The Love of Mortal Beings

Imagine that all that remains of people you once loved more than life are names. Imagine that the power to name is the power to control the conduit of souls to and from the afterworld. Imagine a couple caught in the aftermath of the Holocaust, struggling with one another over the power to name their children. This is Batnadiv Hakarmi's debut, The Love of Mortal Beings. With tremendous patience, care, compassion and wisdom, HaKarmi gently releases the fingers clenched around letters that never came, honors the bodies never found, in the devastation that is never named. As she probes her grandparents' lives together, love and forgiveness shift and strain, snap, and reconnect. This book will change your heart.



-Marcela Sulak, author of City of Skypapers and Mouth Full of Seeds



In this debut collection of poems, Batnadiv HaKarmi transports the reader to the lost world of European Jewry dispersed in the Holocaust. By turns haunting and mundane, HaKarmi gently intertwines the universal with the everyday. Poem by poem we are drawn along as bread is rationed, fathers disappear, children are lost, candles are lit, and God is accused. Invited on this journey are Abram, Rachel, Isaac, King Saul, and a witch or two. And at the center, HaKarmi's grandparents mourn and berate, struggle and survive. With a deft and steady hand, HaKarmi observes and records their lives and the effect their trauma has on those around them. These are poems of witness, but they are also poems of great beauty.

-Jane Medved, author of Deep Calls to Deep and Olam, Shana, Nefesh