“There was an underlying sense of, ‘This is my home, but I belong somewhere else,’” says Jake Marmer of his childhood in Soviet Ukraine. The accomplished poet and Head of School at Lander-Grinspoon Academy in Northampton was raised in a Jewish family, where he was acutely aware of systemic repression and its lengthy history. But as a young student who loved the humanities, he learned that poetry was sacred. His grandmother was a teacher of literature and language, and learning poems by heart was a duty and a joy.