Fea­tured on Zib­by Owens’ My Most Antic­i­pat­ed Books 2025 list

Inter­weav­ing mem­oir with Hebrew poet­ry, Going Out with Knots illu­mi­nates author Wendy I. Zier­ler’s lit­er­ary and per­son­al Jew­ish mourn­ing jour­ney in the after­math of unremit­ting per­son­al loss.

She begins with her sto­ry: the death of both her par­ents in one year; the chal­lenges she faced as a woman say­ing Kad­dish in an Ortho­dox syn­a­gogue; and her deci­sion to teach a week­ly class on mod­ern Hebrew poems that address grief, prayer, and God wrestling. Each sub­se­quent chap­ter delves into the works of a dif­fer­ent mod­ern Hebrew poet – Lea Gold­berg, Avra­ham Ḥal­fi, Yehu­da Amichai, Rachel Mor­pur­go, Rachel Bluw­stein, Ruhama Weiss, and Amir Gilboa – in the order in which she trans­lat­ed, inter­pret­ed, and taught their poems (many trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish for the first time). Each poet, like Zier­ler, comes to writ­ing deeply con­nect­ed to Jew­ish tra­di­tion and yet at odds with it, too.

Ulti­mate­ly, Going Out with Knots reflects on how a woman liv­ing in a Mod­ern Ortho­dox com­mu­ni­ty can claim a place in the male-cen­tered rit­u­als that Jew­ish tra­di­tion pre­scribes for mourn­ing, and how immer­sion in mod­ern Hebrew poet­ry can respond deeply to both com­mu­nal (COVID-19, Octo­ber 7) as well as per­son­al loss­es, offer­ing a new form of the­ol­o­gy and Torah.