Abstract

“My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet” is a poetic exploration of queer longing, queer mundanity, and contemporary cultural Judaism. The project has two primary components: (1) epistolary, persona, and narrative poems that tell the story of Ernest and Rubin, two homosexual Jewish lovers in pre-Holocaust Romania, and of Ernest’s later life in mid-twentieth-century Montreal; and (2) prose, lyric, and form poems that explore my homonormative existence in contemporary Montreal, including my relationship to my cultural Judaism, my romantic engagement(s), and my material comforts. These two components are connected by the fact that Ernest is a heavily fictionalized version of my actual maternal great-grandfather, Herbert, about whom I know very little save for the fact that he danced ballet in Romania before immigrating to Montreal. The two components intersect in metapoems that explore my queer longing: my desire to discover that my homosexuality, my queerness, is shared with a member of my family. The project is inspired by other contemporary texts, such as Casey Plett’s Little Fish and Lisa Richter’s Nautilus and Bone, that also seek to reposition familial or Jewish history in a queer context, and by media such as Bianca Stigter’s documentary Three Minutes: A Lengthening and Sebastian Meise’s drama Große Freiheit (Great Freedom), both of which explore mid-twentieth-century Judaism and/or queerness using new and innovative lenses.