emet ezell (b. 1995, Texas, USA) is a poet and typographer living in Berlin, Germany. ezell is author of the chapbook between every bird, our bones, and their writing can be found in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and AGNI. As an artist, ezell engages archival materials, reworking objects from government records, museum collections, and their own family history. Their works on paper will next be exhibited in Sabile, Latvia, in a show entitled “Destruction Is and Is Not Forever” (May 15—July 15 2025, the Sabile Arts, Culture, and Tourist Center). For more information, please see: emetezell.com

Agnieszka Zachariewicz: Destruction Is and Is Not Forever, a solo exhibition of your works, will open this May in Sabile, a village in Latvia where your family roots are from. Can you tell me about the origins of this project?

emet ezell: I was interested in return, both its limitations and impossibilities. I was also interested in understanding the larger circumstances surrounding my family’s deportation. What had happened, historically? How did my family’s dispossession fit into larger structures of global re-organization? In many ways, I was able to return to Sabile because the Jews were already ethnically cleansed—the process was complete. Everything was ruined; I was no longer considered a threat. And when I arrived, I was destroyed with grief, rage, retribution. The materiality overwhelmed me. My family’s home and bakery still stand on the main street, our buildings inhabited by Latvians. Despite the horror, I found an immediate intimacy with the landscape. I was placing this flower, yarrow, into my mouth and chewing it up. I was swimming naked in the river. I was learning the birds. And it was peaceful and it was horrifying. I became a ghost. And as a ghost, I had no language, no vocabulary, no alphabet to articulate what it was that I was experiencing. This project emerged from that spectral place.

Your family was forced to leave Sabile during World War I. What have you learned about the context of that wave of deportations – part of European history that is not widely known and remembered?

The Russian internal refugee crisis of 1915—which affected not only Jews in the Baltics, but also Germans, Poles, and Muslims in various border regions—was the largest case of forced migration before WWII, with the number of displaced civilians estimated between five and six million. My work orbits this historical context, which is frequently eclipsed by the Holocaust and remains almost entirely obscured. In Sabile, and across the Baltics, the Jews were deported on the holiday of Shavuot, sent to work camps in Russia. My family was among the 1915 deportees. Displaced from their village, they were sent by train to work camps, where most died of starvation or tuberculosis. Surviving the labor camps, my great-grandfather fled to the Unites States as a refugee in 1921. In 1941, under Nazi Occupation, the Sabile mikveh and synagogue were set aflame. Latvian soldiers marched the remaining Jews into the forest and shot them into a pit. This pit is roughly 7km outside of Sabile, eclipsed by a ridge along the highway.

The evils of imperialism persist; they do not disappear. Rather, they function like a leak in the ceiling, dripping down the walls, rotting the building with mold. It has been four generations since anyone in my family has returned to Sabile: 110 years since the deportations. And because of this giant width of time, I am able to touch something that cannot be touched. I understand, viscerally, that the story of the land is the story of the people, and the story of the people is, simultaneously, the story of the land.

There is a bird that migrates to Sabile every summer, the white stork. These birds come to Sabile from the Jordan Valley in Palestine. I follow these storks to draw an alternative geography, one that is mapped in sky. What have these birds seen? What do they know? Last year, far fewer storks arrived in Sabile. They arrived covered in ash. Where had they been? Bombs over Lebanon, bombs over Ukraine, bombs over Gaza.

When you first came to Sabile, you could really stay and work there?

Sabile is a tiny village. There are no hotels, no airbnbs. But there is an artist residency called Pedvāle Art Park, and I slept there and had a spacious studio in which to work. The property is run by the artist and sculptor Ojārs Feldberg, who came to Sabile from Riga. After the Iron Curtain fell, he helped to restore the Jewish synagogue in Sabile. He is an incredibly wise and kind person. He showed me the Jewish history of Sabile and connected me to resources. I made many trips to the State archives, where I found my great-grandfather’s passport. There is also a Jewish cemetery in Sabile. I have ancestors buried there way, way back. It is very rare in Latvia for a Jewish cemetery to have been left intact. There is an energetic protection around the entire plot of land. Storks make their nests in the trees. It is clear to me that I will always be going back to Sabile, dotting the horizon like a stork.

That’s a question I wanted to ask: you are in a conversation with the place, but are you also already in a conversation with the local people?

I don’t speak Latvian. That language barrier creates safety for me, but it also creates distance. There are a handful of people in the village who I know and can speak with. There is one woman who, last summer, grabbed my arm, and told me a story passed down to her from her grandmother: on the night when the Jews were deported, there was so much screaming and crying that it filled the valley. Everyone shut their windows. No one could sleep. And now, when the wind bangs against the shutters, there’s a sense that it’s the Jews coming back for their things. This woman proceeded to tell me a bunch of racist things about Jews. I thought, okay, that’s not for me, but the grandmother’s story was for me. There’s a constant need for discernment: what is other people’s violence to unravel and what is mine. These forces intersect, but they do not overlap. At first, I thought that I had to take on all the pain of Sabile, but now I know that I do not.

Are you getting any help in your research and artistic undertakings?

The spiritual intensity of this project has required an almost monastic isolation. My immediate family is not thrilled about my work–they don’t know, and they don’t care. But my mother’s cousin has been amazing. He sent me all the photographs that my great-grandfather smuggled out of Sabile and has ensured that I have access to relevant family documents and information.

My most exciting discovery has been the Pinkas of Sabile; it is currently held in the archives of the Russian State Library in Moscow. A Pinkas is a handwritten notebook that records precious information regarding the everyday affairs of Jewish communal life. With the help of Avinoam Stillman, a Jewish historian in Berlin, I transcribed and translated the Pinkas. Written in a mixture of Hebrew and Yiddish over approximately 200 folios, the entries in the manuscript begin around 1790 and end abruptly with the deportations of 1915. I suspect the Pinkas Khevre Kadisha of Sabile was one of the few objects taken by the community leaders when they were deported into the interior of Russia in 1915, and that the manuscript remained in Russia thereafter. In the wake of pogroms, the 1915 deportations, and the destruction caused by both World War I and World War II, it is a miracle that the Pinkas Khevre Kadisha survives.
I found the signatures of my family members, the Blumenthals, throughout the Pinkas, participating in the Khevre Kadisha [burial society]. My spiritual line has been burying the dead forever. Yet this sacred tradition of burial, its practices and rhythms, did not get passed on to me (the Jews were even not allowed to speak Yiddish in Siberia). I have not learned how to bury the dead; at the same time, this is exactly what I am doing. Somehow, information gets transmitted, even through the rupture. It is all gone and yet something is left. A trace, a haunting.

I understand you are using this Pinkas as a source for your creative work. But other than that, are you going to publish this archival material?

I wrote an entire book about my return to Sabile entitled Wretched Heaven. I have taken many of my poems from Wretched Heaven and brought them here to Lublin to print. This book includes poetry, prose, photographs, and multiple translations from the Pinkas. Stillman and I translated excerpts from the Pinkas into English and then I translated the content from those excerpts into poems – so there are multiple layers of translation in the book. The Sabile Pinkas feels like my greatest treasure. Maybe two or three people in the world have looked at this amazing document hidden in an archive. Stillman and I intend to publish a collaborative academic article with some of the findings from the Pinkas. Much of my work is in picking up these hidden things and allowing them to be made visible.

And typography, how did it start for you? It seems that using it as a medium in your project has proved very inspiring.

My work is inflected by the real histories in a place and their surviving material traces. When I first visited Lublin in 2023, I met Robert Sawa in Dom Słów [House of Words – part of Grodzka Gate – NN Theater Center]. I have since made multiple trips to Dom Słów, painstakingly producing all the works for my exhibition here in Lublin. I fell in love with this place and I fell in love with this medium. Typesetting is an art form that allows me to touch a depth of time retracted by modernity. Take Nicolas Cochin, for example. An elegant French typeface, the letters were designed in 1912 and brought to Lublin in 1914. Due to its Western origins, the typeface was banned under Soviet Occupation. These historical and material layers are not only tangible in the leaden letters, but they become part of each produced work, evoking multiple layers of association. The other day, I used a set of letters that had been left outside in the rain in Warsaw for years. When I printed with those letter forms, the rust became visible in the print. Everything is in the letters.

And of course, the Hebrew letters – this has been huge. I have incorporated secret names of God into my poems, using the Hebrew letters in Dom Słów to charge my poems like sacred amulets. Hebrew is not my mother tongue. It is something I have learned as an adult. I am full of gaps, I make mistakes all the time. The transmission of tradition has been ruptured, and that rupture is reflected in my work. There is no ironing it out, there is no making it go away. The same is true in Sabile. There is no un-pitting the pit from the place: here is a pit of dead Jews and stolen property. Okay, now what? Do I go there or not? If I get into the pit, will I ever climb out?

It is very complicated for me to work with Hebrew in this time, as the State of Israel commits genocidal violence in Gaza. Hebrew is currently being used to erase another history. I think about the way Hebrew names of places are being used to remove the Palestinian names of places. This goes to show that all language can serve a regime of brutality. What else can be done with language? I have printed the Hebrew blind, embossing it into the paper. I have printed names of God that are not words. How can I break and resurrect this form at the same time?

I have also been making paper. Many Hebrew books were once printed on blue paper, and I was very interested in this phenomenon. Historically, in Antwerp, there was an entire edition of the Talmud that was blue. Even the Zohar was printed blue. The blue paper craze started in the 16th century, and by 1900, the Liebenson Press in Warsaw was printing almost all their prayer books on blue paper. The writer S.Y. Agnon notes in one of his books that the Jews of Eastern Europe could be found davening [praying] blue. I suspect that a mixture of black and white rags produced this subtle blue tint in the paper. I was stunned by it. I have been researching how to make this blue and tested different cellulose samples. I also made paper with materials from Sabile. Dried birch leaves, long strands of grass from the valley. I am thinking, here, about how to get the land and the language, which are so connected in my poems, to touch on the page. I also made paper with a pit at the center, an attempt to make visible the hole at the center of myself.

Much of the paper I made here in Lublin will be on display in the exhibition. Handmade paper is like stained glass, and I want the fibers and textures to be visible. When illuminated, the hidden interior crackles to life. Some works will be exhibited in custom light boxes, while others will be framed and hung on the walls of the gallery. The building itself was previously the Jewish Community’s synagogue. For generations, my family prayed in that building, their prayers collecting inside the walls. The synagogue was restored in 2002; now the synagogue functions as a contemporary art gallery. As part of the opening events, I will lead a closed Friday Night Kabbalat Shabbat ceremony, restoring sounds to the space that have not been heard in over a century. The ceremony will take place on the 110th anniversary of the deportations, a time that coincides with the seasonal migration of the storks.

I would like to ask you a bit more about Lublin in this context: how are you feeling here, interacting with the spectral faces of the city?

Lublin was home to centuries of rabbinic learning. It was a vibrating center of Hebrew creativity, book-making, and printing. This Jewish imprint is very present for me when I am here. I am in conversation with everything that has been removed. What neighborhood was destroyed to build this parking lot? What happened in this place before a giant glass cube of office buildings was erected? I want to see through the everyday deceptions of modernity, and I think this is something we can all learn to do. I spend time in Lublin’s Old Jewish cemetery. I lie on the grave of the Seer and daven in the abducted yeshiva, which now functions as a hotel. There is spiritual accompaniment for me here, and ferocious discipline. I meet many ghosts. I become a ghost. It’s agonizing and simultaneously wonderful.

That is very interesting that you find this experience mainly inspiring – the heaviness of the past of such places is not destroying you…

I think we can all get destroyed by our pasts, some of us more than others. How do I look backwards and still live? How do I not end up in a pit of dead Jews? On certain days, I feel destroyed. The first time I walked through the former Jewish ghetto in Lublin, I vomited. My people replaced by shiny plastic shops and mediocre restaurants. At the same time, there is a conversation happening in the land itself, and I can attune to that vibrant frequency. Every morning, 50,000 jackdaws fly through the old Jewish ghetto and circle above the ruins of the synagogue. And every evening, they come back and repeat this sacred circling. 50,000 Jews were deported and murdered from this place; and in the heavens, 50,000 birds. We haunt the skies. Next to all the ugly advertisements and billboards, right where the giant Maharshal synagogue used to stand, there is yarrow blooming bright white. I watch this plant tremble in the wind and overhear all the secrets of Lublin.

Despite the deluge of destruction, I pilgrimage to Lublin for the living. I come back for Robert, who is an incredible mentor, and for the letters, which twinkle with a life all their own. Here I am in the remote east of Poland, doing God knows what for eight hours a day in a basement. And here is Robert teaching me font history, helping me to make deliberate choices that reflect the material and spiritual world of my poems. And I am having the time of my life. It is awful – it is amazing. It is enchantment interwoven with so much death; I lift the letters.

Do you feel like through this kind of work there is a hope for an actual conversation, transmitting the meanings and changing something in this reality?

My job is to make the work. I do not know what conversations, what realities, can and cannot change. I did not make the work to change anything. I made the work so that I would not die. And I am thinking constantly about Sabile and Palestine, how these places are intertwined. Sabile is very special to me, but it is the story of everywhere. Someone was removed, a parking lot was put in, people’s things got stolen… How can we be with this utterly depraved world? I make the art. And as for the rest, who knows? We will find out together in May.

There is this Jewish teaching from Shmuel Bornsztain (from Sochaczew, in fact), from his commentary on Lech Lecha (a specific portion in the Torah). The Shem miShmuel describes how dew arouses the inner moisture of grass and then disappears. In his parable, this action of arousal and disappearance is like God within the heart. But this to me is also the job of the artist. To arouse the inner moisture that remains latent within the soul and then to evaporate, to disappear.

Thank you!