Exploring Doikayt Through Sukkot Poetry

I am hardly a religious person, and yet, since I first began writing poetry seriously as a teenager, I have been crafting a poem cycle about Jewish Holidays, which I have tentatively titled “Lunar Calendar.” I first began publishing individual poems from the series in 2016, and ten years later, I am still writing new poems for it. 

Over the years, excerpts from this cycle have appeared in, among other venues, the North American Review, the Jewish Book Council’s Berru Poetry Series, here at JWA, and even as part of High Holiday programming at various synagogues. 

Ironically, the fact that I am not particularly religious is, I believe, part of what makes these poems work: they are irreverently reverent, or reverently irreverent.. Always, they are influenced by my rootedness in the Yiddish language, which is why I always make sure to title each with both the Modern Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation of a given holiday.         

Writing poetry is an opportunity to celebrate one’s beliefs and convictions, but also a way of challenging them in ways that may surprise even oneself. 

As a not-particularly-religious but very culturally Jewish Yiddishist who often characterizes herself as a rootless cosmopolitan, I often turn over the Bundist concept of doikayt, or hereness. When contemplating Jewish holidays, so many of which center on return to the Land of Israel, a preoccupation with doikayt might seem like a contradiction. But the other side of longing to return is always a connection to the place where one is.   

Sukkot/Sukes, which commemorates our forty years of wandering in the desert, is a particularly fitting holiday to use to explore doikayt.  

Sukkot

(Sukes)

 

The nostalgia grows easier as the years go by:

How pleasant to dine and to sleep once in a while

under a roof of branches and fruit beneath the sky. 

 

The nostalgia comes easier when the land is fertile 

with lulav and etrog, myrtle and willow

when there is food for seven days in a sukkah.

 

Surely, there must have been wonder in the flight

from Egypt, marriages born in the desert, 

friendship in Babylon, beauty in Poland. 

 

The nostalgia grows easier.