The Federation is pleased to announce that the 2025 2nd Place Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Prize has been awarded to Ariel Resnikoff for his debut poetry collection: Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020). This challenging, provocative collection explores the place of the exilee, dwelling in the region between here and there — at home only when not at home — and the role of poetry as a crucial language for the navigation of these interstitial spaces.

This status (that of the exilee) is, the book suggests, at once the inheritance and the legacy of the Jewish people; it is a source of pain and also, sometimes, a source of joy; in truth, it is the one and only home of humankind. Are we not all, the book asks us, like the medieval depiction of the Jew, as featured on the cover, wandering the world as humans with foreign birdbrains (so to speak): dreaming of flight, remembering a nest, on our way to somewhere else, somewhere equally elusive? Navigating this human condition is, likewise, the task of the translator — who knows that no perfect translation exists, that any and all attempts to translocate language from one site to the next forms an inherent impossibility. And yet, this translation, this impossibility, must and does take place all day long as we attempt to decode one another’s inscrutabilities — indeed, the inscrutable world around us. For after all, as Resnikoff suggests, all language, and all writing by extension, is itself translation.

Resnikoff, who lives in El Cerrito, CA, teaches Jewish Cultural Studies at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco. There, he sees teaching Jewish literature and philosophy as a means of putting students in contact with their intellectual and aesthetic inheritances: Jewish thought and its more encompassing forms, Jewish language, art, and culture.

Unnatural Bird Migrator is urgent and challenging in several key ways. It mashes the familiar and the unfamiliar into a kind of “Yinglossia” — a dictionary of undefinable terms; but also, it revives so-called “dead languages” into living idiolectic flesh. Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic and Akkadian join sinews into a walking linguistic corpse-collage (corpus decollage? cadavre exquis?) which makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.

But this is no mere exercise in wordplay. Resnikoff, who most recently lived in Israel for three years as a Fulbright visiting scholar and translator, is both deeply familiar with and a thoughtful responder to the dream and struggles of Israelis and Palestinians for a national homeland. His experiences in the region, which he reflects on throughout the book, have exposed him to a painful reality that, strictly speaking, there is no actual safe nest for humans (or their chicks) in the Middle East, neither Jewish nor Palestinian; or more precisely, as he says, no one is safe until we are all safe.

Likewise, there is no safe haven in simple narratives. Rather, like the bird-headed creature, we are all wandering here to there in search of an elusive nest. This is not to say that there is no reality. Quite the opposite; Resnikoff’s poems suggest that no single entity, no single language, nor culture, no single people are the true citizens of this world. Rather, we are all in search of home. And search we must, neither here nor there, but in space betwixt-between:

And yet, there is hope in this space. This mentality, Resnikoff writes in a dialogue with Tamil American poet, essayist and educator, Divya Victor, forms the poetics of the “nomade immobile” — and forms part of a response to fascist constructions of identity based solely on blood or soil. This “diasporic subjectivity” (nomadics) allows, in plain language, for a dexterous response to totalitarianism, a creative response to stagnation. And it imagines a future where we are “marred & married [to the] speech of strangers.”

In this world-to-come, we are all one another’s’ bird-headed cousins.

The book serves as a critical piece of living culture because it both deconstructs traditional notions of Home and Homeland and asserts the deep value of belonging. It will not spell out conclusive statements about the Middle East — nor anywhere for that matter. It does not offer catharsis for suffering, or comfortability in the face of death and destruction.

Rather, it frequently makes use of resistant language techniques, or language activism, as the Hebrew writer Almog Behar has called this sort of work, re-alphabetization, misspellings and mistranslations that peel away signifier and signified and (attempt to) release language from the harsh bonds of national linguistic standardization. It allows the reader to see the freedom that poetry sees not the world as it should be, nor the world as it is, but the world as it could be, leaving us all to ask the impossible questions. And is there no greater Jewish task than this: never to expect clear understanding, as Resnikoff says, but to stand under: to seek, to wander, to hold and behold?