By TAHLIB
INDIANA---Ms. Bonnie Maurer is one of the first three literary artist honorees to receive the A&O Prize; and on Saturday, November 9 at 2:00 p.m. she will be honored at Indiana Interchurch Center, 1100 W. 42nd Street in Indianapolis. Maurer is also a two-time recipient of the Creative Renewal Arts Fellowship awarded by the Arts Council of Indianapolis, and self described as "Jewish American". Last year, as part of her fellowship, she traveled to Germany to inform a new series of poems based on the Holocaust. Maurer holds a Masters in Teaching English as a Second Language and an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. Her poetry chapbooks are numerous, and her poems have appeared in the Indiana Review; Lilith, a feminist journal; Nimrod International Journal; Innisfree online journal; on the IndyGo buses; on a CD of Central Indiana Women Musicians; on the website of the T.C. Steele State Historic Site; and in the recent anthology: And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana, published by the Indiana Historical Society.
Below are Bonnie's answers to two questions about religious risk. You can thank Bonnie, and the other artists for taking a risk with religious imagination, by making a gift to the Alpha Omega Prize: Artist Fund via power2give.org.
I am a Jewish American. My experience with risk relating to religious interaction is the story of others in my family: My grandmother Martha’s story, for one, and her mother who I was told hid her down the cellar inside the pickle barrels when the Cossacks rode through their Russian village wielding swords. My grandmother Martha escaped the Russian pogroms (Jew killings) in Lithuania. Was she hidden in a rickety wagon under straw to pass the border guards? At 16, she voyaged to America choosing its July 4th birthday as hers. That’s the story she would tell me over and over, pulling the pins from her bun, silver strands falling down her back like a waterfall.
One of my father’s stories occurred during WWII in the army. He didn’t go to college but he wanted to become a bombardier. He had to take the college equivalent exam. He studied nights under the bathroom light and took the exam. Though he got the highest grade, he was told by his immediate superior that the officer above him did not like Jews and that someone else would be getting the award he deserved. He did go on to become a bombardier.
My mother’s story goes like this: She designed our new house for a new north-side neighborhood. A few families there of women whom she had gone to Shortridge High School with made it known that they did not want our Jewish family to move in to the neighborhood. We did.
Compared to their stories, their struggles and risks in the name of religious freedom and justice, I have taken no risks. I have not had a need in America to fight for my life in the dark of anti-Semitism, or been denied an “A” plus award because I am Jewish or not let in the door of opportunity because of my religious background.
But these stories of courage have fortified my life with a fierceness and resilience. Their stories (and more from our Jewish history) fuel my own desire to pursue knowledge and to create a just world in the ever enlarging circle around me.
2. How have you chosen to use or not to use religion to overcome life challenges?
So I have learned my lessons well, in the light of life’s challenges. Judaism is taught as a way of life—to follow ethical values and to repair the world the best we can. The Talmud teaches us that it is not incumbent upon us to complete the task, but neither are we exempt from beginning.
As one of my life’s challenges to promote understanding and dispel ignorance, I have stood up against prejudicial expressions toward me as a Jew. In my teens, in fact, I had to explain to some girls that Jews did not have horns!
If finding my way after college is one of those life’s challenges, then I chose to use my religion to seek opportunity. I took a big risk in becoming a volunteer during the Yom Kippur War of 73 in Israel by taking the place of soldiers gone to war with neighboring countries who did not want them to coexist.
In my challenge with breast cancer in my 40’s, I can say that again the precepts of Judaism to honor the body as a temple kept me strong and wanting to sustain myself with positive images. But I was also lucky.
Now in my 60’s, I have challenged myself as a Jewish poet---choosing to explore themes related to my heritage. The horror and madness of the Holocaust will never disappear from our consciousness (nor I hope from the consciousness of the world) and although it is not my personal story, I have recently taken the risk to create poetry after visiting Holocaust sites. Perhaps by reading my work, sharing these poems with others, I can serve as an “agent of historical memory” to preserve and transmit words about the atrocities of history at its very worst. Perhaps I can educate others on my way to begin repairing the tears of the world.
In so many endeavors to create a better humanity, there is so much work to be done.
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