Peter Neil Carroll is an American writer and historian. He is the author of over 20 books, including Sketches from Spain (Main Street Rag, 2024), a lyric homage to the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; Talking to Strangers (Turning Point Press, 2022); This Land, These People: 50 States of the Nation (Press Americana, 2022), winner of the Prize Americana; Something is Bound to Break (Main Street Rag, 2019); Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land (Turning Point, 2015); The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford University Press, 1994), winner of the 1995 BABRA Nonfiction Award; and the memoir Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History (University of Georgia Press, 1990). He is emeritus faculty in the Department of History at Stanford University, and is Poetry Moderator of Portside.
On September 16, 2024, after a brief illness, Peter passed away at the age of 80 surrounded by his family. Peter leaves behind a lasting legacy, and a space in our literary community that cannot be filled.
Poem on Belonging
BORSCHT
My grandpa Izzy adored borscht, slurped
the soup, steaming or cold, let the red juice
spread on his mustache and licked his lips.
Borscht. A Russian scholar once advised me
never to underestimate its power to make
a community, and in honor of Izzy I bought
the scholar’s book about an obscure laborer
in Tsarist Russia, depicting the daily lives
of a passionate people unknown to history.
They might be characters of literature, the stuff of
Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, yet not fictional,
revealing the dreams of ordinary men, women and
the making of working-class consciousness. They
drink too much, eat too little, get sent to prison,
yet he gives them something they never expected,
maybe even more than he imagined. I see them drinking
tea in filthy rooms, fired by factory foremen demanding
payment or sex from women workers, and confused by
students who try to uplift them with books they can’t
understand. He’s given them immortality, assuming
someone like me reads his book. His story tells much
less about my grandpa, a Jew in old Russia, lacking
even the slim benefits of Russian nationality. Refusing
discipline of factory work, he became an itinerant glazier,
carried his goods on his back, worked outdoors without
a timeclock in all weather and loved the glass he cut
and framed for all the light, he said, it brought to life.
Copyright © 2022 by Peter Neil Carroll. This poem originally appeared in Talking to Strangers (Turning Point, January 23, 2022). Used with permission of the author.
Read Peter Neil Carroll’s ecopoems, “The Mountain Top” and “Appalachia“.
Find Peter’s books in the library!
This Land, These People (2022)
The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1994)
Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History (1990)
Speak Poetry in San Mateo County 