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Jake Marmer

Jake Marmer is a poet, performer, and educator. His most recent poetry collection is The Neighbor Out of Sound (Sheep Meadow Press). He is also the education and programming director of the Bronfman Fellowship.

Disgruntled Ode

Disgruntled Ode

Jake Marmer

For a young daydreamer, nothing is more beautiful than the unspoken, which becomes the focus of desire. And the Jewish unspoken of my childhood was so vast that, within it, the imagination could reach near-spiritual proportions.

Babel’s Transcendent Mistakes

Jake Marmer

When I was 12, my parents bought me a gigantic Yiddish-Russian dictionary. Maybe this was their way of compensating for the fact that they had not told me I was Jewish until second grade, when I came home singing a Ukrainian ditty with the word “zhid.”