Origin Stories - Judy Kronenfeld

    Musical Surprise
    by Judy Kronenfeld

    All through the klezmer concert 
    at the synagogue, all through the wailing, laughing,
    talk-back violin, the clarinet cavorting
    and kazatski-ing, and climbing up to cry
    from the rooftops, the cymbals shushing and tsk-ing, 
    the sax keening and weeping its ecstasy  
    of prayer, my dead father and mother sit down beside me,
    and my unmet father’s sister who never escaped
    Germany, and my mother’s parents
    who died before I was born, and their parents
    before that—all of them silently kvetching, kibitzing
    groaning, singing, all the way 
    back.   

    First published in Poetica Magazine: Contemporary Jewish Writing

Origin Stories – Musical Surprise

The klezmer concert this poem responds to occurred at a nearby synagogue which my parents belonged to in their retirement, and which my husband and I have attended, much more sporadically, in recent years. This immersive music—with its interwoven folk and liturgical motifs, its particular instrumentation, and its performance in a place I associated with my long-gone parents, a place where remembering is a constant theme—called out and spoke to my identification with my past, my ancestry, in a way that felt almost mystical. I felt an unusual, poignant, and calm sense of belonging, of closeness, of taking that past into myself. I knew this feeling would lead to a poem, To realize that poem, I later listened to more klezmer music on the internet—still under the enchantment of the concert—searching out the flavors of the instruments I had heard, closing my eyes and letting words come that would describe those instrumental voices. The descriptions summoned by the music wound up suggesting something more—the expressiveness and experiences of a people and a culture as perceived through my ears. “Musical Surprise” became the first poem of my fifth book, Groaning and Singing.

BIO

Judy Kronenfeld’s fifth full-length book of poetry, Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle) came out in 2022. Previous collections include Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012) and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (2^nd ed. Antrim House, 2012), winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies (including one textbook) and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Judy is a more occasional writer of short fiction and nonfiction, and—in another life—published a dozen articles on English Renaissance and other literatures in various scholarly journals, and wrote a book on Shakespeare and Shakespeare criticism –KING LEAR and the Naked Truth (Duke UP, 1998). She is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside, and lives in Riverside, California, with her anthropologist husband. They have two far-flung middle-aged children and four grandchildren.

WEBSITE: https://judykronenfeld.com

https://www.facebook.com/judy.kronenfeld

https://www.facebook.com/JKronenfeld/ (page for my fourth book, Bird Flying through the Banquet)