Subterranean Memory by Harry Goldstein

Memory provides the raw material for the stories we tell about ourselves. Or maybe memories are fictions themselves, vague impressions of feelings combined with fleeting shards of images woven together by gossamer threads of narrative that pull one into the next until an approximation of past reality emerges like the tail end of a dream that comes just before waking.

Maybe that's too Freudian an interpretation of what Brooklyn-based writer and psychologist Marc Kaminsky is up to in Shadow Traffic, his latest work published recently by Red Hen Press. Indeed, Kaminsky seems more Jungian in his thinking and his seeming embrace of Karl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. In Shadow Traffic, Kaminsky is less concerned with his own personal memo¬ries than those that drift on the sea of Jewish memory, which wash up on his literary shore more like seaweed-tangled flotsam than messages stuffed in bottles.

Read full review in the current issue of the American Book Review

May/June 2009 issue Volume 3, No. 4