Miriam's Choristers (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781482686418)

Elizabeth Socolow won the Barnard Poetry Prize in 1987, and her ms. Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton was published by Beacon Press in 1988. Her second short book of poems, Between Silence and Praise, was published in 2006 by Ragged Sky Press of Princeton, New Jersey (in a run of 500). She is a winner of the Isotope Magazine Poetry Prize and of the Canadian CV2 Two Day Poem Prize in 2006. Socolow was educated in Torah study and Hebrew by a survivor of Auschwitz, Mrs. Iskovic, who hid in a closet while her brothers were taught liturgy, Hebrew and cantillation. She was taught reading and writing secretly by them and learned all the prayers and melodies by heart in the closet. She told us that she survived Auschwitz because she was the only woman who could help say prayers for the dead. This book has its source in Mrs. Iskovic's way of teaching Torah, which took place at the Kehiloth Jeshurun congregation on East 85th St. in Manhattan between 1947 and 1952.