Outcasts: the Penikese Island Leper Hospital 1904-1921

A partnership program with the Falmouth Jewish Congregation and the Falmouth Museums on the Green

July 24 at 5pm

Free and Open to the Public. Space limited, reservations required.

Join acclaimed author and poet Eve Rifkah for a performance based on her book Outcasts: the Penikese Island Leper Hospital 1904-1921. Ms. Rifkah will read poetry from this moving collection based on the lives of inhabitants of the Penikese Island leper hospital on Penikese Island, the smallest of the Elizabeth Islands off Cape Cod.

All the persona poems are based on actual patients and the directors of the hospital and actual patients, who came from around the world [China, Japan, The Azores, Russia, Turkey, Greece, Latvia, India, Cape Verde, Trinidad, Barbados, Syria, Italy and the US], but were living in the Boston area at the time they were diagnosed with leprosy. They were Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim. 36 patients were sent to the island, 14 are buried there and 13 were sent to the newly built national leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana when the Penikese leper hospital closed in 1921. Leprosy, today called Hansen’s disease, is a term of fear. We refer to feeling like a leper when we mean to feel like an outsider. While most Americans have never seen, a person with Hansen’s disease that they know of it still instills an abhorrent sense of revulsion.

Eve Rifkah was co-founder of Poetry Oasis, Inc. (1998-2012), a non-profit poetry association dedicated to education and promoting local poets. Founder, and Editor DINER, a literary magazine with a 7-year run. She is the 2021 recipient of the Stanley Kunitz award. She has run an ongoing writing workshop for 15 years and teaches workshops and classes at WISE (Worcester Institute for Senior Education). She lives in Worcester, MA with her husband, musician, artist, writer Michael Milligan and their cat.

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