Wearing My People Like a Shawl

Reading Dorothy Field s second collection of poems is like entering a rich, digressive, passionate, multi-layered novel, at the heart of which is the individual in search of self. Field s physical journey takes her to Israel, the American Deep South, India, New York, and western Canada. At the same time, these poems penetrate the past, the complex and indecipherable lives of her parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Attempting to understand her family's conflicted relationship to their Jewishness, Field revisits her fifties childhood, becoming again the sharply observant child. We all carry the baggage of our ancestors on our backs, but Field has transformed that baggage into brilliant, soul-baring poems. Wearing My People Like a Shawl is a brave book and one that embraces not only Jewish people but the whole suffering world.