Shalom, My Teardrop! Mimoza Erebara

 

Shalom, My Teardrop!


Mimoza Erebara (Translated from the Albanian by Arben P. Latifi)


© 2021 by Mimoza Erebara


Cervena Barva Press


Somerville MA


ISBN 978-1-950063-27-7


Softbound, $8, 28 pages






Review by Zvi A. Sesling





There are fewer than a dozen and a half Albanian poets listed on Amazon, though there are many more you will find via Google. I have read exactly three Albanian poets: Luljeta Lleshanaku, Ani Gjika and now, thanks to Cervena Barva Press, Mimoza Erebara.





Writer, critic and editor Peter Constantine, in his introduction to Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Fresco, states: “Luljeta Lleshanaku is a pioneer of Albanian poetry. She speaks with a completely original voice, her imagery and language always unexpected and innovative. Her poetry has little connection to poetic styles past or present in America, Europe, or the rest of the world. And it is not connected to anything in Albanian poetry either.”


Whereas Lleshanaku’s poetry is praised for being apolitical, Gjika’s poetry employs the political as it is described by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky: “Albania, India, Massachusetts. The mass culture posters of an American adolescent and the mass uniformity of a police state. Snow and bread. Ani Gjika has created penetrating, alert and elegant poems that successfully bring her unique voice to English…”





Erebara’s chapbook, Shalom, My Teardrop! is entirely about Israel, some written in her home of Albania and some on a trip to Israel. Her poetry is translated by Arben P. Latifi. I find this chapbook particularly interesting because it is about Israel and is most likely, though I cannot be sure, the rare setting for a book of poetics among Albanian poets.





Erebara has won numerous awards at home and internationally and thanks to Gloria Mindock’s Cervena Barva Press Erebara will now be better known in the United States.





In Shalom, My Treardrop! Erebara declares her love for Israel in a way few other poets could. As an Albanian, her heritage and her visit to Israel inform her verse and bring the reader, especially Diaspora Jews, a connection to Israel and their Jewish heritage.





In the title poem: “Shalom, My Teardrop” Erebara writes from Albania about a land far away, a land of the soul that many Jews in the Diaspora feel for a homeland they have never visited. She cites her soul from whence her love of Israel comes and even further, in a tip of the hat to politics, she notes “a different air” as a metaphor for freedom as opposed to a police state.





Shalom, My Teardrip!


This land, even though far away,


won’t let me go…





With her love,


hidden somewhere


in the depths of my sinews,


which freshened me up in a different air,


despite the dazzling spears


of negation,


that pierce me through


like slander.





A single leaf of fire


holds me onto the marrow of nonoblivion


like a teardrop


that never dropped down…





In her poem Ha-Shoah, Erebara gets to the crux of the Holocaust including three lines of which on her visit to Yad Vashem struck my heart like a knife because I remember the identical feeling that I had as a visitor to this memorial that I never forgot “I want to leave/But I am pinned there/Petrified,”





There is no sugar coating. There is terror, sadness and pain for those who visit this Holocaust Memorial. It is direct, hard and takes one’s breath away to experience that six million Jews – men, women, children, whole families -- died at the hands of the nazis.





HA-SHOAH*


In Yad Vashem, the Museum of Holocaust Victims





Like a crematorium


Inside me burn


Grain, Bone, Light, Breath


Everything is extinguished


In the ashes of existence,


Which gained its very soul from air…


I want to leave,


But I am pinned there,


Petrified,


Like a black pigeon,


In the hollow sockets


Of those beautiful eyes – once,


When they’d breathe life toward Life


I pause


To find the akin to myself


In the field, where the wheat is freshly cropped…


And here’s where I am,


Me


Along with a wheat-ear of memory


That, twixt smoke and ashes –


poor rosy smoke –


Confides to me in ecstatic whisper


My, wasn’t Hope so beautiful


Under winglets of butterflies


Dripping with dew!





*Ha-Shoah [Hebr.] -- Commemoration





Jewish or not, these poems will help readers understand the importance of Israel to Jewish heritage and its meaning to those who live in countries other than Israel, and feel their connection to this tiny democratic country in the midst of those who wish to destroy it.


___________________________________________


Zvi A. Sesling


Poet Laureate, Brookline, MA 2017-2020


Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review


Author, War Zones (Nixes Mate Books)


The Lynching of Leo Frank (Big Table Publishing)