Yiddishland
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Erika Meitner. From Copia. BOA Editions, 2014.
When asked by The New York Jewish Week how her “family background–as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors on [her] mother’s side, and Israelis on [her] father’s side” has influenced her writing, Meitner responded, “a lot of my family history was shrouded in silence. When I was very young, my maternal grandmother used to tell me that the numbers on her arm were her phone number. Like many survivors who wanted to protect their grandkids from the horrors they endured, she didn’t talk about her experiences during the war until the early 1990s […] In being shaped by that silence, I always felt compelled to tell stories that mattered, and that reflect my belief that art and social justice should be entwined in some way—which is also a legacy of my Reform Jewish upbringing, and its focus on tikkun olam.” The Hebrew phrase “tikkun olam” translates to “world repair.”