Review by Robbi Nester
A first-generation child of immigrants must construct a hyphenated identity, intersection between two different worlds. Judy Kronenfeld’s memoir, Apartness (Inlandia, 2025) takes this process of acculturation as its subject, making the book’s hybrid form, a mixture of essays and poetry, particularly appropriate.
Apartness’ blend of auto-biographical essays and poetry traces the writer’s “interaction […] with family, culture, institutions, time, and place” (13), from her youth in a tenement apartment in the Bronx to her adulthood as a writer, poet, and professor in Southern California.
This hybridity offers readers a stereoscopic view of such subjects as education, religion, caregiving, aging, and death. Take for example two pieces on the topic of bodily infirmity, the essay ”Half Deaf, Half-Adjusted” and the poem “Chronic This and That.”
The essay relates Kronenfeld’s experience with sudden hearing loss. Autobiographical essays follow an experience unfolding in time, rather than focusing on one instant, as lyric poetry frequently does, allowing the writer to explore the psychological and bodily changes involved in adjusting “to what can’t be adjusted to—the totally random” (138), “when the body one takes for granted plays a dirty trick” (139).
The essay’s figurative language aids the writer in illustrating the narrator’s psychological state, as when Kronenfeld describes how after adapting to the permanent loss of the hearing in her left ear, she is later ”shocked again […] by how quickly the phonemes of English became unrecognizable and failed to combine into words, breaking up instead like a pixilating picture” (144). Since we cannot perceive another’s hearing loss directly, the writer turns to other senses to communicate a sense of how deafness might feel and how it might in some cases lead to a state in which words can lose their meaning and become unrecognizable.
Though the narrator is at first enraged by these changes, she adapts. Yet the process reaches its culmination only when she realizes that ultimately, all of “our bodies will betray us” (145), leaving us “grateful for less and less” (145).
The accompanying poem, “Chronic This and That,” framed as an apostrophe to the body, delves even more deeply into the implications of an experience in which the body has become a separate entity, disengaged from the mind/self of the poet. To communicate this disjunction, the poem focuses on one extended metaphor, in which the body becomes “an enormous, ridiculous/parade balloon that won’t/float” (147). As with the “pixilated picture,” the reader gets a glimpse of the shock one might feel when one can no longer control the body, which now requires “all these handlers”—doctors and nurses, caregivers, attentive relatives—”to wrangle it” (147).
The tone and perspective changes in the second stanza. While the first stanza communicates the narrator’s horror at this sudden transformation, in the second, she expresses a kind of resignation, appealing to the balloon/body as to a deity, asking it to “cut your strings/lighten, rise, so I may /be[…]/heedless/ of body” (147). Whether this is a death wish or a fantasy of relief in this life or the world to come, the poem leaves to our imaginations.
These two parts of the book offer a microcosm of the book’s larger structure. Apartness traces the writer’s evolution from youth, when she feels isolated both from the mainstream culture of this country and from Jewish culture, to her realization that these differences are incidental beside the more essential similarities all human beings share.
Born in this country, Kronenfeld does not share her foreign-born parents’ history, rooted in the traditional ways of their youth or their native tongue. From birth, she belongs neither to one culture or the other, feeling that in her effort to fit in, she is “in training to be an imposter” (19).
Her parents, immigrants forced to leave their native Europe, seem to her like “[fossils]from the late Yiddish Paleolithic” (53), with their heavy Yiddish accents and strange (to American eyes) customs, an embarrassment to a girl who wants only to pass as an American no different from her classmates.
In a milieu where Jewishness had become identified with Otherness, a stumbling block to acceptance, she was already alienated from her heritage because she had “imbibed [only]a kind of vapor” of that religion (15). The family did not belong to a temple, although they lived upstairs from one, hearing prayers and melodies drifting in through the windows. Kronenfeld, like many first or even second-generation Jewish-Americans, including myself, “feared rejection from [her]own group for doing things incorrectly, for being an outsider” (83). To admit this might leave her vulnerable, so she remains in an in-between state, hence the book’s title—Apartness.
The family’s poverty also contributes to her feeling of Otherness. Kronenfeld lives in a tenement apartment, and as new immigrants, her parents must take any work they can in order to secure for their daughter the kind of education that would allow her the opportunity to assimilate. They help her to perfect the American persona she would need to craft, the mask she must wear in academia, to achieve success in the profession as a woman in what was then a man’s profession, a Jew in a world of Wasps, a scion of working-class immigrants in a world of privilege.
In such a circumstance, being able to cobble together a hybrid identity, both Jewish and American, might be a solace, but she instead feels “discomfort with [her]own religion accompanied by a perverse mixture of yearning for and passionate rejection of the preponderant Other” (82).
In some ways, Kronenfeld’s ambivalence seems less an idiosyncratic and personal phenomenon than a perceptive description of a feeling many other first-generation immigrants from religious and cultural backgrounds markedly different from those of the American mainstream share. While many such immigrants identify Christianity with being American, and thus “yearn for” its protective coloration, they may nevertheless defensively reject the implication that they cannot be fully Americans while also being who they are.
Yet ironically, in Kronenfeld’s oeuvre, the “village-like corner of the provincial Bronx” where she grew up becomes a major preoccupation of her poetry, the subject of many richly detailed portraits of a beloved home (52). The very things that she once perceived as isolating her from others have become an essential part of who she is.
Kronenfeld even seems to grow into the social masking she once found so artificial. In the poem “Charm,” included in this volume, she notes that “sometimes I cannot feel /my face until I put on/my smiling interaction mask” (103). Indeed, she finds that she “needs the press of others/to make me condense” (104), as though the self were a mist formed by interaction rather than a constant unique only to herself. She concludes the poem by identifying with other people, “social beasts/ that we are” (104).
Kronenfeld even comes to enjoy traveling to experience “that sense of dislocating strangeness” akin to the feeling she sought to leave behind as a child (94). She embraces the experience of apartness that living in another language and culture requires.
With great affection, humor, and an eye for a bygone world, Kronenfeld offers insights into the process of assimilation and acculturation. Her book will appeal not only to those of us who share her cultural and religious background, social class, or status as the children of immigrants, but to everyone who has looked into the past and learned from it.
Apartness: A Memoir In Essays And Poems by Judy Kronenfeld
Inlandia Books, February 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-955969-38-3
Robbi Nester is a retired college educator and poet who lives in Southern California. She hosts two virtual poetry readings monthly and reviews an occasional book. Her website is at http://www.robbinester.net