Customer Reviews

The Hardship Post

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A review from the blog WRITING THE HOLOCAUST ([...]):

Jehanne Dubrow's The Hardship Post (winner of the Three Candles Press 1st Book Award) is not afraid to ask hard, necessary questions about identity and memory, grief, and art as they relate to the Holocaust.

In these poems, she questions, for example, whether she have a right to talk about the past, the Holocaust. And if she does, what gives her that right, and then how should she talk about the Holocaust? What kind of language should she use to embody what she feels? And is there even such a language? And what should she say to those who feel she doesn't have the right to talk about the Holocaust? And what should she say to those who feel that whether or not she has that right is really unimportant because the Holocaust is not important?

Dubrow's answers are shaped into verse that is constantly moving with thought and feeling at the intersection of her own and her family's past. She speaks of her birth, her travels to Africa and Eastern Europe, her life as a diplomat's daughter, but always with the sense that her life is a life in exile, separated from the unspeakable that touched her family and millions of others despite her best efforts to understand what happened.

She speaks of, writes about, these lives with a care, imagination, and thoughtfulness that finally convince us of the depth of her closeness to and love for these lives.