Poetry. "In spare, elegant, and superbly textured poetic language, Ruth Panofsky imagines the lives and thoughts of Laike and Nahum, evoking their hardships and struggles through the strength of remembrance, confronting with an open heart and a poet's eye the need to preserve and understand her ancestral and historical past through language and memory. By entering the everyday existence of two lives, Panofsky captures the complexity and difficulty of the immigrant experience, exploring the rhythms of a harsh Russian past moving toward an unk nown future in Montreal, of the efforts to raise a large family and earn a living, and of dealing with personal tragedy and the larger world. Panofsky weaves an intriguing, compelling, sometimes painful poetic story of love and family that does not flinch from the difficulties of the immigrant experience and shows the beauty of the human spirit"-J. J. Steinfeld.

Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices (Inanna Poetry & Fiction Series)

Literature & Fiction

Panofsky, Ruth

Poetry

Inanna Publications

Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing (Studies in Book and Print Culture)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

University of Toronto Press

This long, narrative poem, Radiant Shards: Hoda's North End Poems, traces the sacrifice and suffering of devoted but destitute parents, Russian immigrants who are acutely affected by the Depression and struggle relentlessly to survive in Winnipeg. More importantly, with its focus on the life experience and inner world of their tenacious daughter - and as the first poetic project to give voice to a Jewish sex worker, a figure that has been all but erased from literary history - Radiant Shards is a compassionate and humanizing work. The poem invokes Adele Wiseman's 1974 novel Crackpot, described by Jewish Studies scholars Ruth Wisse as a foundational twentieth-century literary text and by Josh Lambert as a radically feminist work. This book imagines the interior life of the novel's protagonist, an obese Jewish sex worker named Hoda, who services the boys and men of North End Winnipeg during the first half of the twentieth century. In Radiant Shards, Hoda reflects personally and knowingly on the experiences of her complicated life. Against the structural arc of novelistic events that shape her worldview, she plumbs the depths of her suffering and the triumph of her will from a poetically imagined position of maturity and self-awareness. This creative project also incorporates archival/historical photographs housed in the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada and the Archives of Manitoba. These images ground the poet's lyric presentation of Hoda and deepen the resonant voice of a character that originally was modelled on an actual North End resident.

Radiant Shards: Hoda's North End Poems (Inanna Poetry & Fiction Series)

The New Spice Box: Canadian Jewish Writing, Volume 1

Genre Fiction

New Jewish Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Panofsky, Ruth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Panofsky, Ruth