Over the Rooftops of Time: Jewish Stories, Essays, Poems(SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture)

In this collection of essays, stories, and poems, award-winning poet and fiction writer Myra Sklarew traces a journey across the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Her point of view is Jewish, though her subjects include science, exile, the future, the Holocaust, the remaining Jewish community of Morocco, Yiddish poetry, the visual arts, and teaching. Many of these pieces deal with personal subjects—the search for a grandfather's birthplace, the death of a mother, the profound effect of a teacher, the struggle of a woman to embrace Judaism. Whether writing about medicine, Messiah, or the first speech of an infant, Sklarew's work finds its roots in Judaism, a Judaism fashioned in large part by the author's own hands. Ultimately, the book is about access, about following one's own curiosity despite the obstacles that might appear along the way. And it is about a kind of belief: that nothing will be wasted, that all that we can learn will have a place in our lives eventually, though we may not know its purpose at the time.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Preface Learning the Language The Landscape of Dislocation From the Backyard of the Diaspora Learning the Language Who Has Not Dreamed of Flying Yiddish Poetry Morocco: Gauze Curtains, Round Tombs, Hidden Jews What Hasanin M'Barak Said Like a Field Riddled by Ants In the Afterlife Which is a Library The Messenger Getting There Like a Field Riddled by Ants My Companion the Aleph-Bet The World Is a Parchment Scrawled with Words Khamsin Night Watch A Journal for John Holmes From Alexandria to American via Amtrak Interview with Joseph Brodsky, February 28, 1979 The Howard Poets in Perspective Counterpoint Life, the Unfinished Experiment The Selfish Gene (or, Cortazar's Watch) The Knockout Mouse on the Doorstep of Neurobiology (or, the Mind/Body Problem Revisited) AIDS: Latency and HIV Reservoirs: In the Dark Backward and Abysm of Time Human Gene Therapy: Harnessing the Body's Defenses Against Cancer The Puzzle People Genes, Blood, and Courage: A Boy Called Immortal Sword Root Causes: Stem Cells and the Tower of Babel The Statue Within A Place Called Gehinom Writing the Holocaust: auch ohne/Sprache Holocaust On Muranowska Street Then 1941 The Roots of Resistance: Le Chambon Instructions for the Messiah Crossing Over Instructions for the Messiah What is a Jewish Poem? Certainty Crossing into the New Millennium: American University, Convocation, August 1998 Grandfather: Lost and Found Ode to the Czar's Assassin The Messiah Reconsidered Notes Index