"Remember This" is available at Amazon and from the author.
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“Remember This” is a collection of poems and stories that share the experiences and insight of an Arkansas writer.
Through contemporary poetry, “Remember This” explores the modern world in all its absurdity and wonder. Here is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aged pioneer from pre-statehood Arkansas, a one-act play where modern women speak their truth about men, and a parable about the Good Samaritan and the Angel of Death. The book concludes with a true story of a Navy veteran, haunted by PTSD, who meets his fate at a 1950’s rockabilly music hall. The book’s title pays tribute to the author’s ancestor, a Kabbalist rabbi and a psychic in 18th century Poland. In settings as varied as a communal village in the Peruvian Andes and a gospel music church service in Harlem, “Remember This” invites the reader onto a pilgrimage that bridges time and world cultures. The Celtic cross on the book’s cover is a milestone marker of that journey, a reminder of the moments when beauty and love, when revelation and mystery are found along the way. |
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From the book review
“Remember This” offers steadiness, craft and a kind of earned humility. These pieces feel lived in, faithful to the Arkansas that exists between the historical markers. In a literary moment that often rewards flash over substance, this modest, quietly luminous book reminds us how resonance is really made. |
Introduction to "Remember This"
How an 19th century Jewish mystic gave a modern Arkansas writer a title for his book
In 1814, a man fell from a second-story window of a modest house in what was then the Jewish quarter of Lublin, Poland. Severely injured by the fall, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz told his followers his death would come the following year. The rabbi had made many correct predictions in his lifetime, and his psychic abilities had earned him the title of the “Seer of Lublin”. He was a charismatic teacher, a leading figure in the emergence of a new branch of orthodox Judaism known as Chasidism.
His death came as he said it would, on August 15, 1815, a day which coincided with the solemn holiday of Tisha B’Av (the ninth day of the month of Av). The holiday is regarded as the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, the day when both the first and second temples in Jerusalem were destroyed. The accuracy of the rabbi’s final prediction raised his already high status among the rapidly growing Chassidic community in eastern Europe. His writings were preserved by his students, and, since that time they have been studied by Judaic scholars.
The Seer had a brilliant analytical mind and the rare ability to interpret the Bible in the Kabbalist mode, a complex philosophy of Jewish mysticism that explores the hidden nature of God and the universe. For two centuries, only limited copies of his complex writings were available, known only to highly educated Jewish men capable of reading the original work. That changed when a descendant of the Seer, my grandfather David Bloom, had his ancestor’s writings published as a single, hard cover book.
Moszek David Blimbaum emigrated from Poland in 1920, arriving in Canada, then settling in New York. By the 1940s he had become a wealthy man with numerous real estate holdings in Manhattan. David achieved the American Dream, which included giving himself a new name. He drove a Cadillac and smoked fat cigars, but his character had been established in turn-of-the-century Warsaw, where as a 12-year old boy, so a family story tells, he came home barefoot one day, informing his parents he had given his shoes to another boy who had none.
In New York, David became a philanthropist to Jewish charities, particularly Chabad-Lubavitch, a Brooklyn-based chassidic group that originated in Russia. The Russian Lubavitch movement promoted a Jewish spirituality similar to that of the followers of the Seer of Lublin. Both groups were influential in the emerging chassidic movement of the early 1800s.
According to family lore, David inherited the Seer’s original manuscripts from his mother Hannah, who carried the ancestral writings with her in the 1930s when David brought his parents from Poland to New York. As a direct descendant of the Seer, Hannah had an esteemed position in her Jewish immigrant community. Upon her death in 1948, local women competed for the honor of preparing her body for burial and her casket was carried through the streets of The Bronx.
When the Seer’s manuscript became David’s possession, he published it in the original languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. The book has only a few English words on the front pages - the date and location of printing (New York, 1949), the names of David and his brother Moshe Bloom as publishers, and this remarkable declaration:
“This book is not for sale. It may be obtained free of charge from the publisher. David Bloom.”
The book is more than three hundred pages, printed in eight-point font, a challenge to the reader’s eyesight and tenacity. Presumably, Chabad-Lubavitch scholars helped assemble and edit the book for David. In the years that followed its publication, and even after David’s death in 1955, bearded chassidic men in black hats and suits came to our Brooklyn house to humbly request a copy. I was sent to retrieve a book from the box kept below the basement stairs. I watched as the men’s eyes lit up when my father handed them a copy and they walked away with their newly gifted treasure.
Though I could not read the book, I held on to my copies as a reminder of a lost family heritage. To me, the book was an artifact of European Jewry, a world destroyed in the Holocaust, a world my immigrant grandparents left behind to start anew in America. The book held enormous value for the orthodox Jewish community, but in my secular world it was only a keepsake, a link to a mysterious past.
David’s life was also a mystery. I was six years old when he died, and my only memory is him giving me a few coins to go to the local newsstand to buy his Yiddish language daily newspapers. In the decades that followed his death, I have few memories of family conversations about his life and achievements. My mother, the eldest of the four Bloom daughters, sold her father’s real estate and shared the proceeds with her sisters. David’s life and achievements were reduced to a few photo albums and saved immigration documents.
Still, I took copies of the Seer’s book to Arkansas, where I began graduate studies in literature and creative writing in 1972, and where I still reside. Decades passed before I interviewed my mother and her remaining living sister, and a family oral history was shared.
In my university years, I was entranced by the world’s great poets - Pablo Neruda, Charles Baudelaire, WB Yeats, Walt Whitman, and others. And as I developed my craft, a style emerged that used personal symbolism and surrealism to convey the themes I wanted to share. The style is known as “oracular poetry”, where the writer serves as an oracle or a prophet, a user of mysterious but compelling language.
Many poems in the oracular style are included in this book. They are composed of dramatic images, yet their messages may remain elusive to some readers. In some of the writings, the experience of the poem, more than its literal meaning, is the essential goal. And so a poem might remain in one’s mind as a luminous memory, its dream imagery rooted in the real world yet mysteriously evocative, even unknowable. These are the memories that remain, I believe.
My heritage with the Seer of Lublin would once more overlap with the Chabad-Lubavitch. In 1992, nearly forty years after my grandfather's death, a young rabbi was sent to Arkansas as part of the organization’s global outreach strategy. As Rabbi Pinchus Ciment was establishing his new congregation in Little Rock, he agreed to help me translate the Seer’s book into English. Rabbi Ciment cautioned me that the Seer’s Kabbalist writings might not be easy to comprehend. I was not deterred.
My goal in the translation project was to learn from my ancestor’s writings and write a book explaining the Seer’s life and teachings. That outcome rapidly proved unreachable. The Seer’s text offers extremely complex interpretations of the Bible. Each commentary includes numerous references and insight from other rabbinical writings and sacred tomes. Much of the writing is presented as acronyms and abbreviations, and it frequently uses numerology to reveal hidden meanings of the words.
Rabbi Ciment explained each reference and coded word, and I diligently created hundreds of pages of literal translation. Our Sunday afternoon sessions went on for almost seven years, yet only about one-third of the book had been addressed. Even in English, the text presented a formidable challenge to be rephrased into smooth reading. I realized my initial goals would not be reached. It was time to stop.
Nevertheless, much value had been achieved. As we studied the Seer’s book, Rabbi Ciment and I had broad, stimulating conversations on topics of Jewish theology, world history and politics, science and cosmology, Shakespearean heroes and villains. Though the scope of my secular education did not equal the depth of his religious training, we enjoyed learning together. I even learned that he was a Boston Red Sox fan.
I also learned that the Seer’s writings were structured in three manuscripts, three separate books of similar style. As shown in the David Bloom book, the deceptively simple titles of these books are translated as: “This Memory”, “Memory of This”, and “Words of Truth.”
The Seer did not predict that a 21st century ancestor would adapt his book titles. But in 2017, I published a book of memoirs and rephrased the Seer’s third title from “Words of Truth” to “True Stories.” It seems fitting now to update his words again, rephrasing “Memory of This” to this collection’s title, “Remember This.”
An ancestor’s interpretations of sacred text and a young writer’s creative expression have been brought together by a grandfather’s gift. And though much of his life remains a mystery, it is with profound appreciation that this book is dedicated to David Bloom, may his memory be for a blessing.
Little Rock, Arkansas 2025
How an 19th century Jewish mystic gave a modern Arkansas writer a title for his book
In 1814, a man fell from a second-story window of a modest house in what was then the Jewish quarter of Lublin, Poland. Severely injured by the fall, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz told his followers his death would come the following year. The rabbi had made many correct predictions in his lifetime, and his psychic abilities had earned him the title of the “Seer of Lublin”. He was a charismatic teacher, a leading figure in the emergence of a new branch of orthodox Judaism known as Chasidism.
His death came as he said it would, on August 15, 1815, a day which coincided with the solemn holiday of Tisha B’Av (the ninth day of the month of Av). The holiday is regarded as the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, the day when both the first and second temples in Jerusalem were destroyed. The accuracy of the rabbi’s final prediction raised his already high status among the rapidly growing Chassidic community in eastern Europe. His writings were preserved by his students, and, since that time they have been studied by Judaic scholars.
The Seer had a brilliant analytical mind and the rare ability to interpret the Bible in the Kabbalist mode, a complex philosophy of Jewish mysticism that explores the hidden nature of God and the universe. For two centuries, only limited copies of his complex writings were available, known only to highly educated Jewish men capable of reading the original work. That changed when a descendant of the Seer, my grandfather David Bloom, had his ancestor’s writings published as a single, hard cover book.
Moszek David Blimbaum emigrated from Poland in 1920, arriving in Canada, then settling in New York. By the 1940s he had become a wealthy man with numerous real estate holdings in Manhattan. David achieved the American Dream, which included giving himself a new name. He drove a Cadillac and smoked fat cigars, but his character had been established in turn-of-the-century Warsaw, where as a 12-year old boy, so a family story tells, he came home barefoot one day, informing his parents he had given his shoes to another boy who had none.
In New York, David became a philanthropist to Jewish charities, particularly Chabad-Lubavitch, a Brooklyn-based chassidic group that originated in Russia. The Russian Lubavitch movement promoted a Jewish spirituality similar to that of the followers of the Seer of Lublin. Both groups were influential in the emerging chassidic movement of the early 1800s.
According to family lore, David inherited the Seer’s original manuscripts from his mother Hannah, who carried the ancestral writings with her in the 1930s when David brought his parents from Poland to New York. As a direct descendant of the Seer, Hannah had an esteemed position in her Jewish immigrant community. Upon her death in 1948, local women competed for the honor of preparing her body for burial and her casket was carried through the streets of The Bronx.
When the Seer’s manuscript became David’s possession, he published it in the original languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. The book has only a few English words on the front pages - the date and location of printing (New York, 1949), the names of David and his brother Moshe Bloom as publishers, and this remarkable declaration:
“This book is not for sale. It may be obtained free of charge from the publisher. David Bloom.”
The book is more than three hundred pages, printed in eight-point font, a challenge to the reader’s eyesight and tenacity. Presumably, Chabad-Lubavitch scholars helped assemble and edit the book for David. In the years that followed its publication, and even after David’s death in 1955, bearded chassidic men in black hats and suits came to our Brooklyn house to humbly request a copy. I was sent to retrieve a book from the box kept below the basement stairs. I watched as the men’s eyes lit up when my father handed them a copy and they walked away with their newly gifted treasure.
Though I could not read the book, I held on to my copies as a reminder of a lost family heritage. To me, the book was an artifact of European Jewry, a world destroyed in the Holocaust, a world my immigrant grandparents left behind to start anew in America. The book held enormous value for the orthodox Jewish community, but in my secular world it was only a keepsake, a link to a mysterious past.
David’s life was also a mystery. I was six years old when he died, and my only memory is him giving me a few coins to go to the local newsstand to buy his Yiddish language daily newspapers. In the decades that followed his death, I have few memories of family conversations about his life and achievements. My mother, the eldest of the four Bloom daughters, sold her father’s real estate and shared the proceeds with her sisters. David’s life and achievements were reduced to a few photo albums and saved immigration documents.
Still, I took copies of the Seer’s book to Arkansas, where I began graduate studies in literature and creative writing in 1972, and where I still reside. Decades passed before I interviewed my mother and her remaining living sister, and a family oral history was shared.
In my university years, I was entranced by the world’s great poets - Pablo Neruda, Charles Baudelaire, WB Yeats, Walt Whitman, and others. And as I developed my craft, a style emerged that used personal symbolism and surrealism to convey the themes I wanted to share. The style is known as “oracular poetry”, where the writer serves as an oracle or a prophet, a user of mysterious but compelling language.
Many poems in the oracular style are included in this book. They are composed of dramatic images, yet their messages may remain elusive to some readers. In some of the writings, the experience of the poem, more than its literal meaning, is the essential goal. And so a poem might remain in one’s mind as a luminous memory, its dream imagery rooted in the real world yet mysteriously evocative, even unknowable. These are the memories that remain, I believe.
My heritage with the Seer of Lublin would once more overlap with the Chabad-Lubavitch. In 1992, nearly forty years after my grandfather's death, a young rabbi was sent to Arkansas as part of the organization’s global outreach strategy. As Rabbi Pinchus Ciment was establishing his new congregation in Little Rock, he agreed to help me translate the Seer’s book into English. Rabbi Ciment cautioned me that the Seer’s Kabbalist writings might not be easy to comprehend. I was not deterred.
My goal in the translation project was to learn from my ancestor’s writings and write a book explaining the Seer’s life and teachings. That outcome rapidly proved unreachable. The Seer’s text offers extremely complex interpretations of the Bible. Each commentary includes numerous references and insight from other rabbinical writings and sacred tomes. Much of the writing is presented as acronyms and abbreviations, and it frequently uses numerology to reveal hidden meanings of the words.
Rabbi Ciment explained each reference and coded word, and I diligently created hundreds of pages of literal translation. Our Sunday afternoon sessions went on for almost seven years, yet only about one-third of the book had been addressed. Even in English, the text presented a formidable challenge to be rephrased into smooth reading. I realized my initial goals would not be reached. It was time to stop.
Nevertheless, much value had been achieved. As we studied the Seer’s book, Rabbi Ciment and I had broad, stimulating conversations on topics of Jewish theology, world history and politics, science and cosmology, Shakespearean heroes and villains. Though the scope of my secular education did not equal the depth of his religious training, we enjoyed learning together. I even learned that he was a Boston Red Sox fan.
I also learned that the Seer’s writings were structured in three manuscripts, three separate books of similar style. As shown in the David Bloom book, the deceptively simple titles of these books are translated as: “This Memory”, “Memory of This”, and “Words of Truth.”
The Seer did not predict that a 21st century ancestor would adapt his book titles. But in 2017, I published a book of memoirs and rephrased the Seer’s third title from “Words of Truth” to “True Stories.” It seems fitting now to update his words again, rephrasing “Memory of This” to this collection’s title, “Remember This.”
An ancestor’s interpretations of sacred text and a young writer’s creative expression have been brought together by a grandfather’s gift. And though much of his life remains a mystery, it is with profound appreciation that this book is dedicated to David Bloom, may his memory be for a blessing.
Little Rock, Arkansas 2025
Book Review
Marvin Schwartz, “Remember This”
PHILIP MARTIN, Arkansas Democrats-Gazette, Nov.24, 2025
Marvin Schwartz’s “Remember This” feels like the sort of book that could only come from someone who has spent decades quietly paying attention. A fixture of the Little Rock literary scene, Schwartz has never been much interested in fashion; he writes with the durable clarity of someone who trusts the line, not the noise around it. His new self-published mix of poems, stories and a sharply rendered monologue from a pre-statehood Arkansas pioneer shows him working comfortably in the territory he knows best — memory, character and the long arc of time.
It’s worth noting, too, that the book’s title carries a private lineage. Schwartz is a descendant of the Seer of Lublin, the great Hasidic mystic whose phrase “Memory of This” he gently adapts into “Remember This.” There’s nothing overtly mystical in Schwartz’s writing, but the impulse is similar: to hold onto the fleeting moments that shape a life. He isn’t invoking prophecy so much as lineage — an inherited insistence that the smallest things matter, that they deserve to be looked at twice.
Take a poem like “Snapshot of a Five Year Old,” which is about as characteristic of Schwartz as anything in the book. It’s plainspoken, measured, a little old-school in its cadence, but not in a way that feels tired. Schwartz doesn’t try to jolt the reader; he tries to say something true, and does it with unforced authority. The poem looks into a child’s face and sees the adult beginning to surface — an idea that could be mawkish in lesser hands, but is handled here with restraint and a touch of rue. It simply settles in, revealing more the longer you sit with it.
The emotional ballast of the collection may be “Midnight at the Moon,” Schwartz’s account of the Christmas-night shooting of Francis “Fats” Callis at Newport’s rough-and-ready Silver Moon Club in 1955. The piece first appeared in 2014 as the opening chapter of “We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers,” one of Schwartz’s finest contributions to Arkansas history. It holds up beautifully here. Schwartz tells the story with a reporter’s level gaze — minimal adornment, maximum attention — yet the writing carries the ache of something remembered rather than merely archived. He doesn’t mythologize Callis or flatten him into a tragic emblem; he simply renders the moment, and its human cost, plainly and well.
“Remember This” offers steadiness, craft and a kind of earned humility. These pieces feel lived in, faithful to the Arkansas that exists between the historical markers. In a literary moment that often rewards flash over substance, this modest, quietly luminous book reminds us how resonance is really made. Schwartz remains an indispensable presence in Arkansas letters precisely because he keeps doing the work, and doing it well.
PHILIP MARTIN, Arkansas Democrats-Gazette, Nov.24, 2025
Marvin Schwartz’s “Remember This” feels like the sort of book that could only come from someone who has spent decades quietly paying attention. A fixture of the Little Rock literary scene, Schwartz has never been much interested in fashion; he writes with the durable clarity of someone who trusts the line, not the noise around it. His new self-published mix of poems, stories and a sharply rendered monologue from a pre-statehood Arkansas pioneer shows him working comfortably in the territory he knows best — memory, character and the long arc of time.
It’s worth noting, too, that the book’s title carries a private lineage. Schwartz is a descendant of the Seer of Lublin, the great Hasidic mystic whose phrase “Memory of This” he gently adapts into “Remember This.” There’s nothing overtly mystical in Schwartz’s writing, but the impulse is similar: to hold onto the fleeting moments that shape a life. He isn’t invoking prophecy so much as lineage — an inherited insistence that the smallest things matter, that they deserve to be looked at twice.
Take a poem like “Snapshot of a Five Year Old,” which is about as characteristic of Schwartz as anything in the book. It’s plainspoken, measured, a little old-school in its cadence, but not in a way that feels tired. Schwartz doesn’t try to jolt the reader; he tries to say something true, and does it with unforced authority. The poem looks into a child’s face and sees the adult beginning to surface — an idea that could be mawkish in lesser hands, but is handled here with restraint and a touch of rue. It simply settles in, revealing more the longer you sit with it.
The emotional ballast of the collection may be “Midnight at the Moon,” Schwartz’s account of the Christmas-night shooting of Francis “Fats” Callis at Newport’s rough-and-ready Silver Moon Club in 1955. The piece first appeared in 2014 as the opening chapter of “We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers,” one of Schwartz’s finest contributions to Arkansas history. It holds up beautifully here. Schwartz tells the story with a reporter’s level gaze — minimal adornment, maximum attention — yet the writing carries the ache of something remembered rather than merely archived. He doesn’t mythologize Callis or flatten him into a tragic emblem; he simply renders the moment, and its human cost, plainly and well.
“Remember This” offers steadiness, craft and a kind of earned humility. These pieces feel lived in, faithful to the Arkansas that exists between the historical markers. In a literary moment that often rewards flash over substance, this modest, quietly luminous book reminds us how resonance is really made. Schwartz remains an indispensable presence in Arkansas letters precisely because he keeps doing the work, and doing it well.