Tales of the Tetragrammaton

Poetry. Jewish Studies. With TALES OF THE TETRAGRAMMATON, poet Paul Nemser reaches into his own childhood memories to explore the mystery at the heart of ordinary life. It is at once an evocation of a Jewish family's life in suburban Portland, Oregon in the 1950's, with its bowling alleys, formica countertops, and TVs, and a search for meaning and transcendence in the spirit of Jewish mysticism—as if Borges had become a writer for Sid Caesar, or Kafka were the act following the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Images cascade, paradoxes loom. Hovering over the ordinary world is the mystical name—the regulator of all events, the font of all language, the curator of the impossible, the determiner of lives and deaths, the ruler of all that is.

"This wonderful book is about language as it creates the world, told in strawberry blintzes and the grinding of gears as the bus goes up a hill. The poet, Paul Nemser, is one of my favorites, for his lyricism and fiery strangeness, his mudslides, olives and jelly jars containing the name of God."—Valerie Stivers- Isakova