Jamie Wendt’s sec­ond col­lec­tion of poet­ry, Laugh­ing in Yid­dish, main­tains a del­i­cate bal­ance of earnest­ness and sub­tle­ty. The sub­tle­ty comes from atten­tion to music and form: often pan­toums, ghaz­als, and tri­o­lets, but an espe­cial­ly inven­tive deploy­ment of those forms, includ­ing a ghaz­al mixed with inter­view, inter­view with brack­et­ed com­men­tary, and per­sona poems where the Eisen­how­er Express­way speaks, among oth­er mono­logues dra­mat­ic, ekphras­tic, and ethno­graph­ic. The earnest­ness comes from scope and con­tent: root­ed in fam­i­ly and com­mu­ni­ty his­to­ry, in the Mid­west and East­ern Europe. Wendt is speak­ing for many when she writes, as in a kind of mis­sion state­ment, ​“They were not sup­posed to talk about it./No one did.//So, I fill in the blanks –” and in the last poem, ​“I will record your voice here.”

Of course, what we record is frag­men­tary at best. In one ​“inter­view,” ​“Papa says there are no diaries [frag­ile secrets, loves, prayers],//no cur­sive let­ters, land­scape post­cards [declar­ing intention]/no ketubot [proof fold­ed into heavy, lay­ered pock­ets].” Wendt’s patient poems med­i­tate not on the process of research or ethnog­ra­phy, but the desire that dri­ves it. In anoth­er ​“inter­view, she turns from ​“search­ing archives for buried rel­a­tives” to moments of con­ver­sa­tion with her father — him­self pulled along by ​“a cold phan­tom” — to vis­it a fam­i­ly ceme­tery. In this con­text, the past feels prophet­ic, a lay­er­ing of speak­er, poet, and their respec­tive, shared ghosts. His­to­ry and art shape our own com­pli­cat­ed under­stand­ing of iden­ti­ty today, but this mix is espe­cial­ly intrigu­ing when the places and the times are less famil­iar: in Arkansas in 1941, to Chica­go in 1892, or with the artist Geller rather than the painter Cha­gall. Take these insights from ​“Art Intel­lec­tu­als Con­cur: Amer­i­can Gallery is Best”:

Yes, Geller’s ​“Strange Worlds’”

was per­haps very American,

which means the characters

in the bright background

appear hard­work­ing in oil on canvas.

…In his paint­ings, he could hide

with­in the face of a man.

This lay­ered atmos­phere is sus­tained as well by almost rit­u­al­is­tic rep­e­ti­tion and asso­nance-heavy slant rhyme. ​“They nod, pleased with my children’s names,/their man­ners, the col­or­ful paper chains.” Wendt’s most pow­er­ful fig­u­ra­tive lan­guage rec­og­nizes the slip­per­i­ness of that music and por­trai­ture and his­to­ry: ​“We fit in/​like a ripped stock­ing.” or ​“their Yid­dish voic­es a run­away don­key,” or ​“between Egypt and Israel and Rus­sia and Chicago…We dwell for hours, curl into the warmth/​of my ances­tors, like lay­ered parentheses.” 

Over the course of this lay­ered book, the poems’ many dif­fer­ent ​“I”s come clos­er to a ​“we,” and the present clos­er to an old­er sol­i­dar­i­ty. Wendt deep­ens a world of ped­dlers and union oaths and high­ways cut­ting through ceme­ter­ies, just as lived-in as our cur­rent gig work and dis­place­ments. The dan­ger, in com­bin­ing this earnest­ness with this pol­i­tics, is the pro­sa­ic and didac­tic: When in 1922 Amer­i­ca, Mey­er Pret­covitz ​“felt his Jew­ish­ness like an impend­ing yel­low star,” we miss the speci­fici­ty of the poem’s ear­li­er ​“pere­grine push­carts” with their ​“wood­en wheels,” with­in, ​“A kessel­gar­den, they called it, or the Ellis Island of the Midwest.” 

Still, this book’s his­to­ry and pol­i­tics are ambi­tious and admirable. In Wendt’s best poems — ​“Art Intel­lec­tu­als Con­cur: Amer­i­can Gallery is Best,” ​”Inter­view with Papa: Lan­guage,” ​“Inter­view with Papa: ​“Free­man,” ​”The Eisen­how­er Express­way Speaks, 1951,” — what is pos­si­ble and real comes alive, if at first what’s pos­si­ble and real only ever starts subtly.