Tuvia RuebnerNow at the Threshold: The Late Poems of Tuvia Ruebner by Rachel Tzvia Back

Abstract

Lee’s persistence in her desire to preach, the recognition of women as the backbone of the church, and Prathia Hall’s “I Have a Dream” talk aloud with God, among others. The discussion of Islam from the beginning of the abducted Africans’ forced migration to North America to the Nation of Islam’s influence during the modern Civil Rights Movement is fascinating. Other notable discussions include the historical bombings of Black worship houses as they were recognized as the seat of empowerment for Blacks. Gates’s discussion of the Jesuit scandal (indeed the role of the entire Catholic Church in the slave trade) involving slavery and their educational mission is riveting. Finally, his discussion on Black music (spirituals, gospel) as a requisite feature of the Black Church (along with sermonizing) is brilliantly executed and weaved throughout the account. Framed by a very informative introduction and an epilogue that contains Gates’s personal recollections of the church, the four chapters are organized chronologically by key moments in American history. Chapter 2, “A Nation within a Nation,” is especially illuminating in its guide to the development of the Black Church. Likewise , chapter 4, “Crisis of Faith,” charts the decline of the Black Church as a force for transformation to its resurgence with new and powerful voices for both social change and accommodation to new musical styles and messages. Gates identifies hip-hop as “a new kind of secular ministry.” This is a brilliant work: a compelling read that incorporates little-known facts about the Black Church and clarifies other information held popularly by the public. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Tuvia Ruebner Now at the Threshold:The Late Poems of Tuvia Ruebner Trans. Rachel Tzvia Back. Cincinatti. Hebrew Union College Press. 2020. 188 pages. THE POET TUVIA RUEBNER left this world just months before the arrival of a pandemic that has since shaken it. For a life shaped by continual loss, both communal and personal, this seems a small measure of mercy. But as I read through Ruebner’s late poems, gathered in a superb bilingual collection of translations by Rachel Tzvia Back, I wondered whether the global health crisis would have affected him at all. Though his life spanned two centuries, traversed two continents, and encompassed two languages (German, his mother tongue, and Hebrew, his adopted and main language of composition), Ruebner took up BOOKS IN REVIEW Imbolo Mbue How Beautiful We Were New York. Random House. 2021. 384 pages. HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE is Imbolo Mbue’s second novel to be published; however , Mbue started writing it long before her first novel, Behold the Dreamers, appeared. This novel transports readers to the imaginary African village of Kosawa, grappling with the ravages of environmental pollution as a result of drilling by an American oil corporation. The novel opens dramatically when, at a village meeting with representatives from the Pexton Oil Company, Konga, a madman , captures the car keys of the delegates, steering the village toward an astonishing act of rebellion: holding the Pexton men hostage to exert pressure on the company to reveal what happened to their own men who disappeared when they went to the city to lodge a complaint. The narrative vacillates between the perspectives of the children who witness this primary act of rebellion and other characters in the village. The dramatic act of collective solidarity initiated by Konga is a sly inversion of Pexton’s strategy of liquidating the emissaries from the village who had demanded better environmental protections . The initial act of rebellion prompts a retaliatory bloodbath against Kosawa and the arrest and execution of several villagers on charges of kidnapping. Already, readers are plunged into cycles of trauma: IMBOLO MBUE 82 WLT SPRING 2021 0 remarkably little space. As a teenager he traveled from his native Bratislava to Kibbutz Merhavia in northern Israel, where he remained in a modest two-room home until his death at the age of ninety-five. Terms like “social distance” and “shelter in place” never entered his parlance, but the concepts were intuitive for him. For this reason, his poems are needed today more than ever before. They observe the wonders of the quotidian , the splendor in the...