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OGINSKI STREET
New and Selected Poems

Praise for Anna Halberstadt

Anna Halberstadt’s Vilnius Diary kept me reading late into the night. With the concentrated precision of poetry, it has also the richness of a novel and the intimacy of memoir.  One poem leads to the next with addictive power, moving from childhood in Lithuania to her later life in New York by way of Moscow, Vienna, and Rome.  Memory, loss, and immigration are captured in poignant images: the print of cat’s paws in the dust of an attic in Vilnius, a knitted cap clutched in white-knuckled hands at the Moscow airport, buildings in Rome “peeling and bruised like old hand-made shoes,” a grandfather’s grave buried in beer cans in the vandalized Jewish cemetery of Kaunas, pigeons huddling on a New York street “like small-time drug pushers.”  There’s an occasional lyrical burst of feeling for the natural world, as in “the enormous palace of the evening sky.” Throughout, the poet returns again and again to Vilnius: “provincial, sleepy, magical,”  “Atlantis of disappeared life,” its cobblestones stained with the blood of Jews.  The reader, like the writer, will fall under its spell, haunted by the terrible magic of the city.  Vilnius Diary is impossible to forget.
—Elizabeth Dalton

“The need to forget gradually / turned into a need to remember,” Anna Halberstadt writes in this moving autobiographical collection of poems, which keeps returning to her Jewish childhood in Lithuania, her interim time in Russia, her first hardscrabble years in New York. Vilnius Diary is a fine book of days—scrupulously remembered, refreshingly truthful, deeply astonished.
—Edward Hirsch

History’s a glowing lamp held slightly aloft in Anna Halberstadt’s hand. She guides us wisely, richly, and satirically across continents, tough choices and the gorgeous pithy details of otherwise over-whelming tragedies and truths. I love this book—across all of it and poem by poem because it’s like a kind of careful shopping, she weighs and feels each thing and remembers to read her own heart too and the hearts of all the lost and known friends, the cousins and lovers and parents and strangers—waiting in rooms and getting on trains, acting, vanishing, all of it, all of them. This beautiful book lives most perfectly in the throbbing heart of our time.
—Eileen Myles

This is a brilliant collection that immerses the reader from the first lines, sweeping us away.… Anna Halberstadt’s Vilnius Diary begins its poetic journey from behind the Iron Curtain only five years after the Holocaust. The poet’s elegiac tone mourns and celebrates the Vilnius of her youth, and like Sebold’s Austerlitz images seem to flow effortlessly in an unending succession to evoke the drowned world of the past.… In image after incantatory image the poet tells us of her immigration from Russia; in Rome “persimmons like orange lanterns / hanging on naked branches;” the wrenching up of roots and replanting them in the unfamiliar soil of America, a nine-year-old-son and two aging parents in tow.… Each poem inhabits a dual time and place.  The genius of Vilnius Diary lies in its refusal to be circumscribed. Never simply a lament, Halberstadt weaves together the sacred and the wildly profane, lighting the great darkness with wit and laughter. This is the poet who calls God a bastard but recognizes divinity in a beehive, the poet who mourns a family tree cut off during the Shoah, yet wickedly observes changing women’s fashions. Literate in three languages, “now I forget words not in one, but three languages,” she gives us Vilnius Diary in English.… The collection not unlike the immigrant’s initiation into a Viennese supermarket—“beautiful fruit in precious wrappers/Warhol cans of tomato soup/phallic bananas without a scratch or blemish.”
—Stephanie Dickinson

Anna Halberstadt is a posthumous daughter of Jewish Vilne, also called Vilnius (in Lithuanian) and Wilno (in Polish). “I forget words not in one, but three languages,” she says bitterly: her immigrant English is permeated by hues of Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian.  Sometimes it is sprinkled by entire sentences in Lithuanian which she had learnt in the postwar Soviet school. The city is still multicultural, though its vibrant Jewish culture was destroyed by the Holocaust, and the last remnants of it were wiped out by Stalinism. For Anna Halberstadt, as for many of its former inhabitants, it became a city of “disappeared people, disappeared voices.” Always in transition, she catches the ever-changing context of her life in series of exact and fascinating images bringing to mind the poetry of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, as well as the fiction of Isaac Babel. Partly reminiscences, partly diary entries, partly essays, Anna Halberstadt’s poems remain pure and tragic works of art.
—Tomas Venclova

Anna Halberstadt’s Vilnius Diary is a book of journeys in actuality and memory.… Here are some lines that indicate the bitterness the poet, who is a therapist, has overcome: “Fall in love again / for a new love / always remembers and reflects the previous one / in a crooked mirror. / Eventually differences will blur, / eventually you will feel / you love all of them / past and present / or don’t care for any / what the hell…”
—Michael Graves
    
Anna Halberstadt’s Green in a Landscape with Ashes is a book of poems about the flux of daily experience set against the imperatives of conscience and the memory of human desperation and suffering. Halberstadt is acutely intelligent about what and how much we might feel on a given day, on a subway platform, on bridges and city streets, in winter or summer light, as the poems search the past and live in the afterlives of tyranny and slaughter. The poems are evocative in their feeling for the textures of memory—a child watching her father from underneath a Biedermeier table with lion paws, another child “searching for hidden chocolate/in the cupboard.” The speaker dreams of the summer forests of childhood and youth, of mushrooms “in velvet moss among pine needles and wild strawberry leaves,” of bees in an apiary full of “buckwheat and clover honey.” But at the end of the journey, we find ourselves in a neglected graveyard “all overgrown with grass and Queen Anne’s lace,” or standing on a forest floor—a place of prolonged butchery during the war—feeling the shade of pine trees streaming skyward toward the light as if in intercession, on behalf of survivors and witnesses, since the perpetrators themselves “never repent.” With self-understanding and acuity, and sensitive to the vulnerability and suffering around her, Halberstadt asks, “Where are you, the beautiful shining angel / To stop Abraham’s knife?”
—Saskia Hamilton

Paperback
Publisher: Madhat, Inc.
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-968422-11-0

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