Hatikvah: In Praise of Those Who Persevere
Hatikvah. The song I learned during
Friday night services at Camp Nah-Jee-Wah
in the amphitheater overlooking the lake
or in the rec center when it rained.
Where we learned Yerushalayim shel Zahav
and zeal for Eretz Israel.
Hatikvah. The flow that brought me home
as I listened to Smetana’s Vltava
in Prague’s Spanish Synagogue pew, melodic
notes borrowed from “La Mantovano”
and the nineteenth century. The hope
for a homeland, the hope of a people,
the hope of a dispersed set of tribes
longing after two millennia to go home.
Hatikvah. A lifelong mantra I learned
from Hebrew School teachers
with indigo numbers tattooed on their forearms.
A burning call to action I inherited as Mrs. Don
taught us the song in the synagogue’s
All-Purpose room. Hatikvah. All purpose.
Hatikvah. The allegiance to a nation
fighting once again for its existence,
bearing the brunt of Weltschmerz for all,
breaking through the clouds in jets,
with guns, with fierce persistence and Hatikvah.
~
Genesis
Eve shook her name—life—off the apple tree
until it fell onto my second-great-grandmother, Chava.
Death dragged Chava beneath river currents,
Life passed on to four granddaughters honoring Chava.
The Garden of Eden, now called the Goldene Medina,
beckoned. Across the Atlantic journeyed my grandmother Chava.
In America, she ate apple pie on a plate of stars and stripes,
stuffed memories into photo albums. This Chava,
now Eva, whose limbs stretched back across ocean and centuries,
bore children who bore children with the name Chava.
And while I don’t bear the name myself,
I will always sit at the ancestor table with Chava.
~
The History of Rock Candy
After Matthew Rasmussen
Zuckerkandel, rock candy, is an ironic name
for a family of diabetics, the irony of cruel
Hapsburg nomenclature. I used to suck
on threads of rock candy from Nanke’s Confectionary,
not knowing my DNA would lollipop that sugar
to my blood and bones and glucose up
my eyeballs so that I could barely read or sleep.
Sure, we’re told as kids and later as aspiring
parents that we shouldn’t give our kids too much
sugar. They won’t fall asleep. But that’s really
only because sugar ribbons already loop and hoop
our eyelids wide open. Rock candy, like a giant
fireball of cinnamon, some say a remedy
for diabetes, can break your teeth. A jawbreaker.
family members punch against our so-called fate.
Take the sugar, add hot tears (but watch the salt),
boil it up with bones of ancestors sunk in pine boxes,
stir with oars of transatlantic journeys.
Let the centuries dry out the concoction
until only crystals remain. Shags and shards
of memory like tectonic plates
to create a new confection with a more stable
shelf-life, no GMOs or preservatives. Wholly organic.
~
Viennese Crunch
Dr. Emil Zuckerkandel called me
and asked in his thick Viennese
accent if he might attend
a meeting of the Cousins Club.
I immediately said yes and gave him
the address. He showed up
with his grandson, also Emil,
the one I met in Stanford
twenty years ago. They wanted
to talk about Vienna in the good old days:
the salons, cafes, concerts. Mahler, Klimt,
Crown Prince Rudolf. I explained
I’d never been there. Not wanting
to sound like a rube, I said their name
meant rock candy. Emil the Elder
let out a belly laugh so hard Emil the Younger
had to slap him on the back. My grandmother Eva
joined us in the kitchen. She said, Instead
of discovering the Organs of Zuckerkandel
and the molecular clock, couldn’t you—
the renowned scientists of the family—
have found a cure for the family’s diabetes?
______________