Note from the Editor

“Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.” – Elie Wiesel

When I sought out the curation of this folio, I had no idea the world was going to shift so dramatically. This has been a horrible year. We’ve mourned our losses on multiple levels: from our jobs and financial security to the economic strain of the pandemic, the friends and family whose bodies simply weren’t strong enough, and any last semblance of normalcy that we’ve buried beside them. There were strangers we will never meet.  Our celebrations have been replaced with an acute sense of distance; our holidays spent in isolation.

We’ve turned our televisions on to a fresh wave of antisemitism, to faces of those murdered by the hands meant to protect them, to the crying eyes of children in detention centers who don’t know if they’ll ever see their mothers again.

We’ve grieved the loss of hope that there might one day be an end to the hate that surrounds us. We’ve grieved a year that will never return to us – all those moments in our lives that were supposed to propel us forward, and the memories that will never be what we hoped for them to be. We’ve grieved the friends we cannot safely see, the feasts we could not share, and the days when stress was not a regular at our dinner table. We’ve grieved ourselves into exhaustion.

But we’ve grieved before. As Jews, we are far from strangers to it. And still, through the avalanche the world continues to violently cast down upon us, we climb. But we could not make our way with such strength and determination without our community scaling the mountain beside us.

This has been a horrible year, but still we count our blessings. And so, as we enter the High Holidays, we reflect – not only on the year past, but the history that has brought us here — to this world where we’ve continued — even as others have fought to see us gone. As I read through the pieces submitted to this folio – I realized one thing with unyielding clarity: the vitality of our stories. Without them, memory cannot live on. And without memory, without the very thread of all that we have been through, and those that came before us, our community risks unraveling until we are nothing more than floating pieces of dust desperate for a place to settle. Even with so many hands eager to swat us into the oblivion of denial, we grow.

I am moved and grateful for the outpour of submissions to this folio, and to the work we are able to feature – the memories of our families, of our childhoods, of our grief and joy, reminders that with all that we have been through, with all the odds stacked so heavily against us, we’ve persevered. Let these stories and poems bring you hope. Let them serve as sanctuary. Let them guide you into the space of knowing that the strength of your community – whatever community you claim as home – is a foundation. Even when the things we know and love are stripped away and burnt, we will not be alone in the rebuilding. We will not be alone in rekindling the embers. And so, we raise our glass to the strength that allows us to share the stories and memories presented here and to those we will continue to create and pass on. L’Chaim!

-Jessica Fischoff