Bread Without Sugar by Gerald Stern
"Bread Without Sugar" by Gerald Stern is a substantial poem divided into eight distinct sections that delve into themes of memory, identity, and familial relationships. Set against the backdrop of his father's gravesite in Miami, the poem serves as a reflection on both the poet's relationship with his deceased father and the broader tapestry of Jewish history. Through a journey of recollection, Stern intertwines personal anecdotes—from his father's life as a tailor in Kiev to his own childhood memories of Pittsburgh—while contemplating his own mortality and the potential locations for his burial.
Stern's voice is characterized by an impromptu and visceral quality, creating a meditative experience for readers as they navigate his thoughts and emotions. The poem employs a unique associative structure that allows for a blending of time and memory, with a particular emphasis on sensory experiences, notably the sense of smell, which acts as a thread connecting various recollections. The concluding passages resonate with a sense of hope and yearning, encapsulated in a prayer-like incantation that seeks preservation and understanding amidst the complexities of life. Overall, "Bread Without Sugar" invites readers to engage with an introspective exploration of heritage and the intricate connections between past and present.
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Subject Terms
Bread Without Sugar by Gerald Stern
First published: 1989; collected in Bread Without Sugar: Poems, 1992
Type of poem: Elegy
The Poem
“Bread Without Sugar” is a long fifteen-page poem in eight unnumbered parts that function not so much as stanzas as discrete sections (each approximately thirty to sixty lines in length). To further complicate the picture, the poem is written in memory of the poet’s father, contains an epigraph from Grace Paley (“This is what makes justice in the world—to bring these lives into the light”), and, at its conclusion, is dedicated to the writer and editor Ted Solotaroff. It is necessary to keep these three aspects in mind as the poem unfolds.
The setting for “Bread Without Sugar”—and there usually is an external setting for a Gerald Stern poem—is his father’s gravesite in Miami, and it is his father’s life that Stern wants to “bring to light.” Kneeling in wet December sand to see the headstone, the speaker travels through memory to the day of his father’s funeral; he sees the cantor, the boring rabbi, the Jewish businessmen from Newark and Flatbush who, like his father—a retired tailor and buyer—had come to Miami. He then goes back through a cross-section of his father’s life (“born in Kiev, died in Miami”), to a cross-section of his own life (memories of Pittsburgh, the “bread without sugar” he had eaten as a boy, his eventual travels), to a day in “1940 or 1941” when the family had first visited Florida. Simultaneously, the governing sensibility of the poem travels outward, embracing the whole of Jewish history, the scattered past that in the end can bring such different people together in the same place.
As the poet contemplates his somewhat strained relationship with his deceased father, what he calls an “odd vexation,” he also recounts his interaction with his aging mother and begins to wonder where he himself will be buried. He considers a variety of his favorite places, going from “country/ to country in search of a plot.” These imaginative gestures move him into what might be termed “speculative time.” Thus Stern is able not only to select several possible burial sites but also to create his death scene (hit by a taxi in Poland). His expansive imagination embraces the future: “I want/ to live with the Spanish forever. I love/ their food and I love their music; I am/ not even dead and I am speaking/ their language already; I hope their poets/ remember me.” There is a complicated mix of tenses so that chronological time becomes meaningless. In this way Stern allows himself, at least figuratively, more than one life.
Further, the poet is able to move quickly from remembered time (the family in the Charles Hotel) to his projected old age in the same hotel; he envisions himself drawing his pension, cooking on a hot plate, losing his glasses on the sand, not being able to find his towel. The poem ends with incantation, an individual prayer for the self, fully realized because of its all-inclusive, all-embracing journey through concomitant histories: “May the turtles escape/ the nets: May I find my ocean! May/ the salt preserve me! May the black clouds instruct me!”
Forms and Devices
Over the years Gerald Stern has developed an idiosyncratic voice—one that readers can recognize instantly as belonging to him alone. It is not simply conversational; it is a voice which seems to come from the most visceral center of the man: personal, engaging, spontaneous, often breaking free in impromptu associations. To read Stern is to accompany him on a sort of spiritual autobiography. This voice is not that of a confessional persona pretending to “tell all”—it does not invite or even seem to need the reader. Readers participate fully, but as bystanders. Each poem embodies a thought process—a scattering of real moments and personal connections, a twist of particular synapses, then new observation, new wiring, odd pairings that lead to more memories, more connections.
“Bread Without Sugar” proceeds on just such a circuitous associative route. The sentences seem to spill into one another, a jumble of questions and observations, punctuated by dashes and semicolons, commas linking one fleeting thought to another, one memory to its outlandish extrapolation. A good example is the section in which the speaker is thinking about the people buried near his father:
The sky
The reader is inside the speaker’s head. The poem functions more like a meditative lyric than a narrative, yet its length allows it room to range through the father’s history, the poet’s own story, and even the ongoing saga of Jews in the Diaspora, regaining Spanish, “remembering words/ they hadn’t thought of for five hundred years.” The interest is as much in what the poet is thinking and feeling as in any “story” he might tell.
An interesting aspect of “Bread Without Sugar” is the use of the sense of smell. Each section contains some reference to a memory of a stench—seemingly brought on by a garbage dump near the cemetery in Miami. The poet’s associations are held together by smell; it crops up as a memory of a rat-strewn bakery where he had to cover his mouth as a boy, the heavy syrup of his parents’ fruit salad sundaes, the “disgusting smell” of the clinkers in the yellow cloud of air at Union Station in Pittsburgh, the burning city, pigs “rolling in shit” in Mexico, the angel who “stank from the sun,” each image just a bit more exaggerated than the last.
Sources for Further Study
Boston Globe. June 21, 1992, p. 107.
Choice. XXX, October, 1992, p. 302.
The Georgia Review. XLVI, Fall, 1992. p. 554.
Library Journal. CXVII, March 15, 1992, p. 92.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. September 13, 1992,p. 15.
Poetry. CLXI, November, 1992, p. 99.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, April 27, 1992, p. 257.
Times-Picayune. April 26, 1992, p. D 19.