John Spiegel Reviews Yerra Sugarman's Aunt Bird
Yerra Sugarman’s recent poetry collection Aunt Bird is an homage, an elegy to her Aunt Feiga, who was killed at Auschwitz. Broken into seven sections, Sugarman’s book uses a variety of poetic forms to imagine what Aunt Feiga’s life was like during that time. The text is cinematic in its approach to a topic that is inherently difficult to navigate.
In a conversation with Tiffany Troy published in Tupelo Quarterly, Sugarman shares how she had “as a student, explored the poet Muriel Rukeyser and her text, The Book of the Dead,” an innovator of documentary poetry. Sugarman asked herself during that time, “‘How do you approach this sort of testimonial poetry, poetry of witness, or vicarious witness in a certain sense?’” While this question is left unanswered in the interview, the answer her book gives seems to be to use a variety of perspectives or techniques to present a more complete version of a topic or experience, not just the version any one person sees, which is by nature incomplete.
The book begins with lines from Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safron Foer. This is fitting from a narrative as well as thematic perspective, as both Sugarman’s and Foer’s texts are about searching for a relative lost to the Holocaust. Both of these books are really two separate perspectives being explored. Everything is Illuminated follows Alex’s and Foer’s story, with unique voices guiding the reader through their experiences, whereas Aunt Bird follows the speaker as she researches and learns more about her lost relative, and also follows the “reimagined” life of Feiga, or Aunt Bird. In this way, the book attempts to explore grief from multiple angles: from the perspective of the life that was taken, and also the grief of not knowing and properly mourning said loved one.
Aunt Bird explores the former of these perspectives through several symbols that are repeated throughout the manuscript. It can be difficult territory, writing about the dead in a way that does not use misfortune for one’s gain. Moreover, there is the question as to whether it is appropriate to write about another’s experiences at all. In an interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Sugarman admits that “…writing ‘creatively’ about genocide and death is inherently ethically problematic.” She goes on to describe how the “peril involved in domesticating the unspeakable horrors of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is called in Hebrew, through using aesthetic conventions to grasp the ungraspable.” Sugarman navigates this issue by focusing the text on recurring symbols and motifs in the text, using these descriptions as anchor points for the text to navigate around.
Two of these images are the sky and the bird, fittingly, since Feiga comes from the Yiddish word for “bird” (foygl) One example of both images being used is in “[a tumult of birdsong]” which begins by focusing on this motif: “a tumult of birdsong / mourning coats each thing / with the iris of affliction sky” (99).
Other symbols the text relies on are found in nature: trees, grass, and other life found throughout the camps. In the poem “[The TV’s on mute; its cool glow scrubs the room],” the speaker wonders about “…the camp’s electric fence, or why young spruce trees spring up there, every need a gravestone. What’s mourning? she’ll ask herself” (26).
One other significant motif is the graphemes of the Yiddish alphabet. An example of this comes from one of the first poems in the book, “Aunt Bird on What Happened to the Alphabet When the War Broke Out.” The poem states,
The alphabet’s letters, she whispered, quivered.
Each one fell on its belly as bombs shocked the air
and rattled needles on fir tree branches…
That Vov’s skin was wrinkled and blue
One of its feet clung to a sock and the sole of a boot,
shattered pinecones in its hair— (19)
The effect of focusing on these images is like that of a camera focusing on an image close up and blurring events in the background. We as readers perceive the feeling and emotion of a scene, almost osmotically. We take in the emotion gradually while focusing on more intimate details, leaving the specifics of Feiga’s life open to speculation and interpretation. This is not an elegy to the life of Feiga, it is an elegy for the many possible lives Feiga could have lived. It is an exploration of the unknown, sorrow for what could have been, if not for what was.
Aunt Bird explores the latter of these perspectives, that of a person seeking a lost loved one, through a variety of conceits. Firstly, there is a recurring scene where the speaker attempts to learn about her Aunt’s life and death. She says, “Years later, haunted by my computer screen’s membrane of light, I discovered what her fate had been, her brief story chronicled on the flare of the Internet’s page” (11). We see the grief of the speaker, and through her, gain insight into the life of Aunt Bird.
Later, Sugarman utilizes a comparison to the “slain Hector” from The Iliad, a gesture that spans several poems. In “[To imagine no one completely vanishes],” she cites Harrison, who says that “a person can ‘die in spirit’ if they do not bury the people they love,” and described King Priam by saying, “Dung lay thick on the head and neck of the aged man for he had been rolling in it” (97–98). In an earlier poem titled “[Tonight, the moon is scarred, an aperture in the mist],” Sugarman connects these events back to her Aunt Bird, whose body was never found. The text says, “Without having the departed’s corpse to mourn, can the living ever stop grieving?” (92). In this way, the body of a loved one becomes another symbol the text can revolve around. In the same interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Sugarman states, “Many American elegies in the twentieth century stopped idealizing the dead, but rather created real flesh-and-blood humans.” She goes on to say that her goal is to “…[mourn] ‘real’ humans, with whom we can identify…”
One poem that captures all of these perspectives is the first poem in the book, “[I have nothing to see her with].” The title of the poem also serves as the first line, which establishes Sugarman’s search, but at the stanza break, the poem begins contemplating Aunt Bird’s life, imagining the unknowns.
Does she suckle on wind,
forage among roots,
rummage near clawed feet,
drink handfuls of rain?
The immediate shift in perspective as well as focus on the established images of the text (the natural elements of wind and roots as well as bird-like clawed feet) make this poem function more like an overture, an introduction of what is to come, or an establishing shot early in a film. And in many ways, the book reads more like a film than a poetry book. It shifts between perspectives like a shot/reverse-shot dialogue. The lens lingers on roots and dirt while we hear dialogue about something else coming from someone off camera. This is perhaps what it means to be “cinematic” in writing; not necessarily to use techniques from another medium, but to translate those techniques and adapt them for a new purpose, a new topic, or a new audience.