Lost and Found: Jake Marmer’s Love of Language is a Steady Compass

Written by Melissa Karen Sances
Photos by Nikki Gardner

Published in Northampton Living (September 2024)

“There was an underlying sense of, ‘This is my home, but I belong somewhere else,’” says Jake Marmer of his childhood in Soviet Ukraine. The accomplished poet and Head of School at Lander-Grinspoon Academy in Northampton was raised in a Jewish family, where he was acutely aware of systemic repression and its lengthy history. But as a young student who loved the humanities, he learned that poetry was sacred. His grandmother was a teacher of literature and language, and learning poems by heart was a duty and a joy.

A few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, he received a fellowship to the United States, where he finished high school early and entered Yeshiva University in New York the next year. It was a bittersweet transition.

“Immigration involves a deep sense of loss,” says Marmer. “There is a loss of language, of culture, of roots – all for the freedom to be yourself, for the promise of a safer and better life.” His family stayed in Ukraine while he navigated America’s higher education system. “Somewhere in the space between the two languages that first year I stepped into an abyss,” he says, “or at least it felt like it. Maybe that abyss is where poetry comes from. After all, there is no other way to get at yourself than through words.”

New York’s underground poetry scene both grounded him and set him free. Writing and performing his own verse helped him “take some ownership of my experience as a human being, to process it in this multilayered way that was emotional, intellectual, historical and spiritual.” After completing his master’s in comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center, he published his first poetry collection while working at Random House. For someone who loved words, the job felt rote. He remembers attending a publishing meeting and handing over his business card to a colleague, only to realize that the card was blank. “I had this Kafkaesque moment,” he says, referring to the nihilistic writing of Franz Kafka. He wondered what that blank card represented. Who was he? It wasn’t long before he made a career change to teaching. All the parts of him were integrated as he began helping others understand their relationship between language and self. He felt alive.

Marmer’s career in education brought him to western Massachusetts last year, where he lives with his partner Shoshana and their children, Lev and Ora. Northampton’s climate and landscape remind him of his rst home: “The elds are like the elds I saw as a child. The war in Ukraine, where my family still lives, has been really heavy, and experiencing nature here that is so similar has brought a surprising, almost soothing sense of connection.”

The End Has Feet, by Jake Marmer

first published by “Rattle Magazine” in 2022

the end has feet

and it keeps walking away from us

says Lev as we trudge through the side-trail 

that never seems to merge 

back to the main road

the end, why does it just disappear –

asks Ora as we finally climb out from the shrub

shake out the dirt from our shoes and take in

the sight — 

Los Angeles, peopled vastness fused into shoreline 

fades into fog or horizon or simply the end 

of the visible

I take the picture of the two of them smiling 

thumbs up, sweaty faces, still so young —

and send it halfway

                                                                                    across the planet

to my parents, who don’t speak the same language

as my children but read their smiles 

as a kind of insurance

the world still exists

it’s nighttime 

where they are

they respond immediately, awake 

to their own horizon blurring at the edges of the TV 

city after city covered by rocket fire 

                                                                                                            all around 

yes, photos, anything 

     to ask them 

     without asking —

if I refresh my screen enough times

can I be assured that when I put down

my phone their town 

will remain untouched

in this volley of death?

thousands of miles, my short-

circuiting universe, all of it, here —

it’s a loop 

the trail, I mean 

our own feet marking 

the end where beginning once was