Someone Else's Memoirs

Peter Babiak teaches English at the University of British Columbia.

Even the most spirited poems in this half-burlesque treatment of life in
Toronto’s Jewish community are marked with a menacing sadness, a sort
of enforced structural irony that stubbornly points out that we must
accept sickness and death as compulsory experiences in life (not a
surprising attitude, since Charach is a practising psychiatrist). “Sea
Lotion,” for example, is about a group of men who regularly congregate
in a barbershop, discoursing aimlessly on “NFL, AFL, CFL, / AFL-CIO
vs. Management, / Tales of horror and delight, / of men and women
yielding to body waste,” but whose hyperboles come to a sudden, though
not surprising, end when Syd the barber “[has] an explosion in his
barrel chest.”

The quick juxtaposition of life and death is unmistakable in “A Toast
to Aunt Leah” (the “world’s best spinner / of homilies,” who
named her cat “Regina de la Farbotnik de Catkowitz Da Toid”),
wherein the speaker remembers being “squeezed to your generous
breasts, / even if both would come off to cancer.” It becomes an
avowal of impotence in the face of disease in “Remembering: The First
Round,” when he recalls a patient dying of AIDS before that disease
reached epidemic proportions: “the Specter of AIDS,” he admits in
this strategic biblical allusion, “who could imagine / the span of its
mantle— / passed over us, / having made a first-round / selection.”
Theodor Adorno once said that poetry could no longer exist after the
brutality and suffering of Auschwitz. In Someone Else’s Memoirs,
poetry retrieves its therapeutic and redemptive value in the
interpretation of life precisely because of its brutal realism.