“I had to go to the hospital to give birth,” the poet states. When the book emerges, it is
wild. The Polish Dream Machine is marked by the incredible candor Richard Fein is
famous for. He tells us his life, what others bore, and with eloquence and wit defeats the loneliness of old age.

These are exquisite poems about old age. In “My Doras,” he conflates Dora Diamond
from Freshman English at Brooklyn College with Kafka’s last girlfriend, Dora Dymant,
and he goes to her medical appointments with her and she goes to his, and he tells how they had slipped away, when they were both counsellors at camp in the Poconos, “to the forest, or that nearby town, to make love”, until the final stanza, where he visits the cemetery in Prague with Helen, his wife: “where you had thrown yourself on the grave when Kafka was buried,/and now you tell me what it was like to be with him/even as we are married now, we two old people/ who read together and fondle each other’s body at night—/the flabs, and creases, and moles, and little growths.”

He loses a classmate, Irving Levine, who disappeared (“not by moving away but just by
not being at all”) and stuck with him all his life. “And I am now not far from ending up
where Irving did. . . .Irving. . ./Irving—my street address here in Cambridge,”

Richard Fein is 95. His poems in The Polish Dream Machine bring beauty to the terrors
of old age.” They are quintessential meditations on identity, love lost, and time gone
by—all related with the withering wisdom of old age. They are as candid and revealing
as the old French salesman’s screech, from which, Fein tells us, “this is how the Jew in
me emerged.”

Richard Fein has published thirteen books of poetry. His book Kafka's Ear has won the Maurice English Award. He has also published three books of his translations of Yiddish poetry: Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn; With Everything We've Got; The Full Pomegranate: Poems of Avrom Sutzkever. And he has also published three books of prose: Robert Lowell, a critical study; the Dance of Leah, a memoir of Yiddish; Yiddish Genesis, personal essays. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.

He taught at Hunter College and the University of Puerto Rico before teaching many years at SUNY, New Paltz. He also spent a year on a Fulbright in India, teaching American literature.

"Richard Fein is quite explicit about the importance of the Yiddish language which was part of his up-bringing: The Polish Dream Machine includes a highly personal Afterword about what he heard around him as a child and how certain Yiddish poets influenced his way of being in the world. In the mind and heart of the sophisticated nonagenarian remains for ever the little boy whose mother told him to 'zoyg di beyner. Es di eyerlekh. Vaks': ('Suck the bones. Eat the eggs. Grow'). There is plenty of flesh on the bones of Richard Fein's poems, and eggs galore: nourishment for the readers of poetry who are queens and kings of received culture." — Anthony Rudolf, Author of Silent Conversations and European Hours

"Richard Fein is a genuine master poet. At ninety-five, the breadth of his work rivals the late David Ferry's. And like Ferry his lyric voice has the ring of an instinctive modesty that can't be faked. Everywhere his ear for the modulations of living American speech is exquisite. Larry Rosenwald has called him the best living translator of Yiddish poetry in America. The pliancy of his verse line is utterly singular in the way that he can summon such richly remembered detail without the risk of density, and over and over cadence it into cumulative power. His work is as fluent with allusions to Yeats and Whitman as it is to Glatstein and Halpern. His childhood poems are a brilliant record of Jewish immigrant life in Brooklyn, and his family poems based on the Hebrew Bible are just as jam-packed with fervent life. Most importantly, Yiddish, and the atrocities that Yiddish bears witness to, are burning on the stammering tongue of his eloquent language like the coals of Isaiah." — George Kalogeris, Author of Winthropos

"Richard Fein tells us that his tears are 'just about things.' That describes these beautiful poems too.Their diction is plain, common speech made perfect, their subject matter is sometimes visionary but often plain as well, there are angels but also draft boards and movies and patches of earth. And these plain poems about plain things draw us irresistibly in." — Larry Rosenwald, Author of Portrait of a Pacifist Critic, Guggenheim Fellow 2020