Mother’s Day – Naomi Ginsberg (1896-1956)

Naomi Ginsberg -1896-1956)

Mother’s Day – We celebrate but we also mourn. In the light of recent discoveries by Stevan M Weine, we particularly mourn – Naomi, poor tragic, abused, frightened Naomi, immortalized in Allen’s masterpiece epic,  “Kaddish”

Letter, 1953 (c) Allen Ginsberg Estate, Courtesy Columbia University Library, included in Stevan M Weine’s Best Minds – How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (2023) – Weine was the first person to be granted access to both Allen and Naomi’s psychiatric records

Stevan Weine writes at length on Naomi on her mental instability and the impact its had on her son.

Lyle Brooks, Allen’s nephew, (son of his brother Eugene) discusses his grandmother’s hospitalization as part of Stephanie Kips’ remarkable Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital Oral History Project (including also brief footage of Allen and Naomi at Pilgrim State Hospital) – here:

“Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village..”

(Strange too, to think that you too, Allen, no longer “walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village” – two souls reunited in the poem and in eternity)

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