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Baltimore Sun
there’s a passage in Mencken’s diaries—
now, I think Mencken’s a great writer—
so don’t take this wrong—
anyway, he describes a
somewhat large
immigrant Jewish family
down the street
and how they inspire
in him
powerful feelings of disgust
and the thing is
my great-grandfather lived on that street
in Baltimore
with all his sons and some of their wives
we have the census records
we know how many were employed,
and I know from my uncle
how proud they were
to have Mencken as a neighbor
but I guess
since he called his essays
Prejudices
there’s no call to be surprised
and anyway there could have been other Jews on the street
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Simon Schuchat has lived in Chicago, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, and Moscow, to name a few. His translations of Chinese and Russian prose and poetry have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, as has his own poetry, which has also been published in four collections. According to Kathy Acker, “his poetry doesn’t tell you stuff: it is consciousness.” Ted Berrigan said he was “the opposite of petty, which is grand.” Soviet Texts, his translations of Moscow conceptualist poet Dmitri Prigov, came out in 2020 from Ugly Duckling Presse. The Centos of Simon Schuchat is due out from Edge Books in fall 2023. [Baltimore Sun” originally appeared in the Beltway Poetry Quarterly; author photo by Christine Chen.]
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A tailor shop on Lloyd Street, c. 1908. Gift of Caroline H. Bernstein and Helen K. Silverberg, Jewish Museum of Maryland
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Author: Terence Winch
