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By Charles Rammelkamp
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An imaginative recreation of Magdalena Ball’s great-grandmother’s life, from migrating, alone, at the age of fourteen, at the beginning of the twentieth century, from Russia to New York, prompted by the terror of pogroms, through her life of immigrant hardship, the grueling twelve-hour days in the garment-worker sweatshops, escaping certain death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster in March of 1911 by the sheer dumb luck of not going to work that day (for which she was fired), living through the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (“La Grippe”), and more, including a violent, abusive husband, this vivid, lyrical sequence feels like an act of love as much as the necessary preservation of a life before it disappears into the oblivion of time. Its lessons and examples of quiet courage in the face of crushing despair elevate this collection to something verging on the heroic.
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Though she never met Rivka in her lifetime – already dead by the time of Magdalena Ball’s birth – the affectionate nickname (“Bobish” is a variation on the Yiddish word for grandma, “Bubbe”) tells the reader how vital the family connection is. Ball spells this out in the very second poem of the collection, “Footprints,” in which writes:
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Why go so far
leave behind everything
mother, father, siblings, home
forever
time being what it was
back then.
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Later in the poem she explicitly defines the project: “I wanted to know what it felt like / and you, Bobish / you needed to tell me / even after so many years.” Even though Rivka “kept her head low / left few footprints,” her great-granddaughter uses her prodigious imagination to bring her ancestor vividly back to life.
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The story begins in “The Pale of Settlement,” the area of the Russian Empire to which Jews were banished, poverty-stricken towns (shtetls) that were subject to pogroms, campaigns of violence orchestrated by groups like The Black Hundreds, an extremist rightwing group devoted to the Tsar.
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Brutal signs were everywhere
blood, skin, broken bodies
lintel hanging off windows.
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Her mother gave her a bag of coins
the brass samovar, told her to pack
quickly.
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And so, at the age of fourteen, Rivka goes alone, across the ocean, in steerage (Zwischendeck) promising to send back money, but with so little control over her destiny. (“Ocean Mandala”: “When she earned enough she would // send a ticket for her parents / if she could find them again.”) This first section is titled “Arrival,” and sets the conditions. “Two kopeks” begins:
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Seven of them one room
grandparents crouched small alcove below
broken stove no daylight.
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Ball goes on to describe the constant trauma of the pogroms (“The piano burned in the first pogrom”) and the desperate search for a solution, for escape. She writes in “Taken with Time”:
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the worn trajectory of terror
voices in the distance, banging, barking
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the doppler as they moved closer
sound increasing in pitch
like a freight train of atrocities.
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Poverty and pariahhood bring other obstacles as well; what we call being “illegal” in today’s discussions of immigration policies. Ball explains in “Double Migrant”:
Poverty and pariahhood bring other obstacles as well; what we call being “illegal” in today’s discussions of immigration policies. Ball explains in “Double Migrant”:
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Before she left the largest
ghetto in the word
a small woman on a big ship
she was already a migrant
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in the margins of legality
crouching in the space
between integration
and segregation
watching, waiting.
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Ball occasionally breaks up her vivid, allusive, short-lined verse with longer, prose-like pieces such as “Mother of Exiles,” in which Rivka encounters the Statue of Liberty and reflects on her status and future, as well in selections like “Manhattan, Assembly District 8,” from the second section, a description of upper Manhattan, in which Rivka finds work at the Shirtwaist Factory.
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In the second section, “Azure,” Rivka is more or less settled in her new life, trying to adjust while at the same time hang on to her previous identity – her “Mamaloshen,” “mother tongue.”
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From the very first poem, “A Voice to Shatter Glass,” Rivka has been described as a kind of fortune teller, a seer, reader of tea leaves, diviner of the future. We see it again in “Divination,” which foretells her lucky escape from the factory fire.
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Poems like “Azure,” “Cairn,” “A Devout Child” describe her nostalgic homesickness for the imagined comforts of that homeland from which, we know, she fled for good reason.
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In the third section, “Fish Smoker,” Rivka meets her husband, for better or worse but mainly worse. “Third Avenue EL,” “Peddlers,” “Bear of a Man” vividly portray the conditions of her New York life and the man she marries. “He was studying to become a Rabbi / until he lost his faith.” “La Grippe” is another prose piece that describes the Spanish Flu, its effects and stigma for immigrants accused of being responsible for bringing the plague to America. We see her own fate at the shirtwaist factory, in “Potatoes”: “She bent over, her young back hunched as she / leaned into the machine trying to forget the pain / that followed her like a faithful dog / the rest of her life…”
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Ball imagines Rivka’s grim New York family life (“Silence and Monkeys,” “Love Wounds,” “Words and Bullets”) but also some of the simple pleasures (“Tar Beach (Kelly Street),” “Nickel Empire,” “Spoons”), and then the Second World War breaks out, and her anxieties about the family left behind torture her. “Operation Barbarossa,” “Memorial Fountain (Bryant Park),” and “News from the Old World” hint at the tragedies of the Holocaust.
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The final section of Bobish, “Tikkun Olam,” suggests a kind of redemption. Invoking the Zohar and other mystical Jewish traditions, Ball again taps into Rivka’s “otherworldly” persona. Tikkun Olam means “repairing the world.” It’s central to the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, so the redemption Ball writes about goes beyond the personal, to the universal.
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Bobish certainly succeeds in bringing Magdalena Ball’s great-grandmother vividly back to life. As she writes in “The Consequences of Silence,” she succeeds in her quest to “Unstitch the moment connecting her to me,” a lovely allusion to Rivka as a seamstress but also suggesting the fabric that is a family. Bobish is compelling and poignant, a true tour de force.
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You can find the book here: Bobish
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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books and Catastroika from Apprentice House.
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North of Oxford 