Poetry review – ALEPH BET: Wendy Klein relishes Sue Rose’s imaginative exploration of the Hebrew alphabet
Aleph Bet
Sue Rose
Cinnamon Press
ISBN 978-1-78864-176-0
£9.99
‘Aleph Bet’, the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet! How could I not jump at the chance to review this book with its lively and inventive take on the alphabet I decided (and struggled!) to learn in my sixties? Not unlike the author, I grew up with only the scantiest religious framework facilitated by my grandfather, a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated to the US in the 1890s and side-lined organized religion while retaining a powerful Jewish identity to try to pass on to me. When my youngest daughter undertook Bat Mitzvah, I realized how much I had missed and decided to learn prayerbook Hebrew sufficient to read my ‘portion’ from the Sefer Torah, the holy book of Judaism, myself. What a joy it has been to renew that remedial knowledge and extend it in the delightful manner offered by Sue Rose.
So, where do I begin? Bereshit: beginning (as in the), the first word of the Torah, and beginning with the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ‘Bet,’ which Rose explains in the opening line of her poem in praise of the letter, is ‘second, but not scant,’ that it is ‘a hard kiss of sound’ produced by ‘a pursing of the lips’, as for a kiss. And so, with the deliciously skilled alliteration the poet employs to excellent effect throughout the collection, we are told that Bet is not just for beginning, but for brain, for birth, as in the birth of the world in the beginning. She ‘shouts out’ for its shape, that of a door open, as she does for each letter in turn, a door open and ‘beckoning always’ barukh, brakhha, ‘…blessing the family, friends , laughter, touch.’
Each letter in this remarkable collection is given the same loving, detailed treatment: an exploration of its shape, its meaning, its cultural significance. Their presentation on the page is uniform, short lines, standing tall as if echoing the shapes of the letters themselves. Rose’s approach is both playful and meditative introducing sound ‘the enigma / of tongue against palate,’ comments Adam Horovitz on the back cover, ‘in soft breaths and plosive continuities to become entwined in the words of her ancestors’, and indeed of language itself.
It is a limitation of my clumsiness on my own keyboard with its evolved standard 26 letters that I cannot illustrate all the wonders of this book by typing in each Hebrew character. I would love to be able to show ‘Gimmel’, for example, ‘traced by the voice / as a triangle in the air’, but standing tall on the page: ‘…individual / in motion:
…big foot
ruled by a big heart –
rich as language, king
of wealth, chasing
after the poor with alms.
‘As recompense’, the poet comments wittily on how the word sounds like gamal, which
brings in the camel,
neck outstretched
on its desert trek,
its humpback a gamla –
ancient bridge between
departure and home.
King and camel happily entwined in language enroute towards home. Just delicious! And leading on to dalet, the 4th letter standing tall next to it
Fourth, not forthright
dalet is all deference
mark of the receivers
of the world,
door open
to callers.
However, four/fourth is so much more important, signifying the 4 mothers of Israel’s tribes, the 4 cups of wine drunk at the Passover meal or seder, the 4 questions posed by the youngest child/person at the festive table. Moreover, the poet suggests the door as open to opportunity, leading to the Exodus, the flight to freedom almost certainly highlighting the plight of refugees:
Behind this portal
or sheltered by cloth
crouch the down-and-outs
who are counting on aid.
Which of us will answer
the knock or draw
back the canvas flap.
‘The canvas flap’, indicative of tents, suggests the grim camps sheltering refugees in so many places and perhaps in what is right now, barely Palestine.
Dalet is followed speedily by Heh, pronounced like ‘hay’ and dubbed ‘…the high five / of the body – fingers, / senses / dimensions –’ moves swiftly on to Vav, the letter of connection ‘a silver / crook joining curtain / to tabernacle, text / to parchment, clause / to clause.’ Here the poet infers the way in which the sound in English veers toward female parts, a sexual suggestion halted before spelling out the word itself. Indeed, in my reading there seems, through her choice of language, to be a strong and refreshing thread of feminism within a religious context that is more commonly perceived as patriarchal. Indeed, the 9th letter, Tet, is described as a shape suggesting a snake ‘…head over tail, rare / in the Torah’ in that it ‘teeters between tov (good!) and not, the ‘not’ a house snake ‘its fate of dust.’ The poem warns to hold fast to ‘the perfect nine’, citing it as a vessel which ‘tends futures in its uterus’ but warning of what might emerge, that perhaps it might be better/safer for it to stay ‘empty as a kettledrum…’ And here is letter 14, nun:
Sprouting seed, deceit
embodied by the snake;
seminal nun is offspring
son continuing the line –
though our descent
is uterine, the founding – (ah spot the neat internal rhyme half-rhyme)
feminine. …
It is a fact that Jewish law halacha defines ‘Jewishness’ through maternal descent, which the crafty poet discovers lurking in the alphabet. But nun does more, relaxing into nu, the awe a parent expresses at his offspring’s cleverness, and I can hear my grandmother’s voice, the nachas/pride at our achievements:
And nu, they’d say, cue
to value the now yet
keep on moving, alive
to the boon of family
in natan, past of giving.
It is to my huge regret that I cannot indulge in the attention and praise that every single letter of the Hebrew alphabet deserves in this review, but I do not want to leave without a comment on the ‘gutturals’, particularly chet, the 8th letter. Rose describes its sound as a ‘Rasp hawked up / from the cauldron / of the throat, kh brands / the speech of the chosen.’ My grandmother swore it could not be pronounced properly by gentiles and would prove it by testing willing friends on challah and, chutzpah, and chai, for l’chaim, to life.
On the back cover of this treasure trove of a book, the inimitable Jewish poet, Norbert Hirschhorn expresses his wish that the Hebrew alphabet had more letters ‘…fifty-six, eighty-four in order for Sue Rose to keep rolling out her wondrous poetic achievement,’ and I couldn’t agree more. She offers the reader history, pronunciation, some wonderful photographs of family religious mementos, and a rich sweep of cultural heritage. What’s more she does it with exquisitely crafted poems dotted with some touches of familiar Yiddish humour. Nu, read it and see for yourself.
With 4 collections and a pamphlet behind her, Wendy Klein continues to find homes for poems, wins the odd minor competition and has a new pamphlet out from Grey Hen Press, ‘Having her Cake’, which focuses on the physician-assisted death of a life-long friend.
Oct 31 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Sue Rose
Poetry review – ALEPH BET: Wendy Klein relishes Sue Rose’s imaginative exploration of the Hebrew alphabet
‘Aleph Bet’, the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet! How could I not jump at the chance to review this book with its lively and inventive take on the alphabet I decided (and struggled!) to learn in my sixties? Not unlike the author, I grew up with only the scantiest religious framework facilitated by my grandfather, a Ukrainian Jew who emigrated to the US in the 1890s and side-lined organized religion while retaining a powerful Jewish identity to try to pass on to me. When my youngest daughter undertook Bat Mitzvah, I realized how much I had missed and decided to learn prayerbook Hebrew sufficient to read my ‘portion’ from the Sefer Torah, the holy book of Judaism, myself. What a joy it has been to renew that remedial knowledge and extend it in the delightful manner offered by Sue Rose.
So, where do I begin? Bereshit: beginning (as in the), the first word of the Torah, and beginning with the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ‘Bet,’ which Rose explains in the opening line of her poem in praise of the letter, is ‘second, but not scant,’ that it is ‘a hard kiss of sound’ produced by ‘a pursing of the lips’, as for a kiss. And so, with the deliciously skilled alliteration the poet employs to excellent effect throughout the collection, we are told that Bet is not just for beginning, but for brain, for birth, as in the birth of the world in the beginning. She ‘shouts out’ for its shape, that of a door open, as she does for each letter in turn, a door open and ‘beckoning always’ barukh, brakhha, ‘…blessing the family, friends , laughter, touch.’
Each letter in this remarkable collection is given the same loving, detailed treatment: an exploration of its shape, its meaning, its cultural significance. Their presentation on the page is uniform, short lines, standing tall as if echoing the shapes of the letters themselves. Rose’s approach is both playful and meditative introducing sound ‘the enigma / of tongue against palate,’ comments Adam Horovitz on the back cover, ‘in soft breaths and plosive continuities to become entwined in the words of her ancestors’, and indeed of language itself.
It is a limitation of my clumsiness on my own keyboard with its evolved standard 26 letters that I cannot illustrate all the wonders of this book by typing in each Hebrew character. I would love to be able to show ‘Gimmel’, for example, ‘traced by the voice / as a triangle in the air’, but standing tall on the page: ‘…individual / in motion:
‘As recompense’, the poet comments wittily on how the word sounds like gamal, which
King and camel happily entwined in language enroute towards home. Just delicious! And leading on to dalet, the 4th letter standing tall next to it
However, four/fourth is so much more important, signifying the 4 mothers of Israel’s tribes, the 4 cups of wine drunk at the Passover meal or seder, the 4 questions posed by the youngest child/person at the festive table. Moreover, the poet suggests the door as open to opportunity, leading to the Exodus, the flight to freedom almost certainly highlighting the plight of refugees:
‘The canvas flap’, indicative of tents, suggests the grim camps sheltering refugees in so many places and perhaps in what is right now, barely Palestine.
Dalet is followed speedily by Heh, pronounced like ‘hay’ and dubbed ‘…the high five / of the body – fingers, / senses / dimensions –’ moves swiftly on to Vav, the letter of connection ‘a silver / crook joining curtain / to tabernacle, text / to parchment, clause / to clause.’ Here the poet infers the way in which the sound in English veers toward female parts, a sexual suggestion halted before spelling out the word itself. Indeed, in my reading there seems, through her choice of language, to be a strong and refreshing thread of feminism within a religious context that is more commonly perceived as patriarchal. Indeed, the 9th letter, Tet, is described as a shape suggesting a snake ‘…head over tail, rare / in the Torah’ in that it ‘teeters between tov (good!) and not, the ‘not’ a house snake ‘its fate of dust.’ The poem warns to hold fast to ‘the perfect nine’, citing it as a vessel which ‘tends futures in its uterus’ but warning of what might emerge, that perhaps it might be better/safer for it to stay ‘empty as a kettledrum…’ And here is letter 14, nun:
It is a fact that Jewish law halacha defines ‘Jewishness’ through maternal descent, which the crafty poet discovers lurking in the alphabet. But nun does more, relaxing into nu, the awe a parent expresses at his offspring’s cleverness, and I can hear my grandmother’s voice, the nachas/pride at our achievements:
It is to my huge regret that I cannot indulge in the attention and praise that every single letter of the Hebrew alphabet deserves in this review, but I do not want to leave without a comment on the ‘gutturals’, particularly chet, the 8th letter. Rose describes its sound as a ‘Rasp hawked up / from the cauldron / of the throat, kh brands / the speech of the chosen.’ My grandmother swore it could not be pronounced properly by gentiles and would prove it by testing willing friends on challah and, chutzpah, and chai, for l’chaim, to life.
On the back cover of this treasure trove of a book, the inimitable Jewish poet, Norbert Hirschhorn expresses his wish that the Hebrew alphabet had more letters ‘…fifty-six, eighty-four in order for Sue Rose to keep rolling out her wondrous poetic achievement,’ and I couldn’t agree more. She offers the reader history, pronunciation, some wonderful photographs of family religious mementos, and a rich sweep of cultural heritage. What’s more she does it with exquisitely crafted poems dotted with some touches of familiar Yiddish humour. Nu, read it and see for yourself.
With 4 collections and a pamphlet behind her, Wendy Klein continues to find homes for poems, wins the odd minor competition and has a new pamphlet out from Grey Hen Press, ‘Having her Cake’, which focuses on the physician-assisted death of a life-long friend.