City Pulse People Issue 2021: Chana Kraus-Friedberg, poet

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In her day job as a medical librarian at MSU, Chana Kraus-Friedberg, 40,  helps students navigate complex mazes of medical research. She has written poetry, on and off, since she was 6 and started writing again recently after connecting with the Lansing poetry circuit. A set of five poems from her first collection, “Grammars of Hope,” due in February from Finishing Line Press, earned her the 2020 Marc Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award, given each year by the Lansing Poetry Club.

Have you found that people are connecting more with poetry in the isolation and heartbreak of 2020?

Obviously, it’s been a terrible year, but poetry is having a bit of a renaissance. People are turning to it. I’m a member of a Facebook group supporting faculty during the pandemic. One woman, a law professor, said that things are so awful — she and her students are both experiencing so much stress and uncertainty — that they started each of their online classes by reading a poem. In law school! She said her students loved it. Tons of people commented on the post, saying, “What poems are you reading?” I feel like it’s a real thing. People are realizing they needed it and they just didn’t know.

How do you explain that?

Jeanette Winterson, a really famous British lesbian writer, has a quote in her autobiography, where she describes reading T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” right after she got kicked out of her parents’ house. She just sat there and she started crying. She said, “People think that poetry isn’t for everybody, but strong feelings need strong words.” And that’s what poetry is and why it’s so healing.

In your own poetry, you reckon frankly with your strict Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn.

I was brought up super-duper-Orthodox. It was like growing up in the last century. I went to a Jewish girls’ school where we were told explicitly and frequently that girls were stupid. We weren’t allowed to watch TV or to go to movies. I knew I could study the Talmud a lot better than many men I knew, but I wasn’t allowed. If you said stuff in class that was too smart, you were told no man would marry you. It wasn’t a good place to be a smart female kid and it really made me angry.

How did you get away?

I was lucky. I went to Brooklyn College and I was in a very small, really great honors program. I applied to graduate school to do my doctorate in archaeology and they gave me a stipend. I was financially independent, I was able to leave and I left.

What is your relationship with your parents now?

I didn’t talk to them for about a decade and now I have sporadic contact with them. When I stopped being religious, I also came out as gay, which did not thrill them.

You stopped writing poetry in your 20s, took about 15 years off, and started again when you came to Lansing. Were you reconnecting with your thoughts, or with poetry itself?

It was both, at once. You can’t write poetry unless you can hear your thoughts for yourself, and in an honest way. It’s possible to write a poem about something you don’t feel, but it won’t be a very good poem. It’s hard to fake it. When I started writing more, I found there were things I wanted to do. I wanted to light Hanukah candles, which I hadn’t for a long time. I wanted to go to synagogue and sing the songs I grew up singing. Those things sort of happened at the same time.

Your poetry jumps over a chasm from your Orthodox past to your present-day self. Having re-established that connection, do you see yourself as a bridge builder?

I left the world I left very angry —not now, but I was then. As a result, it is almost impossible for me to talk with someone who voted for Trump and be like, ‘Oh, I get where you’re coming from.’ I feel like it’s everything I hated about where I grew up. But in certain areas, like archaeology and anthropology, I was trained to be able to plop down in a culture and take a look at it. — examine it without judgment. When other people are saying, ‘Some cultures do blah blah blah,’ I say, ‘Santa Claus.’ It all looks weird to me.

(This interviewed was conducted, edited and condensed by Lawrence Cosentino.)