Columbia med school professor and poet reflects on October 7 grief
In ‘A Prayer of Six Wings,’ psychiatrist Owen Lewis grapples with the traumas of the Hamas atrocities
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Poet Owen Lewis, a Columbia University professor of psychiatry, knew that when dealing with trauma, one has to face what happened to move past it.
As he grappled with the traumas of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack and the subsequent anti-Israel acts taking place around the Columbia University campus and his Manhattan neighborhood, Lewis’s best defense was writing his latest poetry book, “A Prayer for Six Wings” (Dos Madres Press).
“I felt like this book just barreled through me,” said Lewis while visiting Tel Aviv, where his youngest daughter and her family live.
The book begins with “My Partisan Grief, SuperNova,” Lewis’s elegy to the young partygoers slaughtered by Hamas terrorists at the Nova desert rave.
These are my cousins.
I don’t know them, These
my sons, daughters, young lovers
and friends. I don’t know them.
Their music fills the desert sky.
They dance to wed the Negev night.
Lewis was in New York on October 7, 2023, when the details of the Hamas terrorist attack were filtering in.
His wife heard about a cousin of hers who was at the Nova, whose fate was still unknown at the time.
Lewis read about Oded and Yocheved Lifshitz, taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz, and recalled that his name, Lewis, had been changed by his father from Lifshitz when he first came to America from Minsk.
And so he wrote a poem, titled “Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, Released by Hamas, Reported N.Y. Times, Oct. 24, 2023”
Excuse me for stepping into
your story but your married name
I couldn’t ignore. My namesake
Oscar Lifshitz, came from Kurjenoff,
near Minsk. We might’ve asked Oded.
your husband, if we’re related, but he’s
still in the captor’s underworld.
Lifshitz’s body was returned by Hamas under a hostage-ceasefire deal last month.
Lewis wrote in “At-Home Coliseum, New York” about Noa Argamani whose scream for help was documented as she was taken hostage, hoisted onto a motorbike and reaching out for her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, who was pulled away from her.
He was also thinking about Noa Marciano, who was taken hostage and killed in captivity, and about his granddaughter, also named Noa.
The tv’s looping on a 26 year old woman
named Noa as she’s thrown onto a motorbike
straddle. She reaches
into my living room.
At the time, Lewis, an American Jew born and raised in New Jersey, wondered if he could speak for Israelis — if he could assume that he was part of the unfolding tragedy.
“But I thought, ‘This is my part of the story. It’s not the whole story. I’m a portion of it,'” said Lewis.
That was before he began experiencing ostracism from writing colleagues and antisemitism on the streets of the Upper West Side.
He got his first taste of it on 79th Street and Broadway, as he saw people ripping down hostage posters covering the windows of an empty storefront.
On another night, Lewis and his wife were threatened after a man holding scissors, ripping down hostage posters, turned on them.
“I realized the war was being fought a block from where I live, as well as in Gaza,” he said. “It was the way the world quickly turned; we had three days of sympathy from the world.”
He saw fellow poets signing a petition to boycott Israel and not accepting awards from PEN International because they believed the writers’ organization didn’t make a strong enough statement against Israel.
“I mean, they’re so misguided,” said Lewis. “If they had dipped into the art of Israel, they would see the dissenting voice. They only see polemics. I was thinking, ‘What is going on here?'”
Lewis didn’t experience any antisemitism or anti-Israel sentiment from his Columbia colleagues but described the encounter with the springtime encampment that took over a building and quad of the university as “brutal.”
“116th & Broadway”
“Just uptown from home, a campus
protest, a jeering crowd encamped
around Alma Mater, the presiding angel
of learning. I’m a by-stander, listening.
I’ve taught: Poetry is everywhere. Today
professors are barred from campus.“Jews Go Back to Poland!”
As if they want us back.”
“I can’t unsee signs that say ‘Send the Jews back to Poland,'” said Lewis, speaking about it months later in Jerusalem. “What’s a sign like that doing there? Why not the genocide in Darfur? Where were people when Syria was killing millions of its own people?”
Lewis, educated at the University of Pennsylvania before attending New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, became a psychiatrist because he wanted time with his patients.
As a young man, he wrote and played piano, and for a short time considered becoming a novelist but stuck with medicine and then became a professor of psychiatry. He helped develop child abuse services in Eastern Europe and brought a similar program to the public school system in New York.
It was about 17 years ago, after he was divorced from his first wife, that Lewis found himself writing again, specifically poetry.
He spent time honing his craft, studying poetry with several instructors, and delved into difficult subjects, including his brother’s overdose at 23 and the experience of divorce and moving back into marriage again.
As a clinical professor of psychiatry, Lewis now teaches narrative medicine in the department of medical humanities and ethics, showing doctors how to listen, how to hear, how to connect.
Poetry and its line breaks, said Lewis, help his students pay attention to what’s not being said in the moment.
As the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7 took place, Lewis’s youngest daughter and family were living in Tel Aviv.
Her husband is Israeli and she, a violinist, has a seat in the Israel Opera Orchestra. Their Israeli life is generally great, he said.
“In the Van to JFK”
“Back in Tel Aviv, no one wastes a single day.
My daughter, a violinist, resumes rehearsing,
calls me as she enters the hall’s orchestra pit.”
He asked them to come back to New York after the October 7 attack and they did, for several months, until the orchestra began operating again and she wanted to help bring music to the Israeli public.
Since then, Lewis, a doting grandfather, has also visited, three times in the past year.
His poetry reflects those visits as well, as does the steady diet of the news in his titles, headlines that he calls “poetic journalism.”
He has also dipped into Palestinian grief, especially after reading the work of Palestinian poets in the wake of the war in Gaza.
“They weren’t all polemics, it was gorgeous, it was them writing about their grief,” he said, and he attempts to bring that side of the story to his poems as well, while recognizing his role as a Jew, as a lover of Israel, and as a frequent visitor.
As Lewis compiled his raw, emotional poems for “A Prayer for Six Wings,” his fourth full-length book of poetry, he realized his audience would be primarily Jewish as he delved into issues that have affected him to the core.
He decided he didn’t care whether the book made its way into the broader poetry world.
“I feel like the people who need to hear these poems are people who have lived this grief,” said Lewis.
