Bound
I can still see the spine of the thin book,
a pasted label with an illustrated woman’s face,
draped In tradition and mystery:
Great Jewish Women. A pasted label
on the red front cover,
in the Hebrew School’s library. How
the stories of Sarah, Rebecca,
Rachel, and Leah brought me
to my people’s early days in the desert,
to their struggles and satisfactions.
I glued myself to their pages, reading on
about Miriam and Deborah, attaching
myself to more modern times of
Penina Moise, Rebecca Gratz,
and Emma Lazarus.
My memory stuck to these stories.
When I saw the book again at a book sale
at the Center for Jewish History,
I had to have it. With this book in my hands,
I once again ran the long-gone hallways
of Congregation B’nai Israel’s
basement classrooms and the library.
I pasted myself to other stories, too.
The Lower East Side immigrants
In Sydney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family. I
substituted my own grandparents arriving
from Poland, my grandmother with her parents,
settling in among the soot and poverty
but with dreams of uptown or Brooklyn.
I pull Great Jewish Women from my shelves
today, flip through the table of contents.
It’s no wonder that I went on to research
Penina Moise and Emma Lazarus
at the American Jewish Archives,
reading diary and writings.
The glue still sticks.
~
Listen
Hern zey mir, my grandchildren who do not know
your Jewish heritage. I will tell you
about your great-grandmother Lillian,
great-grandfather Milton, and their parents
as I knew them. I will pepper my speech
with Yiddish phrases you should know,
call them up from your bone marrow.
I will call you bubbeleh, kiss your keppele,
Give you a shmeck of kugel and kreplach.
Listen, my granddaughters whose legs
itch to dance like Lillian, who draw
like me, who kvetch like us all.
Slushai, my grandchildren, whose
grandfather came from Odessa,
taught your father no Russian. But
I did. I sang him Malenkii Motya
when he was a baby, a song I made up
as I rocked him in his grandma blanket
that you now have.
When you’re ready, you’ll see
the family tree in Ancestry. If you come
to visit, I’ll show you pictures. Ingrain
those images, burn them into memory.
Because even if those photos disappear,
even when I’m gone, you’ll always be able to see them.
~
The Space Between I and We
I am Rivka. They took me to the Tarnopol Ghetto, and then to Belzec. I die, the Torah in my heart. As my ashes rise, my sister Chava in America, my brother Chaim Leib in Siberia, reach for them, and pull them into the pages of their prayers.
I am Chana. They took me to the Tarnopol Ghetto, and then to Belzec. I die, and my ashes dance with those of my sister, Rivka, those of our husbands, and children. I pray for Chava and Chaim Leib to catch us and remember the streets of Kozlow, the Baron Hirsch school, our father’s bloodied butcher’s apron. Our goat, Frima.
We are Naftala Hersh and Srul, veterans of the Great War’s Austrian Army, brothers of Rivka and Chana. If only we’d followed Chava to America. If only we didn’t polish our war medals, thinking we’d be safe. If only.
We don’t know if Chava and Chaim Leib caught us. There is no one to say Yizkor, no one to light Yahrzeit. And so, all of us, we die again and again.