Judy Kronenfeld and Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements!
Judy Kronenfeld’s fifth full-length book of poetry, and seventh collection, Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle) came out in 2022. Previous books include Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (2nd ed, Antrim House, 2012). Her poems have appeared in more than four dozen anthologies and in many journals including Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One Art, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad and Your Daily Poem.
A Stanford PhD in English, Judy has also published short stories, creative nonfiction, and criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998)—a rather muckraking book challenging poststructuralist Shakespeare criticism on historical and linguistic grounds. She is a four-time Pushcart nominee and has also been nominated for Best of the Net and serves as an Associate Editor of Poemeleon.
Judy taught English Literature at UC Riverside, UC Irvine and Purdue University, and is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, UC Riverside, having retired in 2009 after more than two decades teaching there. She has attempted, but is never sure she has succeeded at crossing the boundary between the divided and distinguished worlds of academic criticism and creative writing. A native New Yorker, raised in the Bronx, Judy has lived most of her life in Riverside, California, with her anthropologist husband. Their middle-aged children and four grandchildren live (way too!) far away in Maryland.
By Sharon Waller Knutson
Eight decades of learning life’s lessons paid off for Judy Kronenfeld in her latest poetry collection,” Oh Memory You Unlocked Cabinets of Amazement” (Bamboo Dart Press 2024) as she takes a look back at her childhood and parents with wise eyes from a different perspective than when she lived the life. These charming stories delighted and enlightened me as she shares her insight and past life with readers. I have chosen five favorites from her collection to showcase.
Trust
I’m four or five, lying on my father’s back, grasping his shoulders,
my belly trembling with fear and excitement as he asks
Are you holding on tight? my eyes almost shut
against the black wool of his collar where snowflakes
touch down, their shapes visible for a millisecond, before they
melt. Then the nose of our Flexible Flyer tips,
its red runners skim the icy plowed snow
on the steepest, most knee-buckling hill in our Bronx neighborhood,
so fast I can scarcely count one-Mississippi
before we zip over the intersection at the bottom, with hardly
a glance left, glance right—yesterday’s blizzard
having all-at-once marked it for play—and bounce roughly
to a stop.
Seven decades ago, and I can’t reclaim the warm shivers of refuge
and thrill as I whooshed through the air on your back,
Dad, though I know I felt them—my trust so whole,
I barely knew the word.
Reader, do you almost expect a downfall now
(unlike that stirring descent) because these days
we know too much about fathers who destroy? whose acts
make stomachs revolt, and sex seem sick at the root?
Oh, Dad, even when—after my Age of Deification—I thought
you had faults—how paltry they were...
Elated, you yelled out my Yiddish nickname—
when you spotted me on the bus after the grade-school
field trip—and made me blush, and pretend I wasn’t
your daughter. You shouted at me, once,
during seventh grade, when we had so little money,
and I’d spent a dollar and a quarter on an enticing
tube of frost-blue eye-shadow. You always added
the immigrant’s extra pinch of ingratiation
to conversations with customers,
and the American-born, and I wanted to hide.
You sent lugubrious tapes about how much
you missed your only child when I moved
3000 miles away.
Excessiveness, perhaps, in the ledgers of affection
and concern—or my minuses.
You’ve left me a lived example of simple
goodness, patient and reliable as crocuses
unfolding even in the snow of early spring.
You’ve gifted me the memory of your face radiant
with joy whenever I entered a room you were in.
I mourn for all those daughters whose legacy
is bitterness on the tongue, self-hate like acid
in the throat. I mourn for all those daughters
who had to expunge their instinctive love,
and turn their hearts into grey fists.
Getting It
We girls were given the Kotex
brochures in fifth-grade Hygiene,
with instructions to deliver them
to our mothers. Mine disappeared
once in my mother’s hands. Not
a word was spoken—
if the pamphlet couldn’t be found,
menarche might not happen. We knew
everything that mattered in it, anyway—
though the diagram of the Fallopian Tubes
like crab pincers with caches of stolen eggs
might have been news.
We’d read The Diary of Anne Frank
and mourned, but also longed
for the “sweet pain” of womanhood
she described. Oh, the intense competition
for membership in the secret sorority,
the fear of being among those
not yet hazed! Even the metal hooks—
which fastened the ends of the Kotex pads
to those ugly elastic belts—
that we heard dug into the tender
spot just above the butt cheeks,
seemed less like mortifiers
of the flesh, than a badge
and pledge of some power
not yet fully understood.
My mother choked back tears
when my visitor at last arrived,
and kissed me as if I’d won
an award. Dad sat close to me
in a chair, while I writhed on the couch—
cramp-shocked and soured
on “becoming a young lady”—
and told me tales of valiant sisters
and old girlfriends
who triumphed over it.
Results
After dropping gutter ball upon gutter ball,
my mother, in her skinny eighties,
who’d never bowled or played a sport
in her long, immigrant life, got up for her last
try, following our visiting son’s sixth or seventh
spare. Desperate for something to do
in our town, he’d told us and his grandparents
bowling would be fun.
So Mom stood at the lane in the Grasshoppers flats
she hadn’t exchanged for bowling shoes,
holding the ball in both hands, fingers
avoiding the holes, then set it down,
with a little nudge.
The ball began to roll with preternatural
slowness; it seemed it might take eternity
for her turn to be done.
It was infinitely slower than the arc
of the moral universe, but surprisingly
steady. Still, we could have placed bets
on inertia or friction while waiting—until
it hit the head pin at the magic angle,
and as we gaped, and mother clapped
her hands together, mesmerized,
one pin after another languidly
lost balance, tripping a brother,
until they all lay felled like a forest
during a volcanic eruption, and the scoreboard
lit up.
What were the odds? One to ten thousand?
It felt like an oppressed
peasant winning the presidency
in some third-world country.
My mother’s smile looked shy,
but secretly victorious as a Valhalla warrior’s.
And Dad and Gramps and Dan and I
whooped and hooted for her joy.
The Women of My Mother’s Immigrant Generation
Their loose teeth fell out.
Their varicose veins thickened
and spread
but they didn’t seek redress.
They said, once you go
to those doctors, they’ll never
leave you alone.
They sat out heart attacks alone
in the dark.
Their legacies:
a bridge of yellowed teeth
wrapped in a tissue
a single candlestick
of soft-looking brass
one of a pair cast
in the 19th century
a hundred-year old
wooden spoon
a history that can never be
completely pieced
by their progeny—
with black cloudy gaps
like the eye doctor’s
graph paper grid
as seen by those
with disappearing vision.
The Lost Past within the Past
I remember my long-gone mother’s fears—
how she huddled us home from the subway stop
in the ominous night, furtive as the mugger she dreaded;
how she dipped only her feet in the broad foam
apron of the sea, and leapt back
when a far wave reared. How she always anticipated
the dire turns of fate that scared her—
like having her daughter pulled under
by “wild beast” girls up the street,
and ruined (in the nineteenth century sense).
She never quite melted into my birthright
pot, unlike her youngest brother,
who gently chided her for babying me
too much. He’d make a quiet ceremony
of reading my essays for school—eyes beaming
the adult attention that said I was
a person—while I waited, breathless,
for his sanction.
Yet today, I keep hearing his inconsolable moan,
thirty years ago, when she died, “Stella, the starke,
Stella, the starke,”—her name, strangely joined
with strong. Was her strength to have survived
the light-annihilating stroke, the months
of recuperation lying monument-still,
the second stroke, and then—almost—
surgery for the broken hip?
Or was my uncle’s cry a door I ignored,
that might have opened to the buried past
none of his generation ever shared with us
(we, the American kids, never asked)—
to Vienna, once their home, to Vienna abandoned,
to the Olympic, sister vessel of the Titanic, heading towards
New York, carrying the whole family away from
the coming darkness, to my uncle, a pre-teen barely out
of sailor suits, and my mother, his big sister,
a grown woman ten years older—not yet
a greenhorn?
Could she once have moved with head unbowed,
not merely long-suffering, but brave,
“Stella, the strong”? I wish I had asked.
Did she clasp her kid brother in a fierce hug
as their ship rose and sank on gray
Atlantic waves, and he sobbed?
Did she say It’s an adventure, Izzy,
but you’re safe! and lead him to the promenade
where the wind-driven spray
blew in their faces?
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