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