About this book
it’s the Sabbath …
and my own child is sifting sand from sand on a summer morning
so indescribably beautiful you can’t help but grieve
The preciousness and resilience of Judaism lies within the effort of its adherents to hold both beauty and grief, even when the latter seems overpowering. And overpowering it has been time and again for the family of Jews around the world; for every individual family trying to make it through a “silent dark of healing.”
The poems in Phil Terman’s anthology delicately balance between the universalist and particular, between shtetl and suburbia, tenderness and tacheles, between unspoken names and those lovingly recorded. Most of all, these stellar and masterfully crafted poems are a testament to continuation against the backdrop of loss; a poetic Yizkor, an inventory of Jewish life.
Advance Praise
In Philip Terman’s The Whole Mishpocha we are invited into a family of poems that are haimish—warm deeply Jewish and rooted in a rural western Pennsylvania landscape where Jews have made themselves at home with stubborn self-determination. He is equally at home in the mythos of the Jewish thing—the rabbis and prophets and prayers and books that open like wings—or are they newspapers—the sacred and mundane live in this book side by side as rhymes. The awe is down to earth: the holy moment is not in the synagogue but walking out with his father a “man made of meat and potatoes.” A simple object—like his grandfather the fruit peddler’s ancient scale that hangs now in his kitchen window becomes “a hinge creaking into another world.” The way love is scaled in this poetry takes us into Terman’s world —so similar to ours, but entirely lit by love.
—Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew and The Jew in the Lotus
The Whole Mishpocha gathers the Jewish-themed poems of an accomplished poet who has been producing memorable work on the Jewish-American experience for decades. These poems movingly celebrate the quirky and endearing family members and friends who have passed the Jewish tradition down to Terman. At the same time, the poet honors his restlessness, giving voice to bittersweet questions on faith and loss. I have long admired Terman’s exceptional poems for their Jewish ethos, beautiful lyricism, and emotional risk taking.
—Yehoshua November, author of Two Worlds Exist and God’s Optimism
I love the stuff of Philip Terman’s poetry: the imagined meeting of “Shmuel and Malka” (the speaker’s grandparents) and “our child’s Chinese birth parents . . . at a café somewhere between the Pale/ of Settlement and central-rural China”; “the blintzes at Corky and Lenny’s” as solid evidence when “My Mother Argues with Ecclesiastes;” how the speaker of “Bernie Could Have Been My Father” muses “I could have /learned my bar mitzvah lesson in the backseat /of his Lincoln town car on the way to the track.” Movingly, lovingly, and often hilariously, Terman presents the America he and I grew up in: a place containing the last remnants of the lost world of Eastern European Jews. Who else would describe the ecstasy of spring by saying, “Moses had his Sinai and we have/ the brief life of this dogwood” would use Yiddish—“In the next world . . . will we speak the language that should have been our own”—as a figure for poetry itself?
—Jacqueline Osherow, author of Divine Ratios.
“The speaker in this stellar first collection seems to carry himself without skin, absorbing the particulars of the human struggle in its many dogged and eloquent forms and recording it with the capacious empathy of a saint or a mystic.”
—Leslie Ullman, Poetry Magazine speaking of The House of Sages
About the Author
Philip Terman’s most recent books of poetry are My Blossoming Everything (Saddle Road Press, 2024), This Crazy Devotion (Broadstone, 2020), Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House, 2015) and, as co-translator, Tango Beneath a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected poems of Riad Saleh Hussein (Bitter Oleander, 2021). His poems and essays have appeared in journals, including Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Tikkun, The Georgia Review and Poetry International, and anthologies, including The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, 101 Poets for the Next Millennium, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and Joyful Noise: An Anthology of Spiritual Literature, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine. Retired from Clarion University, he served as co-director of the Chautauqua Writers Festival for 14 years. Currently, he directs The Bridge Literary Arts Center in Venango County, PA and is co-curator the Jewish Poetry Reading Series, sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Buffalo. Recipient of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience, Terman conducts poetry workshops and coaches writing hither and yon. He has collaborated with composers, visual artists, and performs his poetry with the jazz band Catro. https://philipterman.my.canva.site
‘My Ukrainian-Jewish Grandparents and Our Chinese Child’s Birth Parents Meet at a Café and Discuss Her Future’
Schmuel and Malka and our child’s
Chinese birth parents are sipping tea
at a café somewhere between the Pale
of Settlement and central-rural China.
They speak in signs and gestures, swirling
arms like dancers, shaping fingers into figures,
standing up and swaying, contorting bodies
to emphasize some obscure point, even
employing pauses and long silences to further
the conversation. The men gesture:
my grandfather’s yarmulke is as black
as I imagine our child’s birth father’s hair.
The women continue to fill their husband’s cups
and stare off into the distance.
The men agree on the major issue:
each will have to sacrifice their darlings,
their children—send them away, across
miles of land and ocean, into a realm further
and more unfamiliar than they could understand
even in their own tongue, a place perhaps
like those faraway and never-never lands
in the stories of each of their childhoods:
palace on a cloud, temple beyond the stars,
Jerusalem or Shangri-la. It’s better
to think of that strange country this way
than to ponder the potential dangers—
strangers in strange lands, years of forced labor,
the poverty and destitution they themselves
know something about, each in their own way,
these farmers and peddlers, each of them know
dark to dark. Their gestures are more subtle
and sophisticated now, they even forget
and sometimes break out into their Yiddish
and Mandarin, which sounds as exotic
as a gathering of multicolored birds
singing through the tea’s steam.
The bill, which is grief, arrives.
They agree to split it.
They accompany each other to the gate
that opens out into their separate centuries.
Through unfathomable signs, they gesture to meet again.
‘Albert Einstein at the Soup Kitchen’
Do I look like anyone? he asks,
as he swoops the long spoon into the peas,
lifts it a few inches
and holds it steady to pour
onto the tray of the next famished mouth,
shouts to George for more
as his supply empties down.
I’m the bread and donut man
in this assembly line of volunteers
who gather for our three-hour
of weekly service and socialism:
Jose the finger-pointing Filipino
who pours the punch and repeats:
The wages of sin is death
and only reads Paradise from the Comedy,
for his description of heaven, he says, and light;
Jake the Buddhist, who scrapes the dishes
as they are returned, saves whatever
appears untouched for someone else’s
insatiable hunger;
Sal, who tells me he was on the other side
of the line, meaning he was one of the thousand
who form every morning single-file around this Church
of the Apostles, up 9th Avenue and around
28th Street,
like the snake, he chants,
looking out the window beyond Crack Park,
cursed above the beasts of the city
to eat dust all the days of its life.
And their eyes are filled with dust,
drugged and sleepy,
bodies stiff from sidewalk cardboard sofas.
The peaman, it turns out, looks like Albert Einstein,
the shaggy white hair and white mustache,
pronounced nose and dark sad eyes.
I’m an actor, he explains. They pay me to look like the genius.
He shows me his card: E=mc2.
Equity equals many characters,
and I’m honored to be near even the resemblance of the man—
not because I understand relativity
and the contradicting theories of light,
but because of how steady he is with a spoon,
filling each helping to the brim,
as if each portion should be equal
and abundant.
‘Isaiah at Rest’
All day I’ve been reading Isaiah,
who I imagine to be ordinary,
in love with a woman who like you
grows and then cooks the vegetables
and only cares about a happy life.
Ye shall be confounded for the gardens
that ye have chosen doesn’t apply to her,
he meant it in a more rhetorical way.
And when he arrives home late, his voice
gone, his throat aching, feet scarred
and scratched from all the hard roads,
she puts in front of him a bowl
of last season’s harvest: potatoes, tomatoes,
carrots, onions, basil, fennel, dill.
It tastes in his mouth not as the tongue
of fire devours the stubble
or as the dry grasses sinketh down in the flame
but more flavorful of their earth
than the live coals that touched his lips
and took away his iniquities. He loosens
the girdle of righteousness from his waist,
and takes off completely the girdle
of faithfulness from his loins,
being in any case more full
of the knowledge of his sources.
All flesh is grass, he whispers
into her ear, and the smell
of his fiery breath
makes her asks him to whisper it
again.
Book Reviews
“The Whole Mishpocha: New and Selected Jewish Poems, 1998 – 2023″ reviewed by Jewish Book Council , Joshua Gottlieb-Miller – February 2, 2026
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-whole-mishpocha-new-and-selected-jewish-poems-1998-2023
