Wal­ter Hess, who was born in Ger­many and emi­grat­ed with his fam­i­ly to the U.S. in 1940 via Ecuador, has writ­ten a lyri­cal and beau­ti­ful vol­ume of poet­ry that deals with issues of mem­o­ry, loss, dis­lo­ca­tion, exile, and adjust­ment. A retired doc­u­men­tary film edi­tor, Hess brings the keen per­cep­tu­al eyes of a visu­al artist to the poet­ry project of describ­ing what it means to be a refugee. He writes, ​“mem­o­ry fills the dis­tance between here and there; the miles apart and the long year’s gap. And hints of joy instruct­ing mem­o­ry to fill up chinks in space and time.” Mem­o­ry is a bless­ing in Hess’ view. To remem­ber is to affirm faith in human­i­ty, to affirm faith in his­to­ry and to affirm a fun­da­men­tal opti­mism about the future. Mem­o­ry, there­fore, is real­ly a reli­gious con­cept. By ​“remem­ber­ing,” Hess aims to restore dig­ni­ty to jus­tice, to enable him, and indi­rect­ly his read­ers, to live both in the past and in the future, and to fos­ter the pos­si­bil­i­ty of tol­er­ance of difference. 

This is a beau­ti­ful col­lec­tion of poems that, like the ancient bib­li­cal harp of King David that cap­tured the heart, pro­duces soul­ful melodies of rev­er­ence for the dead, cel­e­bra­tion of the liv­ing, and open­ness to God and Jew­ish val­ues and cul­ture. There is pro­found sad­ness here as he traces the life of son and grand­son, from Ger­many to Ecuador and ulti­mate set­tle­ment in the Wash­ing­ton Heights sec­tion of Man­hat­tan. His poems, ​“Oma,” ​“Opa,” ​“Sur­vivor,” ​“Haimat,” ​“1940 — In the Heart of the Andes,” are par­tic­u­lar­ly mov­ing. But there is also pro­found beau­ty and dig­ni­ty here, and per­se­ver­ance and tri­umph of the human spir­it. ​“Sur­vivors have no oth­er task than being who and what they are,” Hess writes. This vol­ume is a paean to a van­ished world and to lives rebuilt and is most high­ly rec­om­mend­ed for any­one inter­est­ed in under­stand­ing a bit of that world. It is a poet­ic gem.