Prairie Kaddish

Prairie Kaddish begins with the author’s serendipitous discovery of the Jewish graveyard at Lipton, Saskatchewan, a community of whose existence she’d previously been unaware. The incident triggers an exploration both archival and personal, for information about these people, and what their lives must have been like, and the resulting work of remembrance. The title also pays homage to Allan Ginsberg, the seminal mid- twentieth-century poet whose “Kaddish” to his mother had enormous influence on not only Isa Milman, but on American poetics in general. Prairie Kaddish works on many levels, the historical and the personal are intertwined, and the poetics are solid and occasionally dazzling. The poems are particularly moving because, whether personally revealing or plainly documentary, they cover difficult ground using a clean, unsentimental style. Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead, recited at the burial, during the seven days of mourning, and every year on the anniversary of the death. Every Jew knows Kaddish, it is the universal prayer. There are no more Jewish colonies, no more Jewish farmers on the prairies. It’s all gone – it’s hard to even find some of the cemeteries. Prairie Kaddish is an elegy for all that no longer exists, except through remembrance.