We announce the passing of Jane Lazarre on June 19, 2025. We deeply mourn the loss of Jane and celebrate her life.
Breaking Light
“Jane Lazarre excels in all forms, across multiple genres. Here, in Breaking Light, she gives us poetry as insightful as it is illuminating; poetry that you will want to return to again and again and again.”
– Farah Jasmine Griffin
“The poems in Jane Lazarre’s Breaking Light are dazzling and powerful. Quite an accomplishment to write about bodies in so strong and true a way.“
– Lynne Sharon Schwartz
“I spent the day reading one poem after the other, amazed and comforted by what Jane Lazarre has managed to get down in words and musical lines. The poem that struck me perhaps the deepest is Shubert Sinking In, how she manages to link music–that cello, that violin–with the music of words, rising and falling, the exultation of hope amidst the dark despair of our lives–something I have pondered for years, but which Lazarre actually got down on the page in Breaking Light.“
– Paul Mariani
The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter: A Memoir
“Lazarre remembers her Communist Party organizer father and how she grew up in his “powerful, endearing, [and] at times intimidating” shadow. Romanian-born Jewish radical activist William Lazarre was dedicated to “justice, human equality [and] dignity.” In this moving memoir, Lazarre’s daughter, the distinguished author of both fiction and nonfiction, recalls his life by drawing on memory, court documents, and data from his FBI file. Reflective and intelligent, her narrative not only chronicles the life of a complex man; it also celebrates the power of memory and love. A poignantly lyrical memoir of family and politics.”
– Kirkus Review
Recent News
Breaking Light
“There is a formality in these pages, a reliance on structure to contain the powerful yet often restrained emotions. Light, nature, mourning, and love provide a deep and familiar comfort and stimulation that remain long after we’ve stopped reading.”
– From the Introduction by Dr. Miryam Sivan
Biography
Jane Lazarre was a prize-winning writer of fiction, memoir, essays and poetry. Her art and her voice were brave, passionate, powerfully honest and fierce in a commitment to revealing what must be said and speaking truth.
Her first memoir, The Mother Knot, was groundbreaking and a widely influential work still today. The first of its kind to speak to the complexities and ambivalence of motherhood – the beauty and love of the experience, but also the loss of sense of self and identity. It is among the Feminist canon.
Her last memoir, The Communist and The Communist’s Daughter, detailed her formative experience growing up in a Jewish Communist community and the unique world view this upbringing instilled. Her memoir Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of A White Mother of Black Sons, explored the transformation of her life from marrying into an African American family and raising two Black sons.
Her memoirs, The Communist and The Communist’s Daughter, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of A White Mother of Black Sons, Wet Earth and Dreams: A Narrative of Grief and Recovery, and The Mother Knot, were all published by Duke University Press. Lazarre’s novels include Inheritance, Some Place Quite Unknown, The Powers of Charlotte, On Loving Men, Some Kind of Innocence, and Worlds Beyond My Control, reissued in winter, 2017, by Hamilton Stone Editions. In 2021 her first collection of poetry, Breaking Light, was published.
Recent Blog
Jane Lazarre on How This Age of Crisis Affects Our Inner Worlds
Writer Jane Lazarre is no stranger to the pages of Lilith; an excerpt from her provocative and resonant novel, Inheritance, appeared in the Summer 2009 issue, and her memoirs The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter and The Mother Knot were both the subjects of...
Three Works by Jane Lazarre on Race & Whiteness
Labor Journal – Review of The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter
“Jane Lazarre’s memoir about her father is at once an intimate look into a rocky father-daughter relationship and an account of the fascinating life of a leader in the American Communist Party….”