Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Review and Friday Forum

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Hi Friends,

Hope this finds you well. Lots of good news to share with you today.

Firstly, I’m very pleased by and honored with a nice review of Buy A Ticket from Kristofer Collins at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

“All of it, though, the suffering and joy, the innocence and experience, are in Robinson’s poems all of one piece, a whole cloth, a brilliant heartbreaking tapestry.”

You can read the entire review here.

Also, I’m happy to report that I will be reading from Buy A Ticket as part of Carnegie Mellon’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Friday Forum. The forum will take play on Friday, May 20th at 1pm. Learn more about it here.

Thanks for sharing this news with me. Take good care.

Until next time,
Judy

Artist Profile at Jewish Chronicle

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Hi Friends,

Hope everyone is safe and healthy. I’m pleased to announce that the Jewish Chronicle has run an artist profile on me in lead up to the publication of my new book, Buy A Ticket as well as the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books.

You can read the profile here, as well as see me read on May 14 at 3:15pm during the Festival of Books.

Look forward to seeing some of you there.

With care,

Judy

Artwork Featured on Persimmon Tree

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Hi Friends,

Hope you are as good as can be. I’m pleased to announce that my art has been featured in the Spring edition of Persimmon Tree, an online magazine of the arts by women over sixty. (It also appeared in their recent newsletter.) The Spring edition is entitled Forgetting, and there you will find wonderful prose and poems by a slew of talented writers. I hope you enjoy it. Until next time…

Judy

New Book and Events Are On The Way!

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Hi All,

Happy New Year!

I’m pleased to announce that my new book of poems, Buy a Ticket will be published in early spring. Its publication will also be the catalyst for a string of events and readings to promote and celebrate the book.

Here are a few readings that are already on tap, with more to come:

Saturday, May 14
Pittsburgh Book Festival

Friday, May 20
Carnegie Mellon University/Osher Friday Forum

Tuesday, July 26
Hemingways/Whale Poetry Series

Also, here’s the blurb from the back of the book:

This is a collection of poems about life—its imperfect beauty, its poignance, and the forces that propel it forward. Toggling among life stages—from a child’s recollections of school with its “blue-lined grainy first-grade paper” to an adult’s look back through the eyes of shared reminiscence with a boon companion, these poems resonate with a sense of time’s passage, its transience and elasticity. Grief and disappointment compete with an indomitable will to continue despite setbacks and loss. Whether through the eyes of teenage Holocaust survivor, Dora, who gleans the forest floors in her quest to live, or the “jobless-wounded-welfar-ians” who keep on dreaming of the windfall that will make it all better, the human beings in Judith R. Robinson’s poems may be beaten and bruised by life’s hard knocks—but they are not down for the count.

Stay tuned for more information.

Stay safe!
Judy

The Art of Poetry: An Ekphrastic Evening

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Hi All,

Excited to share a poem that was part of The Art of Poetry: An Ekphrastic Evening put on by the Pittsburgh Society of Artist. More on the event in this PDF, including other poems and artwork.

Take good care!
Judy

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Why A Stick

based on Woman With Stick by Mary Ellen Raneri

I stand before you in full glory of myself.

See my proportioned torso, my sturdy limbs,

The sleekness of my skin.

My body grew full, well- nourished, beautifully shaped.

I would say perfect.

I flowered in tender, sheltered light.

I was loved. I was protected.

But it was as though I slept:  much was kept from me.

Later,  grown, I  stepped out of my blessed sanctuary,

Awakened into a landscape split by want and rage and loathing,

Suffering of innocents without mercy or  explanation.

Shocked,  cowering, I wished to be other than myself:

A rock, a hill, a river, an island in the sea.

But I thought this could not be. 

My flesh rebelled, turned red with fury,

I dwelt in fear for many seasons .

Only under a  sturdy elm I found a measure of peace. 

The leaves of  this majestic  tree rustled with a message:

You are not  the only creature I have offered succor.

Here is my limb, I give it to you. Take it! Lean on it!

It  is stout, it is strong, it is part of me, and I am  part of everything.

Accept  the tragic  beautiful world as it is.  Take it and walk free. 

IMG-1318.jpg
 

Perseverance — A Holocaust Survivor’s Journey

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Hi All,

Please join us to help celebrate the publication of Perseverance: One Holocaust Survivor’s Journey from Poland to America by Lee Goldman Kikel. Via Zoom, Lee will share her father’s incredible journey from the Holocaust to Pittsburgh’s Squirrell Hill, recorded on audiotapes in his later years.

Melvin Goldman seemed to be a typical successful American, living with his family in Squirrel Hill, a multicultural Pittsburgh neighborhood with a large Jewish population. There, he turned his craftsmanship as a jewelry designer into a profitable business and maintained a rosy outlook on life and a generous view of his fellow man.

In the decade before his arrival in the United States in 1950, Mieczyslaw Goldman saw his home destroyed, his family torn apart, his health ruined, and nearly everyone he had ever known murdered in the death camps of the Third Reich. His survival of the years in the ghetto and Auschwitz and his attainment of a somewhat normal life are miraculous. Here, his daughter Lee Goldman Kikel has captured his story from the audio tapes he made decades later.

Wednesday
April 21
1:00pm (EST)

Click here to register for the event.
A Zoom link will be sent the day before this event.

Hope to see you there!

Judy

"Think of Rain" for Poetry Month

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Hi All,

I’m please to share that my poem “Think of Rain” has been included in Shaler North Hills Library’s celebration of Poetry Month. You can read the poem down below, and also read other lovely poems on the library’s Facebook page.

Take good care and until next time.

Judy

Think of Rain

We need not learn
to love the world,
we’re meant to.

Think of rain,
Or speckled birds—
A soaring V of them
Across a fiery sunset.

Think of the nakedness
Of the one you loved
When you were twenty-one.
The perfumed skin, all of it.

Think of a pond full of frogs,
and the sweetness of pears.

Or the Laurels in springtime,
The little waving wildflowers.
Think of a hillside, pink
And tender with them.

Think of a yellow moon, rising.

And your own life,
Think of that.

Questions: Poem and Video at Poetry X Hunger

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Hi All,

I have a new poem, Questions, featured at Poetry X Hunger. You can find the poem down below, or follow the link to read the poem, as well as watch a video of me reading the poem.

Take care,
Judy

Questions
 
What do I know of hunger?
They say the starving dream of food.
I heard Depression era stories
My mother’s painful account: days with nothing to eat.
I confused her with Cinderella.
What do I know of hunger?
They say the starving dream of food.
There were childhood commandments
My father’s admonition: please finish everything on the plate.
There were children in Europe with nothing.
What do I know of hunger?
In dreams I see old lovers, old cities,
I fall from trees and mountains,
Forget exams, speeches, names of others.
They say the starving dream of food.
What is the difference between hunger
And starvation?
A few days, a week or so?
A difference in dreams, perhaps?

Featured in Pittsburgh's City Paper

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Hi All,

I’m excited to say a story was featured in Pittsburgh’s City Paper regarding my paintings and poetry being featured at Pittsburgh’s Holocaust Center. Read the full story here, or view below.

Wishing you all the best,
Judy

• • •

Artist’s paintings and poetry converge to expose the lingering horrors of the Holocaust 

Reckoning with the massacre at Tree of Life is not a quick or easy process. It manifests differently for everyone. For artist Judy Robinson, it meant channeling her grief into both painting and poetry for The Numbers Keep Changing, an exhibit at the Holocaust Center on display through June 24 honoring Jewish identity, and the victims of Tree of Life and the Holocaust.

Robinson, who was born during World War II, says she has always been grateful that she was born in the United States instead of in Europe, where some of her family died in the Holocaust. Her work in this series is a reaction to the Tree of Life shooting, antisemitism, and a continuing pattern of Holocaust denial. Her art helps her to cope with it all, but also serves to remind others to keep these events in their minds. 

“I have felt, as I studied that Holocaust, yes, it is the past. As I continue to study, these things don't go away,” says Robinson. “And what can we do about it except try to inform, try to educate, try to keep things in mind so people don't forget and people don't deny?”

Each of the seven paintings in the series is paired with a poem, which sits in place of a tag or info box. Robinson has painted and written poems her whole life, but only recently thought to combine the two art forms. 

In the poem “1945 Song,” a woman struggles to forgive in the aftermath of the Holocaust. “A slender woman left behind/rising from the wastes of ash, in bright/pleats of internment cloth,” the poem reads. The accompanying painting features a woman in front of a bright blue and yellow background.

Her painting style is reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. Sometimes the figures are clear and obvious, and other times a more instinctual reaction to the subject. Robinson dedicated the poem “Wildflowers Cover Everything” to Father Patrick Desbois, a French priest who has spent over 15 years uncovering thousands of previously unknown sites of Jewish execution in former Soviet Union territories. The title of the exhibit comes from the rise of the death toll long after the end of the Holocaust.

“There's all these fields and fields of bodies buried and he found them,” says Robinson. “It's startling new evidence of the horrors of the Holocaust. The wildflowers do cover everything.”

One painting and poem set, “El Kiddush Hashem; A Prayer More Than a Poem” stands out, particularly for its obvious tribute to the victims of Tree of Life. The paintings depict all 11 victims of the shooting; the ones with more detailed faces are the ones Robinson knew personally. Robinson has gone to the Temple all her life, as did her parents and grandparents. The poem lists the names of all the victims and praises them as martyrs. “You are gone from us, yet you remain with us. All who come after us will know you.”

The Center’s main focus is to provide programming that informs students, teachers, and anyone interested in learning about the history of the Holocaust. It’s an especially important time for this kind of education, when there are still people who actively deny that the Holocaust happened, or that it’s in any way connected to present-day antisemitism. 

“It's a horrible thing to realize what happened, and I get maybe they don't even mean harm by denying, although many of them do,” says Robinson. “There is this push to deny it all. It's important to me and to the people of the Holocaust Center that that doesn't happen.”

From May 1-7, the Holocaust Center will hold a series of events for Yom HaShoah, the international Holocaust remembrance week, including the Waldman Arts and Writing student competition award ceremony, a commemoration tied in with the Center’s 2019 theme of Women and the Holocaust, and a staging of The Soap Myth starring Ed Asner. 

Robinson hopes that her paintings provide a constant reminder of past and present dangers of antisemitism. “[I hope] that you have in your own mind now some more information that gives you some sense of what's right and what's wrong, so when you're confronted or you see this kind of hate that's in the world or people who deny the past, that you'll know better.”

El Kaddush Hashem; A Prayer more than a Poem

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El Kaddush Hashem; A Prayer more than a Poem

Rabbi’s 
Akiva, Trad-yon, BenBava, Hanasi, Gadol, Shamua, ben Dama, Hakinae, Gamliel, Yesivav (the scribe).

Joyce Feinberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, Irving Younger. 

Burned, flayed, beheaded, slaughtered, for the sake of their faith, Judaism.

El Kaddush Hashem: they Died as Martyrs,
Taken from this plain of struggle and pain
While actively serving God:
This is the highest elevation of a life
Spent on earth. They will be forever
The most closely bound to God, 
Sheltered, cradled, held tight!
They are ours: the martyrs
who will be remembered 
by shattered hearts but unbroken spirits;
by all who come after us, forever:
the beautiful, blessed nashamas of

Feinberg, Gottfried, Mallinger, Rabinowitz, 
Rosenthal, Rosenthal, Simon, Simon, 
Stein, Wax, Younger. 

You are gone from us, yet you remain with us.
All who come after us will know you.
All will worship you eternally.
You diedEl Kaddush Hashem: 
Shalom, Al Mish Ka Voe, rest in peace. 

Amen.

--Judith R. Robinson