Libby Scheier’s Kaddish for My Father brings together new and selected material from earlier collections. The first half of the volume includes new poetry and prose commemorating Scheier’s father, who died in 1997, and exploring the difficult relationship she shared with him and other family members. The second half includes poetry from her books The Larger Life (1983), Second Nature (1986), and Sky (1990). Although the volume works as a piece – several common themes unite the disparate parts of the collection – the most interesting writing appears in the prose/poetry collage that opens the text. Inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s long elegiac poem to his mother (Kaddish 1961), Sheier’s own Kaddish is a personal history told with unflinching honesty.

Although they reconciled just before her father’s death, Scheier remembers a callous and bullying man, shaped by the frightening circumstances of his childhood and youth in Bukavina, Austro-Hungary. Often in hiding, seeking shelter from anti-Semites and rapists who threatened the women of his town, Meier (later anglicized to Murray) Sheier was rushed forward into maturity and responsibility for his family. Murray’s own father took long years to accumulate sufficient funds to bring his family to New York, where they were finally reunited. Later a dedicated Communist, Murray was “so busy flailing arms against pogromists, / absent fathers, the German rapists of little boys’ / mothers,” that he was unable to show and receive love “that would have pleasured him.”

Although the story is familiar, Scheier writes it anew from the perspective of a daughter and reinscribes herself into her father’s life. Her quest for spiritual solace also leads her to rediscover Judaism through prayer and meditation. Defying Orthodox practice – which values the male over the female mourner and does not require her to pray for the dead – Scheier embraces her religion. The result is a moving testimonial to father and daughter who share a bond and the same strong will that Scheier soon recognizes and celebrates in this work.