If I Try To Be Like Him, Who Will Be Like Me?: Poems

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Since Jay’s death, writes Zev Shanken, I have come to value the proverb’s insight into the habits, mannerisms, and values that define a loved one’s presence. And absence. The proverb–If I try to be like him, who will be like me?–does not claim the speaker to be better, but only rightfully necessary and simply irreplaceable. In this first year of Jay’s absence, I have come to understand the proverb as a lens through which to see Jay’s approach to family, friends, art, identity, and Judaism. In memory of Jay I have chosen that proverb for the title of this book. The collection includes earlier poems, a public memorial to Jay Greenspan as a representative of our generation’s struggles to develop new strategies for making life holy, a struggle that brought a number of us together as the ‘New York Havera’ on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s. But, he goes on, it honors Jay most, not so much by the poems that mention him by name, nor the ones that address global concerns he and I shared, nor even by my using one of his favoriteYiddish proverbs as a title for this book, but rather by the other poems in this book, the poems that sprang from the permission Jay’s affection gave this poet to be himself. The result is a riveting act of testimony, integrity, and joy.