by InTrieste
On February 7, 2025, The Forward published an article with a literary hook: in the city where James Joyce once wrote, a long-quiet bookstore tied to a Jewish poet had come back to life. The reporter, Allan M. Jalon, approached the story as an outsider. He did not leave it that way.
For decades, Jalon’s work has moved between journalism and poetry. His earliest influences were the measured lines of Robert Frost, first heard over a school loudspeaker, and later the restless voice of Allen Ginsberg, discovered in a bar mitzvah gift. As a reporter for publications including the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, he returned often to poets and the lives behind their work.
But it was Umberto Saba who, unexpectedly, brought the story closer. Reporting on the revival of the Libreria Antiquaria Umberto Saba in Trieste, Jalon maintained professional distance. Yet the assignment carried a quiet weight: his mother’s family had lived in the city for three generations before fleeing in 1938.
Writing the piece, he has said, reshaped that inheritance. Saba’s poetry—rooted in memory, identity and the texture of everyday life—became newly personal, less an object of study than a point of return.
On March 27, 2026, Jalon will revisit that journey in person at the bookstore itself. Speaking in English, he will trace a path that begins with Frost and Ginsberg and leads, through Trieste, to a rediscovery of family history. The talk starts at 4 p.m.; the doors open earlier.
