Project description:

In my early twenties, I spent three consecutive winters going into work with my maternal grandfather, a shopkeeper and tailor in a de-industrialized opioid town. I went to him to encounter and write in the ruins of his parents’ apartment, wherein he was born and below which he worked seventy years of his life. I did this because he was selling the building, and I felt the need to memorize it, so to be part of its material witness and scars of traditional Judaism. I became invested in Jewish orthodoxy, conceptually and politically, as something that was taken from my family and replaced with white violence. I became invested in Jewish cultural transmission, and its relationship to the visceral experience I had in writing; in writing in place, in body, in history, under nonhuman influence and catastrophe. 

MELEKHMELEKHMELEKHMELEKH! An Assimilation is a durational examination and incantatory slip of the apartment ruins, composed in a series of sensually hybrid but stubbornly minimalist forms. The apartment ruins serve as a nexus for exegesis, local minor history—the racist mob murder of Luiz Ramirez—, dirge, artifact, and direct ancestral address. The Jewish body in its racialized, intertextual, and settler-colonial traces grate the book into concluding theses: “Prayer is the nominal means by which my ancestors recognize my labor/Prayer translates the roots of the dead unto the malice of the living/Prayer disintegrates the violent justification//Prayer is participation.”