Reuven Goldfarb when he lived on Wheeler’s Ranch in Sonoma County. Bill Wheeler took the photo in 1972
poet; essayist; fiction writer; storyteller; literary, social, and cultural critic; journalist; editor; teacher; and spiritual counselor. Reuven Goldfarb was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended P.S 193, Andries Hudde J.H.S., and James Madison High School as well as Hebrew School at Ahavat Israel and the East Midwood Jewish Center, where he became Bar Mitzvah on May 17, 1958.
In Junior High he worked on the staff of the student newspaper, The Hudde Penguin, and in high school he co-edited The Madisonian, the school’s literary magazine. He attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he majored in English, edited two literary periodicals: The Poetry Yearbook of the Fine Arts Society and The Marquis, and acted in twelve productions at the Little Theatre. He won the McKnight Black Poetry prize and graduated as an A.B. with Honors in English.
He entered the Master’s Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University in the fall of 1965, and earned 21 credits before dropping out in January 1967. He drove a cab for Circle Taxi and left for the west coast with his close friend Ellen Clark in June.
The story gets complicated at this point, and it’s better to read the poems first and ask questions later. His current blurb reads something like this: Reuven Goldfarb co-founded and edited AGADA, the illustrated Jewish literary magazine. Recent appearances in print include poems in The Healing Muse, Poetica, Voices Israel, and Arch and Quiver; a dream sequence in Natural Bridge; an essay, “Baseball Kabbalah,” in What’s Jewish About America’s “Favorite Pastime”? (William and Mary Press); and articles in The Jewish Star, The National Jewish Post & Opinion, and The Jerusalem Post. His self-published booklet, Trains of Thought, is a collection of many of these essays, articles, and feature stories. Visit his eponymous web site (reuvengoldfarb.com) to read samples, and write to poetsprogress@gmail.com to order a copy. He and his wife Yehudit live in a renovated old stone house in the Holy City of Tzfat.
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The photo of Reuven Goldfarb was taken by Bill Wheeler at Wheeler’s Ranch (Ahimsa Church).