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PRAISE FOR THE LOWERCASE JEW
The Jew in the poet
"The poem on Ginsberg and Pound is magnificent; the poem on T.S.E. is worth the price of admission; and "Uncle Louis;" and "Rye;" and "Tours of Heaven." Read." -- Gerald Stern "Rodger Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page." -- Louise Erdrich "They are "a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew." -- Yehudah Amichai "The Lowercase Jew is a book dense with mourning, comedy routines, food, blue tattoos. tribal history and the wheel of time, despair and prayer. It begins with three amazing poems on T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism, Allen Ginsberg's forgiveness of Ezra Pound and an imaginary Holocaust Theme Park and ends with an amazing poem on happiness, riffing on the Bible's first psalm." --Alicia Ostriker "Rodger Kamenetz is on a spiritual pilgrimage that feels both urgent and timeless. After finding the "missing Jew" of his early poetry at the crossroads of Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism, Kamenetz is now taking on the mantle of the warrior. His new work militates powerfully for the splendor of the Jewish tradition, taking on without hesitation the cultural icons whose malign influence is far from spent. Jewish urgency and Jewish wisdom are combined here to stand poetically firm in another uncertain age." --Andrei Codrescu
PRAISE FOR From The Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1999 From The New York
Times, March 26, 1999 Rodger Kamenetz's mother refused to speak to her children and husband in the last stages of the cancer that, after long and brutal suffering, killed her. As Kamenetz describes it in this hypnotic, cryptically lyrical memoir, her decision to remain mute had a mysterious and deeply disturbing power. "Our game was to guess at the meaning of her silence," Kamenetz writes, "to weigh this nonspeech and feel its contours. Because she was dying, her silence had an artistic quality. We felt, as we often do before a tombstone, or a poem, that it must mean something more." "Terra Infirma," Kamenetz's meditation on his mother, her stubborn willfulness and the inspiring yet destructive power of her love, has many reflective passages like that one. His book in this sense is no "Mommie Dearest," no mere expose of the harm a demanding and unreasonable parent can do. It is not a medical history about a patient and her family facing awful choices either, though such a history is included. "Terra Infirma" is not a narrative in the standard sense of a chronological ordering of events. It is inclined to circle its main subject in a poetic meandering through the meaning and the mystery of a particular mother's character and the way it imprints itself on her son. Kamenetz's slender volume is an impressively intelligent, maturely perceptive and learned meandering, and it has made for a strange and moving book. Kamenetz, who teaches literature at Louisiana State University and has published three collections of poetry, gained a good deal of attention with his previous book, "The Jew in the Lotus." Inspired by a famous dialogue between the Dalai Lama and a group of Jewish religious leaders, the book examines the spiritual commonality of Buddhism and Judaism. His new book, though far more personal, has much of the verbal flair and intellectual range of the earlier work even if Kamenetz's refusal to spare us dreadful scenes and searing memories also makes it at times painful to read. Early on he reflects that no story could be "more sentimental than the death of a boy's mother." In fact, Kamenetz brings to his subject unsparing psychological insight and a quality of naturalistic observation that is the opposite of sentimental. The first main subject that he explores is the enigma of his mother's past. Neither he nor his four brothers and sisters knew the basics of her biography, which, until one magical night when his mortally sick mother finally told her story, had remained a dark secret. "All my life, I'd felt my mother's sadness as a song without lyrics," Kamenetz writes. "The sadness was all that her secrecy would allow; the lyrics -- the actual facts, were denied us." When, finally, the facts of his mother's life are revealed, they open a pungent and melancholy history, including the insanity of a mother, the brutality of a father and incidents of abandonment that chased each other from one generation to another. These facts enable Kamenetz for the first time to perceive the deep roots of his mother's desperate possessiveness. They also lead him to the conclusion that his mother's story was "a tragedy, even a classical tragedy -- complete with tragic flaw and a heroine who did not know herself." It is his mother's poverty of self-awareness that is the central element in Kamenetz's book, which is a near-obsessive effort to invest every detail of his life with the very quality that was missing in his mother's. He writes a succinct, selective autobiography in which he describes his necessary but cruel repudiation of his mother as a way to establish his identity. In a chapter called "On Mourning," he provides a bittersweet, guilt-edged description of his struggle with the Jewish rituals surrounding the death of a parent. He visits the old synagogue in East Baltimore where his grandfather used to pray and finds there an eccentric dying Jewish community. There is the man who wears two pairs of glasses, one over the other, and the rabbi who is also a steelworker and who punctuates his recitation of the prayers with an occasional, irrelevant exclamation: "BEH!" Kamenetz makes a modest donation and asks in exchange that a special prayer be said for his mother, a way of compensating for his failure to fulfill the filial responsibility of uttering the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. The experience, as always for Kamenetz, is the occasion for a reflection, this one mingling sarcasm with a dose of reverence for the tradition: "We say in the Kaddish, 'God is Great,' for the sake of our dead, but to impose a limit on their influence. God is great, we pray -- and you are just dead." Throughout, Kamenetz is tough-minded and tender. He is sensitive with a quirky, original intelligence and a dry, urbane, self-deprecatory wit. He strives eloquently and interestingly throughout his book to make connections between his mother's jagged character and the meaningful elements in his life. Kamenetz's chapter on his mother's strange refusal to talk to her family in her last days is called "On the Meaning of No," and it ranges from his daughter's learning to talk to the inscription on Guillaume Apollinaire's tombstone in Paris ("My heart like an upside-down flame"). But Kamenetz always returns to his theme. It turns out that while his mother was not talking to him, she was discussing matters with her rabbi. "Why didn't my mother speak to us?" Kamenetz asks. He provides no clear answer, but does recall that she had tempers and tantrums so terrible that they made Kamenetz and his siblings tremble with fear. Perhaps, he suggests, she "knew we were too fragile for anything she might have to say." When the rabbi asks Kamenetz and his siblings how he should describe their mother in his eulogy, Kamenetz's answer could be a inscription on her grave. "Tell them," I said, "she was fierce." From The Baltimore Sun,
February 21, 1999 Kamenetz is a professor of literature at Louisiana State University. A native Baltimorean, born in 1950, he decided at 15 he was to be a poet, went away to Yale and then wandered the country and the world for a good many years. He has published five previous books, three of them collections of poetry. Kamenetz grew up in Baltimore's old Jewish subculture and ghetto-ish neighborhoods, which were rapidly dispersing when he was young. (They lived on Forest Hill Road.) Though his father was present, and provident, he plays almost no role in the book. The family revolved fiercely around his mother. And yet until very late in her life, Miriam Kamenetz was entirely secretive about her own family. Only in the year in which his maternal grandmother was dying did Rodger and his sisters and brother learn that she had spent the last 30 years of her life in Springfield State Hospital, an insane asylum. Not unusually for second- and third-generation immigrant families, Gentile and Jewish alike, there were disappearances, reappearances, lost siblings, dark secrets, bitter conflicts, profound unfulfilled needs. But it was only as an adult, long removed from home, that Kamenetz understood the details. Jewishness infuses the family, the rituals, the typography. But the book's narrative is alien, somehow, to that Jewishness. It is elaborately explanatory, with no tendency, cause or need to be either apologetic or celebratory. The perspective from which Kamenetz explores the theme and role of Judaism ultimately is more anthropological than personal. When finally, in his 40s, he decides to try to write about his mother and their closeness -- really more their connection -- he is artful enough to know it cannot be a chronological record, because "at best history aggregates, only poetry unifies." And from that point on Page 3 onward, the book becomes a unifying poem. Its first words are: "My mother died in the Church Home Hospice in Baltimore at the age of 54. Her last words were 'I love you.' The radio was playing 'Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head'." From there on, Miriam Kamenetz is rarely not in the forefront of awareness. She was not a pleasant person: domineering, melodramatic, secretive. Yet somehow, almost magically, she is, on almost every page, moving, deeply affecting. She ruled: "With her approval I was everything. Without it, I was depressed, miserable, and desperate." And: "She had made a career of being a mother. She had given it inordinate energy. I was dazed by the extra attention like a body burnt by too much sun. I was embarrassed by her love, that deep embarrassment a child has when he feels himself turning into an object. Yet I was in a double bind. It would be churlish to refuse her praise. It was going the only place it could go, to my head." Her unrelenting intensities had to do with her fear of becoming insane, as her mother had. As a child, she had been passed from one relative to another and then to a foster home. She dropped out of school at 16. With her children, she was often angry, screaming, a sort of serial perfectionist who let the house get filthy and then in a "cleaning frenzy" would go into tirades of ordered domesticity. "My mother made us crazy and yet we were crazy about her," Kamenetz writes. "She was a spoiled, powerful child, and we felt protective of her." When she dominates his own wedding by turning up in a long white dress, he writes: "My mother's will had a ruinous intensity. Its strength made me weak." The book is powerful because of its amazing simplicity in dealing with immense emotional complexity. Not a word seems wasted. Not a phrase does not belong. It has exquisite, unforgiving discipline. Yet it wanders, it digresses, it darts and flashes here and there without mapping the diversions. In doing that, it weaves ever more tightly the story, the "legacy" as Kamenetz puts it finally: the mysterious being of a willful, difficult woman who was both impossible and irreplaceable, both hated and adored, but who finally in this magical book emerges in all the intricacy of a human being. She is very much alive as, finally, she dies. Miriam Kamenetz suffered painfully and terrifyingly from cancer for seven years before she died. Early on, Rodger Kamenetz asks, "What story is more sentimental than the death of a boy's mother?" And yet, the story he tells never is. It is beautifully clean and clear, painful and lovely. "Dreaming begins in the womb," he writes. "The eyes of the fetus can be seen moving rapidly, and it is believed the brain matures through dreaming, that dreams provide stimulus in the darkness of the womb. Inside a mother each of us begins a dream." So finally, of course, this is a book only tangentially about Kamenetz's mother. It is a book about growing up, about Kamenetz's own dream. It's about facing truths. Above all, it reveals something about courage and courage's elusiveness -- and shows that without courage, very little else, if anything, matters, or can work. -- Michael Pakenham From New Orleans Times Picayune,
January 24, 1999 Poet Kathleen Fraser wrote, "One hears one's childhood and it is ancient." So adults repeat the patterns of the past, haunted, dreaming, often grieving, as childhood echoes reverberate through hearts and minds. In his powerful memoir of his mother's life, Terra Infirma, poet and teacher Rodger Kamenetz has crafted a sad and enduring tale of mothers and sons. He begins with his mother's dying of cancer at age 54. Her last words were, "I love you." He writes, "Her dying words were a triumph. They hold me still in their grip." Haunted by dreams after her death, Kamenetz began to unravel the mysteries of his mother's life. The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, Miriam Kamenetz rarely spoke of her painful past. After her mother was committed to a mental institution following two failed marriages, Miriam was shuttled among relatives, abandoned by both parents, finally ending up in a foster home. Determined to control her own life, she developed "a fierce drive. It was all mind over matter, will over circumstance." When she made her successful marriage, she never discussed her past, never told her children about her own life until she was near death. When she developed colon cancer, her pride played a part in her eventual death. Like any child of a willful, powerful parent, Kamenetz sought escape - both geographical and mental - and refuge in poetry. Later, when he has his own children, Kamenetz watches his young daughter learn the meaning of the world 'no': "She loved to say it. Do you want to eat? No. Do you want to get dressed? No. Do you want to go to sleep? No. (She doesn't even know how to say yes.) Do you want not to go to Charles's? No. We thought we had her trapped. But No knows no metaphysical corners.. No is not a simple refusal. It is a place of creation. And so she practiced it by herself. Nobody had asked her any questions, but she still sang it, No, NO NOOO. She was building a world of it. "All my life I too have been learning the meaning of the word No. Like Anya, I have built a world of it. I believe that my mother's strange secrecy, her silence, is what got me interested in poetry. For poetry is the meaning of the word No. "Everything absent inspires poetry. Everything absent inspires new names. That is why poets court absence. The most beautiful rose, Mallarme wrote, is the rose absent from all bouquets." Out of the absences in his mother's life, and out of her absence and presence in his own life, Rodger Kamenetz has created a beautiful grief-filled prose poem of love and loss. From terra infirma, that shakv ground, he leads his reader to higher ground. Like his mother, he can be fierce, even as he seeks to do the one thing she could not do far herself, recapture and understand her past. From Tikkun, January
1999 From Kirkus
Reviews , November 1, 1998 "I would be hard pressed to name anyone who has written as beautifully and profoundly about death and family as Rodger Kamenetz in this remarkable memoir. Terra Infirma is a sweet miracle of a book."
"I love this book. It is a powerful testament to the forces of life, will, and love. [T]his memoir will move the soul of anyone born of mother. It is highly rewarding and illuminating to read."
"Remembering his search for the separateness that would allow him to become an adult, Kamenetz writes fiercely and movingly. A classic story, beautifully told."
"One cannot be freed from a mother's possessive love merely by her death, without confronting one's own story. Kamenetz was willing to go through this process of liberation, and thanks to his honesty, courage, and skill as a writer, we have this absorbing and vivid account of his rescue from the silence that obscured his mother's past."
"Entirely under the spell of deep feeling, yet never relinquishing the irony of complex intelligence, this is one of the most beautiful books ever written about a mother and a son."
PRAISE FOR WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR JEWISH THOUGHT 1997 From The New York Times: There was one moment when I laughed out loud. Kamenetz describes Ginsberg and his teacher, Lama Gelek Rinpoche, seated next to each other at a sacred ceremony called the Kalachakra Initiation for World Peace at Madison Square Garden. During the chanting of a Tibetan text, Kamenetz heard Ginsberg chanting, ''Eenie, meenie, minie, mo,'' to his own and Rinpoche's amusement. When I asked Ginsberg about it, he laughed too and told me that the rhythm in Tibetan was identical to the old rhyme's exactly. ''Stalking Elijah'' grows naturally from ''The Jew in the Lotus'' as Kamenetz explores why he had to go to Dharamsala to find his own Jewish identity. Following Rabbi Zalmon Schachter-Shalomi's admonition to have the wisdom ''to change your life from where you are,'' he goes home to Baton Rouge, La., and joins a meditation group. Using Schachter-Shalomi's four-worlds mantra meditation -- ''I am holy. / All is clear. / You are loved. / It is perfect,'' four states of the emotional mind that correspond to worlds within the Kabbalistic teaching -- he carries his inquiry into ancient Jewish meditation practices across the country. He and his wife had suffered the loss of his infant child, and that pain is used as a gate to spiritual connections. Here Judaism complements the quiet mind of Buddhism and modern culture's new-age philosophies. I found myself eager to follow him. On the way to the next important teacher, Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man in Los Angeles, Kamenetz visits Rabbi Shefa Gold in Berkeley. Her story of being blocked from religious participation as a young woman is touching. Now she writes songs and leads a congregation; her voice is complete. Next, Rabbi Omer-Man extends the four worlds by lifting them out of the psychological and appreciating them only as parts of the divine. Thus Kamenetz takes in, learns, rejects, accepts and moves on. His grander scheme is to realize God in a direct fashion. There is a consequent suspense. Will God's finger lift this dry bean from the soup? ''When Jonathan first described the crying-out exercise,'' Kamenetz writes, ''I doubted I could do it. My skepticism abhorred it.'' As he drives on the San Bernardino Freeway, to his great surprise, his own words burst forth. The prayer further pushes his heart to overcome his self-conscious mind; he now recognizes the pathways of pain, pathways of laws, pathways of joy, pathways of silence and screaming on the road. In Cambridge, Mass., Rabbi Arthur Green provides a provocative discussion of the relationship between the Orthodox and the unorthodox. As he and his wife sort Passover kitchen items, the clear path of Halakhah (law) and ''doing things by the book'' is contrasted with the ingenious spiritual intensity of the heterodox. ''There can't be a Judaism without some Halakhah,'' he says. ''One reason the Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist movements have not yet succeeded in creating a serious religious alternative to Orthodoxy is that we have not been able to articulate a Halakhah and say, 'Yes, we will live this. . . . This contains the real presence of God.' '' ''Stalking Elijah'' is valuable not only
for Jews interested in the mystical tradition as practiced today but for Jews yearning to
find a clearer expression of the divine in their lives. In fact, Judaism is not a
prerequisite for learning from this book. Kamenetz's message is: If I can do it, so can
you.
''Stalking Elijah'' is valuable not only for Jews interested in the mystical tradition as practiced today but for Jews yearning to find a clearer expression of the divine in their lives. In fact, Judaism is not a prerequisite for learning from this book. Kamenetz's message is: If I can do it, so can you.
"The author’s answers do not come to him in the setting of a synagogue, but in the depths of his own heart. And he wisely allows his readers to penetrate those sacred chambers".
"Rodger Kamenetz unveils the fascinating secret world of Jewish mysticism in its uniquely American idiom. Combining the crystalline wit of the poet and the guileless honesty of the seeker, Kamenetz renews our faith in God and the human heart."
"When a poet like Kamenetz meets an emerging mystical community like the teachers of Jewish renewal, the text that emerges is something more than lyrical sociology: it teaches without lecturing, wrestles without conquering, and dances without posturing. So to read it is to learn with a light heart."
"Reb Rodger invites us on a journey to sit at the feet of the great Jewish spiritual teachers and sages of our generation. What we discover is profound learning, rich inspiration, and the way to touch our souls at their deepest and most holy places."
"Kamenetz blends the personal with the profound. He takes us on a journey through new spiritual territory and into the hearts and minds of those who are cultivating it. Illuminating and fun."
"STALKING ELIJAH is filled with remarkable speculations, questions, and flights of mystic fancy. Beginning with hurt at its core, this book draws us along its adventurous path of discovery. Every reader who cares for the vagaries of the human spirit in our confused age will find this work unsettling, important, and never less than fascinating."
"Kamenetz gracefully moves in the narrow corridor between two great spiritual traditions, guiding seekers on a great voyage of the soul."
Praise for "IN autumn 1990, a Jewish Buddhist, a poet and eight distinguished Jews traveled to Dharamsala, India, for a four-day exchange of views -- a reciprocal teaching -- with the Dalai Lama, the titular head of Tibetan Buddhism, who has been living in exile for more than three decades. The Jewish Buddhist (or JUBU, as some say) was Marc Lieberman, a San Francisco ophthalmologist, who, with Moshe Waldoks, a scholar and editor, organized the meeting in Dharamsala as well as a preliminary discussion between the Dalai Lama and a Jewish contingent the year before in New Jersey. The poet and chronicler on the trip to Dharamsala was Dr. Lieberman's friend Rodger Kamenetz, and the eight distinguished Jews included Mr. Waldoks and representatives from all over the Jewish doctrinal map: Orthodox and Reconstructionist rabbis, rabbis active in Jewish renewal and professors of religious studies and modern Hebrew thought. As implausible as that meeting in the Tibetan enclave in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh sounds, the two sides -- Buddhist and Jewish -- were drawn together by what was at first an almost impalpable sense of correspondence between their traditions and by the real need for the group experiencing a new diaspora to learn something of the arts of survival from a very old diaspora. In 1959, when the Dalai Lama left Tibet for his refuge in Dharamsala, the Chinese had already occupied his native land for nine years. In their continuing hold on Tibet, they have systematically destroyed its monasteries and temples, imprisoned and executed its people and encouraged the settlement there of ethnic Chinese. "All told," Mr. Kamenetz writes in "The Jew in the Lotus," "an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of the occupation." It has been the Dalai Lama's task to preserve his gentle religion not only against the predations of the Chinese Army but also against the anger of Tibetans living in exile, to prevent Tibetan resistance from becoming merely political and thereby losing the soul of his people's identity. The Jews who traveled to Dharamsala, particularly those from the United States, were confronting a different side of the same problem. In America, the spirituality of Judaism has been depleted by the very adaptability of its people, by their increasing secularism. Mr. Kamenetz, who teaches English at Louisiana State University, speaks for many when he says: "The house of Judaism in North America has not been satisfactorily built -- it does not have a spiritual dimension for many Jews. Too many Jews are like me: our Jewishness has been an inchoate mixture of nostalgia, family feeling, group identification, a smattering of Hebrew, concern for Israel, and so forth." What he believes he witnessed in India and America was a spiritual exile, Jews becoming Buddhists in order to find something the religion of their birth had come to lack. For many readers of "The Jew in the Lotus," the surprise will not be making the acquaintance of the Dalai Lama or his adherents in the enclave called McLeod Ganj in the Himalayan foothills. The surprise will be making the acquaintance of Rabbis Zalman Schachter and Jonathan Omer-Man, who made presentations before the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala on the cabala and Jewish meditation. "Our teachings have been kept secret even from Jews for a long time," Rabbi Schachter said. "So every day, when people get up and say their prayers, there is an exoteric order. But hidden inside the exoteric is the esoteric, the deep attunement, the deep way." Nearly every major religion has developed a tension between its exoteric forms -- accessible to all practitioners -- and its esoteric secrets, which are restricted to a small band of initiates, if only to prevent the misuse of that esoterica. In a series of remarkable discussions, the Dalai Lama and these two learned, ebullient cabalists, Rabbis Schachter and Omer-Man, compare notes on the character of meditation, its structures, rhythms and traditions. To read these chapters is something like walking through a mythic garden, and they are cause for reflection on many subjects, not least of them the shape of human consciousness and what might be called a bending of tradition to such an extent that the richness of its resources becomes inaccessible. "The Jew in the Lotus" is the kind of book that seems, at first glance, to have been written for a carefully delimited audience: Jews, Buddhists and Jewish Buddhists. But that is an illusion. It is really a book for anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying or vulgarizing them. It is a narrative about an extraordinary moment in history, of course, but it is also the chronicle of Rodger Kamenetz's discovery of what he says is a more nourishing Judaism, though anyone who reads "The Jew in the Lotus" as a spiritual autobiography will quickly find that Mr. Kamenetz is uncannily revealing about his religious past and cannily uncommitted about his religious future. Along the way the reader meets many notable people: the Dalai Lama, the profundity of whose presence Mr. Kamenetz finds hard to translate; Ram Dass, a Jewish Buddhist who was once named Richard Alpert; Richard Gere, who says in Dharamsala, "It's not a good idea to argue with poor people"; and Allen Ginsberg. Insights are here for the gathering. I have saved one that was given to Mr. Kamenetz, who is skeptical and, evidently, somewhat irascible, by a lama from Montreal: "You doubt everything else," the lama said. "Why not doubt anger?" Copyright 1997, The New York Times Company.
"A highly entertaining personal account of one man's surprising journey into the mystical heart of Judaism."
"In a series of remarkable discussions, the Dalai Lama and these two learned, ebullient cabalists, Rabbis Schachter and Omer-Man, compare notes on the character of meditation, its structure, rhythms and traditions. To read these chapters is something like walking through a mythic garden. The Jew in the Lotus is the kind of book that seems at first glance, to have been written for a carefully delimited audience: Jews, Buddhists, and Jewish Buddhists. But that is an illusion. It is really a book for anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying or vulgarizing them. It is a narrative about an extraordinary moment in history, of course, but it is also the chronicle of Rodger Kamenetz's discovery of what he says is a more nourishing Judaism..."
"Kamenetz defines and comments upon complex matters with skill, personableness, and a welcome dash of levity."
"Splendidly written from beginning to end, this is a book that might and should be read for the simple pleasure of watching an honest intellect confront its own image...The Jew in the Lotus is a book that should be read and discussed by those interested in the marvelous complexity and resilience of the human soul."
"This is a truly fascinating book-- a challenging, candid, funny, poignant chapter in the education of a man who thought his religion had stopped speaking to his generation. Rodger Kamenetz is a perfect observer of the exemplary drama enacted in the sky-high kingdom of Dharamsala. An undaunted interpreter of complexities and contradictions, not only does he present a spectrum of Jews of profoundly different styles and Buddhists desperate to preserve the Tibetan way against painful odds, but he also conveys quite memorably the intricate inner lives of the Jewish Buddhists who cross forbidden lines, obliterate distinctions, insist they can be more than one thing at a time without loss. I found every page of The Jew in the Lotus enlightening and engrossing. It should be required reading for those of us who, like the author, have a stake in understanding who we are, whose history resonates with ours, and who we could become if we chose to."
"The Jew in the Lotus is a remarkable and important book, articulating a vision of that deep common ground of humanity that even apparently disparate cultures and religions share. And Rodger Kamenetz is a brilliantly elegant prose stylist, so his vision not only touches the mind but that spiritual part of us that is responsive solely to art."
"This fascinating tale of two worlds, the Jewish and the Tibetan, is also a profound discussion of religion, exile, and survival in our time. Rodger Kamenetz has written a spiritual adventure story that brings to life the mystery of connections between seemingly different gods. But this is also a poetic manifesto calling for the creative re-thinking of religion and ritual."
"Rodger Kamenetz's The JEW IN THE LOTUS is ostensibly a fascinating account of a meeting in Dharamsala between Jewish religious leaders and the Dalai Lama. But the book is much more: it's the author's spiritual autobiography, in which he attempts to fuse within himself the two great mystical traditions of Buddhism and Judaism. Kamenetz is a fine writer, with a lovely sense of humor. Indeed, in his search for God, he's taking the path of joy and the reader is enriched by his quest."
"Kamenetz witnesses and reports on a remarkable and historic meeting, his discerning eyes, sensitive ears and deft poet's pen are at the service of the reader who wishes he had come along. He does not miss a nuance of the often tense drama, transmits the elation and the excitement of the journey and chronicles and comments as a representative of the intelligent reader. You will enjoy the multi-dimensional journey he takes you on."
"What a delight that a poet like Rodger Kamenetz got to listen while mystical rabbis met with practical lamas in India. He heard Buddhists learning from Jews the possible futures of Buddhism and Jews learning from Buddhists the possible futures of Judaism. Kamenetz heard the most vivid light shining in their voices; reading him, I could hear the Ultimate Truth saying, 'Sh'ma! Listen!'"
"With the publication of The Jew in the Lotus, the Tibetans will know one more key to the secret of the survival of the Jewish people. As mentioned in Rodger Kamenetz's remarkable account of the fascinating encounter between Tibetan Buddhists and Jewish rabbis and scholars, it is the ability of the Jewish people to remember. And their memory and the memory of the Tibetan people have been enriched by this lively and deeply felt book about how two cultures, separated by geography, are coming together in mutual respect and understanding."
"In a dramatic journey to the East, leaders of two ancient traditions, both of which have known deep suffering and exile, meet to share their storehouses of faith, spiritual wisdom and practicality in topics ranging from angels to cultural survival. The result is a feast of truth sharing, self-examination of lineage, humor and good will."
"I have taken the journey to Dharamsala many times, but never in the unique company described here. For some, the journey in this book will unite their past and present spiritual lives. For others, it will offer a vision of their future."
"With clarity, humor, compassion, and unfailing honesty, Rodger Kamenetz's The Jew in the Lotus tells two stories: the outer story of the historic meeting in Dharamsala India between the Dalai Lama and eight rabbis and Jewish scholars, and the inner story of how Kamenetz explores and deepens his own understanding of Judaism through the "beginner's mind" of shared pilgrimage. Anyone with an interest in Judaism, Tibetan Buddhism, the question of exile, or the fundamental issues that underlie every genuine spiritual path will find much to ponder in this intriguing and engaging book."
"As I read about the historic meeting with the Dalai Lama and the Jewish issues that were raised, I was deeply touched that two great traditions could commune and cross-fertilize each other in this way."
"The Jew in the Lotus is a gripping book about a remarkable journey. Provocative and controversial, this book is sure to stimulate debate about vital questions in Jewish life."
PRAISE FOR "These are grim and meaty poems, carefully crafted and tight. The experiences dealt with are those that break people, but the poems are far from broken. For a slender volume, it is remarkably substantial."
PRAISE FOR "Mr. Kamenetz has become one of the of the most formidable of Jewish voices of American poetry. The Missing Jew is the most significant book of American Jewish poetry to appear this year. .. Mr. Kamenetz recovers Jewishness as a field for discourse, not sentimentalized imagery. In direct and imaginative address, he puts the question of Jewishness under discussion with large parts of honesty and humor."
"Rodger Kamenetz’s poems whirl and shake on the page. He is the poet of the living history of unspeakable names and his book, The Missing Jew, sings with dark with the tales of tough family spirits."
"These are very exciting and original poems about a world that has been written about so many times. These poems are a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew."
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