“In Beggars at the Wall, Rochelle Ratner guides us through an Israel that is not quite the Middle Eastern country we’ve learned about from CNN or travel books. This is her Israel: a fabled and disquieting place she wants to love like a homeland but cannot entirely embrace. In these plain-spoken poems, so naked in their concerns and passions, Ratner has given us the work of a secular Jew who yearns to be centered in Zion but who knows that Israel can never be her home. Her poems are washed in the light of Safed, Masada, and Jerusalem–a light that reveals hard truths about the lone Jewish nation on the planet…and about ourselves”–Charles Fishman.

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