul and Temple Emmanuel in Chelsea are regular collaborators, as are educators at Jewish Day Schools like Epstein Hillel and Gann Academy. We hold institutional papers for many local institutions, including Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Worker's Circle, and many synagogues.



We also have materials on loan at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the West End Museum. There will also be Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center materials on display in the new Holocaust Museum opening in 2027.



Other organizations we work with include Lehrhaus, Mayyim Hayyim, Keshet, the Jewish Women's Archive, and more. We are always excited to have opportunities to connect with local and national institutions on programming and archival projects!



 Why should a person visit your center. What will he or she take away from their visit?



There are many wonderful things to see and learn at the Jewish Heritage Center! We have materials on exhibit throughout the building, and our parent organization, American Ancestors, offers a "Family Heritage Experience" that introduces visitors to the exploration of family history and identity through interactive displays and exhibits. Visitors and researchers can also make an appointment to explore collections from the Jewish Heritage Center's archives, which are filled with fascinating historical documents, photos, and artifacts about Jewish individuals, families, and institutions in New England. These tell the story of Jewish life in our area—and contribute to the larger story of the American Jewish experience. We also host events for the public throughout the year at our beautiful historic building on Newbury Street, along with online programs and educational presentations in day schools and synagogues.





***Thanks to Sarah Quiat for arranging this interview

The Language of Two (Finishing Line Press, 2026) by Jean Flanagan

The Language of Two (Finishing Line Press, 2026) by Jean Flanagan

reviewed by Lee Varon


Jean Flanagan’s latest collection of poetry “The Language of Two” brings us breathtaking poems of remembrance, loss, acceptance, and paying homage. Her finely crafted lyrics help us see how to live a rich and fulfilling life, despite intense moments of grief.

Several poems in the collection illuminate the lives of women lost to history such as Clover Adams, the wife of historian Henry Adams (“In the Shadow of Suicide”) and in the title poem (“The Language of Two”) which is written in the voice of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron. I had never heard that Ada was credited, by some, as the world’s first computer programmer.

But it is Flanagan’s deeply honest and moving personal poems that had the most lasting impression for me. These poems are rich with stunning and memorable details. “Your Letter Fell into the Trash” depicts a letter from a former lover mixed with trash, stained by mayonnaise—in which the only still legible phrase is: “I love you but—”.

In “Ballad of Goodbye at Ardmore” the poet writes:

“I hear you hum this old love song/ and wonder if you know the words/ of our first good-bye”.

Some of Flanagan’s poems felt like an arrow piercing the heart: the exquisitely detailed images of a wedding that never took place in “Blue Wedding Dress” where the poet writes: “The dress was royal blue lace/ ankle length with diamond sequins./ Perfect for a second wedding” and then the poem goes on to tell us, “I was to wear it to St. Jerome’s Chapel/ at the end of Lake Street/ for the mass.” It is the specificity of this poem that makes it so heartbreaking as the narrator tells us exactly how the wedding would have taken place but never did.

In “My Sister’s Foot” the poet begins jauntily: “I am obsessed with shoes, / smooth red suede heels/ 3 inches high. /Navy blue leather flats.../Sandals with diamond and gold bling/ Sneakers for tennis. /I hate Mary Jane’s/ the unsightly strap. No style there.” But after this cheerful beginning, in the second paragraph we are suddenly gobsmacked by the lines: “My sister asks me to put a gold flat shoe/ on her titanium black mechanical foot.” The shoe the narrator struggles to put on doesn’t fit and she is forced to return it to the closet full of shoes her sister will never wear, “steps she’ll never take.”

Peppered among the many permutations of loss which Flanagan so masterfully portrays, there are transcendent poems of lightness and joy as in the three short stanzas of “I Am Startled by This Love.” How beautifully the poet shows us her wonder and joy at new love: “as faithful as snow/ as curious as the hawk/ that lands on /the antenna across the way.”

The Language of Two is available from Finishing Line Press, Amazon, and can be ordered from your local bookstore.

         

Red Letter Poem #308

  The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #308

 

 

 

 

 

I strap the truth onto my back and set out

 

 

I am on a mountain smiling / I am bathing

in a journal / the sun is my skin / a panther 

longs for a friend at night / swabs her fur

with moonlight so 

her velvet lids

may dream 

of me / all I hear are words 

 

this wooded hideaway a stranger

home

 

when the panther has had enough of her

sleepless reverie / when she has wept 

enough petals / to cover the casket

completely / then

we will hold hands

the skeleton

and the moon / bursting

 

into the togetherness of death / like spring

peonies

 

 

                             ––Faith Shuster

 

 

                       

 

 

 

“How Poetry Comes to Me”

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light”

 
― Gary Snyder

 

 

I have a friend who appreciates ‘good poetry’––he’ll remind me over coffee––but draws a line at “the intentional obfuscation” that he feels ‘runs rampant’ in contemporary verse.  His upset signals that he ran across something in Poetry magazine or a more obscure journal that baffled him, made him feel ‘cheated.’  He appreciates dynamic imagery and elegant music––but, most importantly, wants ‘a poem that makes sense.’  I tell him I know exactly how he feels.  But I offer this in response: as intelligent a reader as I think he is, he’s missing the point of the whole exercise.  It’s not as if more traditional approaches signify ‘skilled writing,’––and these other experimental young talents have simply lost their way.  The rules of the game have changed, as culture has changed; and many older styles of (for lack of a better word) beauty began to feel inadequate to the experience of the chaotic and often caustic world we face these days.  Along the way, poets stepped back from the elegance of ‘the well-made thing’ and embraced the visceral intensity of a poem that was bravely finding its way.  Gary Snyder, for example, was fond of explaining that he didn’t write because he ‘had something to say’ but because he needed to find out who he really was that morning, and to take his bearings.  Faith Shuster (née Blake––in case some have come across her poetry under her maiden name) is a young poet unafraid of the challenge posed by a raw and unruly poem.  It feels to her as if each fresh draft is an opportunity to discover what, from the outer world, was pulling at something from the inner.  Or conversely: what wild presence in her inner landscape was desperate to make its way out, into the clearing of the blank page, where voice, musicality, vision can make itself known.

 

Like Snyder’s little ars poetica reproduced above, Faith is conceiving of some animal presence––though it is never made clear whether the habitat of that panther is arboreal, neural, or both.  But whoever or whatever is the hunter, clearly the prey is the truth––or some version of what, at this very moment, feels to be vital and true.  In this “wooded hideaway,” the imagery is leaping–– first, into the consciousness of the poet, and then eventually ours.  And it’s so appealing, I suspend disbelief and allow the poem to carry me along, savoring lines like: “…a panther/ longs for a friend at night / swabs her fur/ with moonlight so/ her velvet lids/ may dream/ of me…”.  As you’re probably familiar, the slash-mark punctuation is usually employed in revising or quoting from poetry to indicate a line break (as I’ve done here).  But Faith has added them even within lines, either to signify auxiliary pauses (like caesuras) or, spatially, to have her lines visually interrupted with something almost vegetal.  Again, I am left to interpret how meaning is being made––but there’s something freeing in that.

 

Faith is an emerging poet whose work (using her own words) “enquires into the ways language can play, move, and liberate.”  Her work has just begun to make its way into journals like the Lyrical column of the Somerville Times, as well as an anthology appearance in The Silver Note, a collection gathering poets from Arlington, MA.  Faith studied Biology at Tufts University, and Education at Stanford.  She founded Effect Learning LLC and works as an Executive Function Coach, empowering neurodivergent adults and teens to learn the skills they need to get things done.  I’ve found her poems daring but emotionally grounded, with language that elevates the heart rate.  I look forward to seeing how her style will develop in order to keep pace with her own powerful curiosity.  This makes me want to remind my earnest but puzzled friend that, at one time, poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Alan Ginsberg or Gary Snyder, were so radical that their work was widely ridiculed.  These days, passages of their poetry can appear in popular culture and no one bats an eye.  Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” caused a riot at its first appearance––but within a year, it was engendering standing ovations.  It’s the speed at which modern consciousness is evolving.  I have a suspicion of what’s happening when Faith’s panther “has wept/ enough petals / to cover the casket/ completely”––but I’m not troubled if it changes with subsequent readings.  Because what I most desire is for me to make sense of my own experience––not to have some masterful poem impress its ‘answers’ upon me.  I want to trust that if the intuitive exploration within a poet’s work brought them to some place of wonderment, I might be propelled to one of my own.  

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/