Sift from the four midrashic levels. The first P’shat, the hand brushing. Remez, the second, a shard refers. The third, Drash, speaks the question the shard asks. Sod, the fourth, air curriculum 
 
echo eastern direction

Byzantine Mediterranean or Aegean 
Any wells, olive trees, terraced fields 
Where any 
 
go and do not land

land and

are required

to not come from

Aspire to be a National Heritage site, abandoned ruin, town rebuilt as a medieval fortress
Compose yourself as a site we can visit 
Become a tour or papers and salary will be withheld 
the Antiquity authorities cannot save 
 
 
 
 
 
The guides who led me through the “old countries” of my grandparents in Vilnius, Lithuania; Kishinev, Moldova; and Odessa, Ukraine; were trained and licensed by government schools that chose to delete Jewish presence from their official tour narratives. “The Guides,” and the larger manuscript it is from, Guide School, is an investigation into the schools that train guides and the global guide-licensing tourist industry as an arm of the state. The training of readers is also under investigation – since the way one is taught to perambulate through a city or through a book shapes perceptions of the foreign and familiar, of theirs/ours. 
 
“The Guides,” is also concerned with differences between those who want to travel and those who don’t have a choice. There are parallels between migrants and refugees, such as my ancestors, who were escaping antisemitism and ethnic cleansing, and those currently escaping genocide, Islamophobia, and ethnic cleansing. And there are not parallels.
 
I did not go to the old countries in search of an origin. None of my ancestors had affection for, or a sense of belonging to those places. For many in diaspora or exile return is not possible. And it is perhaps differently impossible for those who were never recognized as citizens of the state in their “old” or original countries. Guide School, documents visits to the places my ancestors were not from but where they stayed, temporarily, for centuries. In this way it is an itinerary of the irreconcilable, an unwriting. 
 
 
 
 
Advanced Praise for "The Guides."
 
Where tourism organizations commodify diasporic longing, The Guides offers a poetics of refraction, shining light through every fissure and facade in what we incorrectly call history. These episodic ambulations through Gevirtz’s Jewish “anti-homelands” not only call out history’s infelicities and erasures, but also refute it as something lived and shelved. Here the diaspora is present, vital, at turns needfully unpunctuated—a mesh where staid scripts are the seed of a continually cohering midrash.
 
-Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly
 
 
Among the many questions posed by Susan Gevirtz in The Guides is this: “Where should those without a homeland go?” Another, related, in this extraordinary interrogation of home and land: if to return is to rhyme, which rhymes might we listen for in a made landscape ‘passed as true’ by language, memory, constellations of the absent?
 
 
Through Gevirtz’s listening eye (“a figment broken off from the flock”), we hear: author become orphan, protector become predator, tourist become terrorist, place become replace, antiquity become alibi. This feels like necessary music to fortify against the current dangers of language deployed in the service of “nationhood.’ Especially so in the face of another haunting question this vital work pushes us to ask and ask again: “Who is not there?” The Guides is our guide for the present as past, the past as presence, and I don't think we can do without it.
 
-Adrian Lüssen
 
 
With an irreconcilable eye, “The Guides” by Susan Gevirtz investigates how what we read and what we’re told can misshape who we are. The exigencies of Gevirtz’s personal histories remain unchanged, but reading this text shifts, perhaps uncomfortably, the perspectives of its readers, pointing us to the questions: What do schools and schooling in general bury, distort, delete? And how do we, knowingly and unknowingly, train ourselves to look away? “The Guides” contributes to a list of poetry and prose by Gevirtz that audiences will return to for a long time to come.
 
-Justin Robinson
 
 
 
 
Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings), (Nightboat). Gevirtz works with Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. In 2004 she and Siarita Kouka, Greek poet/restorer of maritime antiquities, founded the Paros Symposium, an annual translation and conversation meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. She is based in San Francisco.
​