In Edgar Allan Poe’s famous narrative poem, the raven visits a young man who is mourning the loss of his love. According to Poe, the raven was a symbol of “mournful and never-ending remembrance.”

Suggested activity: Ask students to compare the raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” a poem of mourning a lost love, with the biblical raven from resource #3. Goldberg would have been familiar with this poem both in the original English and in Hebrew translation. If the raven represents the inability to forget what one has lost, what is Goldberg saying about memory and its relation to immigration? Ask students to consider the role of memory in this poem, and to think about how memory complicates the ability to start a new life in a new place. Ask them to think about this in the context of Jewish immigration to Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine (and later Israel). How does diasporic memory challenge the project of Jewish nation building?