A labor of love: Fall River rabbi wins prize for his first book of poetry
FALL RIVER — Locals might know Mark Elber as the rabbi at Temple Beth El, a synagogue in Fall River. But, the city resident is also a published poet who recently released his first full book of poetry.
"I really have to pinch myself," he said, describing publishing a poetry book as a "nearly lifelong dream."While he's been a writer for decades and has published two books about Jewish mysticism and spirituality, Elber in recent years decided to buckle down on writing and publishing poetry. In 2017, he earned an MFA in poetry as a way of pushing toward that goal.
He published his new book, Headstone, after winning a competition run by publishing company Passager Books to acknowledge writers age 70 and older who have not yet published a full-length book of poetry. The award is in memory of Henry Morgenthau III, a former documentary producer for WGBH who began writing poetry while in his 90s.
"I sent in my manuscript, and I was very, very happily surprised," Elber said.
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While this is the first time Elber has published a book of poems, his identity as a poet stretches back to his years as a teenager, when a high school substitute English teacher passed out Xeroxed copies of a poem by e.e. cummings."I just loved it so much," he said.
He first assembled the manuscript that would become Headstones nearly three decades ago."I've been revising it and revising it for the last 29 years," he said.
The poems in Headstone are part memoir and family history, part commentary on the broader global context of his family's experience, he said. His parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland.
"So that was very much in the air for me as I was growing up, he said.
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His parents spoke Polish, Yiddish, Russian, German and English, an influence that left a mark on his writing."I'm enamored of language and languages in general," he said.
Elber said that, while his poems center on his family's experiences, they might stir something in other people."Very few people write solely for themselves… they might want to express themselves, but they also want to communicate with others," he said. "I'm hoping other people will be able to connect with it."
Elber will be doing two readings from Headstone locally in November. One will be at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 6, at Tifereth Israel Synagogue in New Bedford, 145 Brownell Ave. The second will be at 5 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 20, at Davoll's General Store in South Dartmouth, 1228 Russells Mills Road. The book is also available on Amazon and through Passager Books.
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Fall River rabbi Mark Elber wins Morgenthau prize for poetry book
