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LAMENTATIONS

Four Folk-Plays of the American Jew

by
ALTER BRODY
Author of “A Family Album”

Alter Brody, American Poet and Playwright

The American Jewish poet Alter Brody published A Family Album,
a volume of poetry,  in the last year of World War I.
He continued to publish in journals during the Twenties.
In 1928, Brody published Lamentations, Four One Act Plays.
After that, he fell into obscurity.
The English poet and publisher, Anthony Rudolf published poems by Brody
in his Voices in the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets
and tracked him down just before his death in 1981.
Brody’s place in the American poetry and world literature
is waiting to be occupied by him

Lewis Mumford

LAMENTATIONS: Four Folk Plays of the American Jew by Alter Brody

In the notable succession of novels of Jewish life, in which the intellectual spokesmen of a generation of assimilated American Jews are vainly trying to recapture something which they call their Judaism, this book is an arresting phenomenon.

Here, for the first time is the Jew himself - not a sentimentalized interpretation of him, seen through nostalgic minds clouded by conflicts alien to the real Jew; not novelized essays on Assimilation; Zionism, Judaism, The Mission of Israel. etc. - but plain everyday Jews, far too profoundly Jewish to be conscious of it; Jewish peasants of the Greater East Side, living and dying loving and hating in a circumscribed universe of their own, whose inhabitants are as little aware of the “Jewish Problem” as the peasants of Synge’s folk plays are of the “Irish Problem.” Here are Jews speaking for themselves without prompting - sometimes brutally, sometimes beautifully, in a series of folk plays, in which poet has magically transmuted the bold unabashed rhetoric and rhythmic garrulity of Yiddish in English, to enrich our multi colored new literature.

Lamentations are four one-act plays about Jews of the Old World who lead lives in the New World.

In Lowing in the Night a married couple that owns a candy store in the Bronx serves children every day but can have none of their own. They give vent to their frustration but are bound to each other by love and affection.

Recess for Memorials takes place in a synagogue where two old women who bemoan the demolition of tradition that life in the New World has brought about.

Rapunzel is about a young girl who became blind after losing her balance when she leant out of the window like the storybook character. Braille provides her with a fantasy world that she is afraid of losing when she suddenly regains her sight.

The mourning in A House of Mourning comes after a father has unsuccessfully tried to force his maverick daughter back to the pious life.

The language of the plays is ingenuous and yet poetic. As in his poetry, Brody’s love and compassion for his fellow man is omnipresent. Lamentations was published in 1928. After that, Brody went more or less unheard from until his death in 1981. He left a small body of work in manuscript. The Holy Ledger and Sermon of a Text, which were written after the Shoah, are eloquent expressions of despair in which he challenges and reproves the deity.
- Herbert Kuhner