About this book
The Broken Heart is the Master Key is a masterpiece. The poems in Baruch November’s new collection have been honed by years of skilled craft, love, and longing for connection — whether with a woman with chestnut hair or with the Divine. November here infuses the dreams of his younger poetic self with the clear, sometimes sharp realism of a man who has known loss yet still embraces the world with open arms. The result is a unique Hasidic dance, a lyrical niggun that lingers in our hearts long after the last page.
“God works through the fires in the collection, inviting us to reflect on our own spiritual journeys… these poems … are courageous and vulnerable, unlocking painful and uplifting truths.”
—Jewish Book Council
About the Author
Baruch November’s new book of poems, The Broken Heart is the Master Key, features “After Esav,” a poem nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2019, November’s previous book of poems, Bar Mitzvah Dreams, was released, and Stephen Dobyns called the book “one of the best he had recently read.” An earlier collection of poems by Baruch, Dry Nectars of Plenty, won BigCityLit’s chapbook contest. Thomas Lux proclaimed that the poems inside it were by “a poet of talent, urgency, and a large and aching heart.” November’s works have been featured in Lumina, Paterson Literary Review, Tiferet Journal, NewMyths.com, and the Forward. He serves as a host and organizer of the Jewish Poetry Reading Series. It has featured such poets as Linda Pastan, Grace Schulman, and Alicia Ostriker. For two decades, Baruch November has taught courses in Shakespeare, Multicultural American Literature, poetry, fiction, and writing at Touro University in Manhattan. He has lived in many cities across the United States but currently resides in Washington Heights, New York.
Advance Praise
The plain spoken yet musically resonant poems of Baruch November’s collection, The Broken Heart is the Master Key, occupy a kind of middle zone between what November calls, “the ways of sorrow, the directions of loss—” and “the beautiful logic of belief.” While spiritual aspiration haunts nearly every line of every poem, the sacred promise of it grows more vivid, the more it’s complicated, blocked, thwarted or deferred by the body and its profane yet inescapable desires. With a sort of Talmudic passion for clarity and sensitivity to paradox, and a joyous love of low and high brow culture, Baruch brings the whole heterogeneous self to bear on what it means to be an American-Jew at this particular moment of our history.
—Alan Shapiro, author of Reel to Reel, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Night of the Republic, finalist for both the National Book Award and the International Griffin Prize
“Why are you not married?/The rabbis of my early days/demand of me/in my raging dreams.” And so begins Baruch November’s searing and introspective new poetry collection that grapples with the weight of romantic misfortunes, family expectations, holy teachings, and a sense of oneness. Can a lonely heart remain righteous and whole, or is it doomed to be buried beneath a “night/of a billion/careless stars”? Whether in the classroom, a synagogue, or a party for Jewish singles, November’s wise yet well-rooted poems refuse to pull punches or shy away from life’s most difficult questions. I am grateful for this. For while The Broken Heart is the Master Key does not claim to have all the answers, it nevertheless unlocks a door that breaks through darkness and draws us nearer to light.
—Jared Harél, author of Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Winner of the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry
In Baruch November’s poems, sudden illuminations rise like proverbs to be remembered. A grandmother “Bracha mastered the parting /of childhood darkness;” an American immigrant to Israel who lost his wife “knew the ways of sorrow,/ the directions of loss—/ a perfect guide/ for the land.” And in moments of redemption, we can read the figure of the poet himself who… teaches us that The Broken Heart is the Master Key.
— Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022
“God works through the fires in the collection, inviting us to reflect on our own spiritual journeys… these poems … are courageous and vulnerable, unlocking painful and uplifting truths.”
—Jewish Book Council
Introduction by Alicia Ostriker
Introduction
by Alicia Ostriker
At the very start of this semi-autobiographical volume we find the place of the split. “Why are you not married” is the opening line of the opening poem. Threaded through the book, in mostly short-line poems whose language is at once plain in phrasing and lyrical in feeling, is the answer to that question: one failed romance or crush after another, done in tones of nostalgia and regret. And the poet is always looking for a woman, while “She’s always revving/her silver convertible,/ roof down, racing/away from me.”
The other half of the split centers on kin and on the material world of flesh, food, clothing, dancing, towns and cities, shuls and cafes, evocatively inhabited by types like the “old butcher confessing/ that he doesn’t need the messiah,” he’d rather hear his long-dead father sing the blessings. Two roads, like Frost’s, one romantic and spiritual, one earthy and objective? Yes. But unlike Frost, November chooses both. Great grandma Bracha, seamstress whose name means blessing, sews “a yellow dress, /like an overturned buttercup /weaved with moonlight.” And all his worlds are straddled by the Baal Shem Tov, with a Jewishness layered by Yiddishkeit and mysticism.
Many Jewish poets steer away from G-d. Not November, for whom “wherever you go,/ every particle is just/ the presence/of G-d. And standing alone is the sentence fragment questioning, “How to make G-d happy/ a man alone, without children.” I inhaled when I read that bit, for “a man alone, without children” is the poet; and is also G-d. Make what you will of it. My own conclusion is that the poet, and the poet’s G-d, are lonely for the Shekhinah. Perhaps she will come out of hiding in November’s next book. Perhaps she is present. semi-recognizable, in all those disappearing women?
Alicia Ostriker is author of The Holy and Broken Bliss and former poet laureate of New York State.
"After Esav"
After Esav
Why are you not married?
the rabbis of my early days
demand of me
in my raging dreams.
Like the gatherers of old,
I have scavenged
the world for answers,
reassured myself
the problem is not
in the plainness
of my reflection
or the burning color
of my hair— the color of
that ancient hunter,
that great sinner
whose body was lust-driven,
and who bit his brother’s neck
when they embraced,
only to find it made of marble
for that instant
and come away
as hungry as ever.
"Lives upon Lives"
Lives upon Lives
Contractors affix buildings on top
of buildings in Jerusalem.
Occupants below must clear out
for all the years it takes
to finish adding
to sandstone structures.
I have lived lives upon lives.
I want to go back
to when I was certain—it was my twenties.
I dismissed many great women.
Someone greater was always coming along.
I have been an inept architect.
I built for one who does not live
with the truth of others.
I built for starlight,
not shelter.
I built for ghosts
of those never born.
I built a hollow home
for howling winds.
I built a demise
in waiting
and thought it
a masterpiece
towering over
the settled lives
of others.
"An Event for Jewish Singles"
An Event for Jewish Singles
Other people know how
to enjoy themselves.
I am a miserable guest,
especially at these parties
where spinning asteroids
collide or veer off
on their own: you know, lonely
Strangers attempting to meet
over terrible music—
but it turns into a couple hours
where I stare at my phone,
the cedar wood ceiling,
or pray against my self-
destruction.
Or I rewind the night
because I can in a poem
and stay home, listen
to the glowing horn
of Miles Davis, read
a mystical tract
about how much soul
actually needs body
and body needs soul.
I learn how G-d needs
even me, for nothing
could have been created
for the sake of nothing.
"The Loudest Lanuage"
The Loudest Language
The broken heart is the master key,
said the Baal Shem Tov.
Despair is the loudest language
in all worlds.
Ask the mother of the stolen seven-year-old girl.
Ask the widowed wives still in love.
Ask the newly dead as they look down.
Ask the soldier missing both arms.
The broken heart is the master key,
said the Chassidic master
to the shofar blower who lost
his page of mystical notations
& thought he had failed his task—
having blasted notes
like a simple,
broken man.
