Moldovan Hotel
By Leah Horlick
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora.
In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women's lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.
With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick's poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. "No one ever thinks they might be the dragon," Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together.
"If Leah Horlick's second book invited us to witness, this time she draws from her Jewish heritage and takes us back to show us how to read the landscape and mind-scape and tell us what the texts left out. This is an accounting, a calling, an invocation, a return, a skilful mediation on how to remember when the ‘names of the oppressors are blotted out’." — Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days
"Every poem in Moldovan Hotel is a room thick with ghosts. Here, Horlick takes the language of the past—used to dehumanize and unmoor—and crystalizes it around revelation after revelation. A graceful, striking collection." — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
Leah Horlick
Leah Horlick grew up as a settler on Treaty Six Cree territory and the homelands of the Métis in Saskatchewan. Her first collection of poetry, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012) was shortlisted for both a ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. In 2016 she won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, Canada’s only award for LGBT emerging writers. That same year, her second collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), was named Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association. In 2018, her piece “You Are My Hiding Place” was named Poem of the Year by ARC Poetry Magazine and shortlisted for inclusion in the 44th Pushcart Prize by the Pushcart Board of Editors. She lives in Calgary.
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Book preview
Moldovan Hotel - Leah Horlick
moldovan hotel
leah horlick
brick books
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Moldovan hotel / Leah Horlick.
Names: Horlick, Leah, author.
Description: Poems.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200389866 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200389890
ISBN
9781771315456 (softcover)
ISBN
9781771315463 (
HTML
)
ISBN
9781771315470 (
)
Classification:
LCC PS8615.O745 M65 2021
|
DDC C
811/.6 — dc23
Copyright © Leah Horlick, 2021
We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.
A stylized, illustrated blue tree sits to the left of the words 'Canada Council for the Arts / Counseil des arts du Canada.''The word Canada is written out with a Canadian flag—a red maple leaf flanked by two vertical red stripes—situated above the final A.A large red A is bisected by an angled blue C, with a green O balanced between the two letters on the left. To the right of the OAC logo are the words 'Ontario Arts Council / Counseil des arts de l'Ontario' over a red line with the words 'An Ontario Government Agency / un organisme du gouvernement de l'Ontario' below the line.The author photo was taken by Erin Flegg.
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Contents
For You Shall Be Called to Account
In Rumenye Iz Dokh Gut
A Shtetl, a Shtot
Annex
Two Villages
For Every Animal of the Forest Is Mine
Hodl
Curse for Bright Light
Ritual Instructions for Transnistria
Learning to Read Hebrew
You Are My Hiding Place
Return and Revive Us
Aquila
Census
Moldovan Hotel
Brief Conversation with Dybbuk, Strada Alexandru cel Bun
Every Name Means Across the River
Guilt
City of New Beginnings
Marginal Sea
Customs
Typhus
The Spinoza of Market Street
A Boy, a Girl, a Replacement
Couple Flying Over Village
Europe Eats Itself
Still Learning to Read Hebrew
Barzel
Notes Acknowledgements Bibliography
In Rumenye iz dokh gut
Fun keyn dayges veyst men nit
In Rumania, life is good!
No one worries, no one should
Aaron Lebedeff,
Rumenye, Rumenye
For You Shall Be Called to Account
The ancestors of everyone I’ve let into my body
are gathered in a small room with one window,
no lights. Yes, the room is crowded. Yes, there
are no chairs. Yes, they are talking. Why are we
here, says the Nazi resister. Where are the chairs,
says the Viking (no horns). Where is the light, say
the people with their new French name hung
around their necks heavy like a long black cross.
Here, says the grand wizard, and a long white
light descends from a point on the ceiling.
The people of the oldest empire are here, too,
they have brought their own fire (hidden), they
too can speak French, they know in an instant not
to trust that light. They are opening the