Episode 33: Sabrina Orah Mark

Rachel Zucker speaks with writer Sabrina Orah Mark (author of The Babies and Tsim Tsum) right before the first night of Passover. They talk about Judaism, surrealism, Claudia Rankine and Kenneth Koch, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, being good at being pummeled, the prose poem, the kabbalistic concept of tsim tsum, the Holocaust, Jewish identification, what makes a Nazi a Nazi, empathy, Trump, slavery, living in Georgia, the commodification of trauma, teaching outside the academy, “the crying room,” writing fiction, using “I” again, raising an interracial Jewish family in the South, privilege, safety, fear, and believing and not believing in healing.

Rachel Zucker speaks with writer Sabrina Orah Mark (author of The Babies and Tsim Tsum) right before the first night of Passover. They talk about Judaism, surrealism, Claudia Rankine and Kenneth Koch, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, being good at being pummeled, the prose poem, the kabbalistic concept of tsim tsum, the Holocaust, Jewish identification, what makes a Nazi a Nazi, empathy, Trump, slavery, living in Georgia, the commodification of trauma, teaching outside the academy, “the crying room,” writing fiction, using “I” again, raising an interracial Jewish family in the South, privilege, safety, fear, and believing and not believing in healing.

EXTRA RESOURCES FOR EPISODE 33Books by Sabrina Orah Mark

Tsim Tsum (Saturnalia, 2009)

The Babies (Saturnalia, 2004)

Other Books and Authors Mentioned in the Episode

Claudia Rankine

Kenneth Koch

John Donne

Rachel Zucker’s chapbook Annunciation

Coetze’s Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin, 2010)

Josh Bell

Reginald McKnight

Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness by Jane Lazarre

Bruno Schulz

Other Relevant Links

Magritte’s The Healer

Emmett Till

Controversy over the Emmett Till painting at the Whitney

“The Poet as Collector,” Sabrina’s lecture on trash

Rachel’s birth poem that mentions tsim tsum