Wendy Mnookin Reaches Others Through Poetry and Discussion

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

NEWTON - Wendy Mnookin tackles the tough stuff and through poetry, attempts to help others cope with their own tsouris. The remarkably accomplished and empathetic writer is currently reading her work in New York, and on Dec. 8, she’ll travel to Cincinnati Ohio’s Hebrew Union College for Sunday and Monday discussions centered on her two books dealing with bereavement and loss.

As part of Hebrew Union’s Outreach Education program, Mnookin will read at Adath Israel Synagogue and at Temple Sholom from her 1999 book To Get Here, which focuses on her son’s drug addiction. She will also address the topic of addiction within Jewish families, a situation she feels is not always openly acknowledged. “During the time that my son was an active drug user,” she recalled, “I did not find much support for what we were going through in the Jewish community. Drug addiction is often a hidden problem, in the community at large and especially, it seems, in the Jewish community.”

Teachers and parents of students at Cincinnati Reform Jewish High School and Mercaz Conservative High School will attend the talks

The following evening at HU’s Mayerson Hall, Mnookin will read from her 2002 book What He Took, which delves into her father’s tragic death by a car accident when she was two years old.

Shouldn’t He Have Done Something?

Did my father use the brains

that got him through med school,

smile the half-smile that won my mother,

did he strip off his clothes

and try to seduce God

with the twist and shine of his young body? 

If that didn’t work,

did he raise his hands

and claw red stripes down God’s chest,

whatever it took, shouldn’t he

have done something to stay with me? 

From In the Garden

…I picked up my daughter

and pressed her too tightly to me,

tasting the sweat on her neck.

I didn’t want to understand 

my arms could be holding nothing,

with nothing to be done, no way

to go back and take better care.

But God said, Stand. God understood

a mother could be so absorbed in tomatoes— 

neatly staked, well weeded in their even rows—

she wouldn’t notice who had wandered from her.

When my father lost control of his car,

God was flicking sunlight into a gas slick

to see the colors flare. 

The Mayerson Hall discussion will be presented in conjunction with grief and loss expert and HU professor Rabbi Samuel Joseph. While in Cincinnati, she will also discuss her books and her life experiences with Rabbinical students and Jewish Family Services staff members.

Mnookin has found that as she furthers her literary path, support and fulfillment are to be found in her roots. “In the past few years I have begun re-exploring my connection to Judaism,” she said. “This has come about partly as a result of my writing, in which I found myself, somewhat to my surprise, looking at my relationship with God. I am now studying at our Newton synagogue, Temple Emanuel, and attending services regularly. I am very grateful for the community I have found there.”

What He Took won the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Award, along with Feeding the Fire by Jeffrey Harrison, for the best poetry book of 2001-2002. Mnookin has won prizes for her poetry in Comstock Review, Kansas Quarterly and New Millennium Writings, and she is also the recipient of an NEA fellowship in poetry.

A New York native, she graduated from Radcliffe College and received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Her 1991 Guenever Speaks, a collection of personal poems, was published by Round Table Publications (the subsequent two were put out by BOA Editions). Her work has also been included in the anthologies Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation and Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City.