Over the Rooftops of Time

Myra Sklarew is Professor of Literature at American University and the author of many books, including Lithuania: New and Selected Poems and The Witness Trees: Lithuania. She is the recipient of the National Jewish Book Council Award in Poetry, the Di Castagnola Award, and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award.

• Acknowledgments Preface Learning the Language The Landscape of DislocationFrom the Backyard of the DiasporaLearning the LanguageWho Has Not Dreamed of FlyingYiddish PoetryMorocco: Gauze Curtains, Round Tombs, Hidden JewsWhat Hasanin M'Barak Said Like a Field Riddled by Ants In the Afterlife Which is a LibraryThe MessengerGetting ThereLike a Field Riddled by AntsMy Companion the Aleph-Bet The World Is a Parchment Scrawled with Words KhamsinNight WatchA Journal for John HolmesFrom Alexandria to American via AmtrakInterview with Joseph Brodsky, February 28, 1979The Howard Poets in PerspectiveCounterpoint Life, the Unfinished Experiment The Selfish Gene (or, Cortazar's Watch)The Knockout Mouse on the Doorstep of Neurobiology (or, the Mind/Body Problem Revisited)AIDS: Latency and HIV Reservoirs: In the Dark Backward and Abysm of TimeHuman Gene Therapy: Harnessing the Body's Defenses Against CancerThe Puzzle PeopleGenes, Blood, and Courage: A Boy Called Immortal SwordRoot Causes: Stem Cells and the Tower of BabelThe Statue Within A Place Called Gehinom Writing the Holocaust: auch ohne/Sprache HolocaustOn Muranowska StreetThen 1941The Roots of Resistance: Le Chambon Instructions for the Messiah Crossing OverInstructions for the MessiahWhat is a Jewish Poem?CertaintyCrossing into the New Millennium: American University, Convocation, August 1998Grandfather: Lost and FoundOde to the Czar's AssassinThe Messiah Reconsidered Notes Index

"Myra Sklarew is a beautiful writer. The brilliance of her perceptions and her artful rendering of her world in all of its strangeness and mystical garb make this book a testimony to the mind and sensibility of an extraordinary woman with a far-ranging intellect." — Charlotte Goodman, Professor Emerita of English, Skidmore College"The author's personality, as it emerges in these various writings, is extremely appealing and sympathetic. She is searching, does not shrink from self-revelation, is sensitive to the pain of the world, and, overall, is supremely perceptive and intelligent in what she has to say." — Judith R. Baskin, editor of Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing