Friday afternoon radio in Israel is nostalgia time, when old favorite presenters play old favorite oldies to ease out of the week. One Friday afternoon an older lyricist than usual came up during the afternoon program as it played in the kibbutz dairy.

When my wife was working in the dairy

On kibbutz In northern Israel

A Friday afternoon song

Came over the radio

“Take Me in Under Your Wing”

That I read aloud the first time I met her.

The dairyman said to the Israeli girls

Milking beside her, “You know who wrote that?”

They shrugged. He turned to her

More or less out of politeness.

She looked at him, “Bialik?”

He looked back in amazement.

“You see,” He waved his hand

Over the fields, tracks of cud chewer excrement,

“You see, this girl in the land just six weeks

Knows who Bialik is!”

They milked cows and took tithes

And changed pumps for the Sabbath milking

But nobody knew who she was

As she walked up the snake path to the cabin

To wash away the filth

And pray before sunset

And find the law behind a stone

In Jerusalem, not the place she left.

Image via Wikimedia

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I wrote this poem after hearing of the Polish government’s legislation limiting discussion of the Shoah. Most, if not all, societies try to suppress the disturbing events of their past. It is the role of historians, artists, and activists to remind them of their buried misdeeds.

They are committed

to erasing their memory

they have placed themselves

upon the table

soon the lobotomy

then the plastic surgeon

to take away

their scars

They will rise en masse

one smiling

nation

happy to have forgotten

Jedwabne and

Kielce

happy to have stopped searching

through the mountains

of ash

Image via Pixabay

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I wrote this poem when we started reading the book of Shemot this year, but its core feelings have been with me since my non-Jewish childhood in Germany: grief, and the longing to find and get to know what was lost. I do think there is shared trauma among the post-war generations— at the same time, it is often also a dividing line between those whose relatives survived the Holocaust, and those who live with a feeling of secondhand communal guilt.

I began to explore Judaism and made my first Jewish friends when I lived in Buenos Aires. My life is quite Jewish now, and I sometimes forget that I converted, but there are a few dates on the calendar that remind me: November 9^th, for example, and January 27^th, or 27 of Nisan, Yom HaShoah.

The Jews are gone.

What is left in Germany are Germans

with names that in New York are Jewish,

the Hoffmanns, Kaufmanns, Bachmanns,

the Breuers, Seidels, Kleins,

the Meyers, Gerbers, Arndts, and Schwartzes.

At times I see them disappear, the names,

from class rosters, record albums, signatures,

bylines, store fronts, wedding announcements,

one by one,

like the people around me

in the synagogue, in my office, at my table,

one by one

the Goldbergs, Weinstocks, Lewisohns,

the Kirschenbaums, the Halperins, the Katzes.

I stared for hours at the photo of Anne Frank,

wanting to talk with her.

I was younger than she was when she went into hiding.

I am three times older now than she was when she died.

The questions are still valid:

How can you say you didn’t know?

So visible a silence, so tangible an absence.

How can you say enough time has passed?

The Jews are gone.

What is left in Germany are names that haunt

the Germans from generation to generation.

Photo from the interior of the Pinkasova Synagogue, where names of Holocaust victims or missing persons from the Jewish community during WWII are painted on the wall. Via Flickr.

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I like the multilayered ways in which Judaism measures time, how it acknowledges time’s flowing and circular character. In total, Judaism counts four new years that begin at different dates — Rosh Hashanah being the most obvious one. While Tishrei and Elul mark the first and last months of the civil year—5778—Nisan and Adar are the first and last months of the year that determines the religious observance of all festivals.

This poem is supposed to be an allegorical reflection on the relationship between Pesach in Nisan and Purim in Adar – two festivals that celebrate redemption. Also, the days and weeks between festivals are often important passages in Judaism, and this is especially true for the time we are in right now, leading from Purim in the month of happiness (Adar) up to Pesach in the month of freedom (Nisan).

Purim was a charming imp,

leaping, humming, singing; smiling

in the safety of his mother’s lap.

He turned heads with gifts of food and laughter.

The happiest of brothers,

he got away with his transgressions;

he was different, sensitive,

a special child of concealed zeal,

miraculously cheerful in somber hours.

He made everyone forget

what they were enjoined to remember.

Pesach watched his youngest brother

with the vigor of the first-born son.

Like their father,

he had an outstretched arm, a strong hand,

but Purim warmed Pesach’s earnest heart,

despite feelings of superiority,

a beat or two of jealousy,

despite the burden he was enjoined to carry.

The laws.

The blood dripping from cups of freedom.

They were one.

A family’s tale of two-fold redemption,

bound together on the calendar. 

Photo by Matt Hecht

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I wrote a poem when Ariel Sharon fell into a coma: it just started dictating itself to me as I walked down the street and I had to pick up stationery at my wife’s yeshiva when I got there to write it down. We left Israel six months after Disengagement and I read one of his biographies and was moved by his mother’s life, then wound up with a sequence of poems by different witnesses, a curious history of the state. This is the view of Yitzhak Rabin— whose birthday on the Hebrew calendar falls this evening, Rosh Chodesh Adar— who promoted him on condition that he behaved himself, and later as PM employed him as a security advisor to decide what land to cede in the Oslo Accord, while Sharon loudly decried the Oslo Accord in public. As PM Sharon also ceded territory and also faced threats to his life.

You’ve got no tact

To play a part

In any joint decision;

You’ve got no heart

For staying out

Of any bit of action.

You do not listen.

When a military policeman

Tells you “no”

You do not show any discipline, chew him out

To your men, make sport

Of his private life, walk, limp, receding hairline.

These things don’t go unmentioned

When it comes to discussing promotion.

How you talk does not improve the situation.

When you go behind his back

Or over his head to the kitchen cabinet

Because you have Ben-Gurion’s private line

Or some other way to get your own back

It isn’t intelligent.

Every time you get your way

Another enemy is waiting.

The army is like playing a game of chess

You need to see where pawns

Are waiting to take your Queen.

Now Ben Gurion is gone

Who will you go to?

Who can you call when your latest plan

Is foiled because the next man up the totem pole

Remembers exactly what you mean by discipline?

You’ll never make a good officer

You do not have the patience.

I’m giving you the Northern Command.

Get out of here. Prove me wrong.

Behave like a human being.

One day you might have the chance

To be a man instead of talking to the mountains.

On that day remember me.

You do not have to always win

To be a good statesman.

Image via Wikimedia

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The silencing of women’s voices and appropriation of their bodies is not new. These poems look for dignity in the silences of Dinah and Batsheva and ask readers to imagine the part of their experiences which has been lost to us.

Dinah

Who tailored

this alteration of a dream,

to seize Dinah,

Before her father heard and her brothers echoed,

Who took her without words before,

only after?

Jacob’s sons reasoned

In the nerveless refuge of revenge.

    How shall we deal with our sister?

We have seams of earth,

flocks, water, and swords.

She holds nothing but a man’s eye.

Silent, when he found her,

cloaked her,

stopped her.

She had words before,

delivered to other daughters,

when she could still speak.

Dinah’s brothers hauled their pain

and silenced the city.

Jacob wrestled and learned who he was,

but Dinah was gone.

Batsheva

She could feel the sun

and the dust lifting

from the stones on the roof

spelling words of war.

From her window

she watched the Law

carried like an ageing father

too tired to remember his sons.

Batsheva’s eyes were half closed.

She saw promises of cornered fields,

angled houses,

nights saved by water.

On this day she was alone.

There was no one in the city,

as she drew inside the picture

of a woman bathing,

turning her waist in the king’s tent.

Image of painting “Bathsheba at Bath” by Paolo Veronese via Wikimedia

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After my father died we had to clear the apartment he kept his office in, and my mother started collecting old menorahs from thrift stores. I still can’t go past a window display with some old Jew’s cast-offs without wondering when that was last lit, and how.

I saw the first on top

of a book case, hiding, funereal

and black as a cenotaph

tucked behind my father’s photo.

The next was on the ledge

of the window and she showed it

– opening the tiny frame

in the heart that contained ten commandments.

The last one (recently acquired)

was stone in part, and green amethyst

(or look-alikes) bejewelled the cups

where the candles, if it were used, would be put.

Why she should collect the lamps

of the dead, who don’t light their candles,

take them home instead and light

just her own one  I could not say.

But she stands running her hands

on the candle cups. Her doctor mentioned:

“You can’t just leave them. It’s a call.”

And my mother agreed, bought a new set

and when she lights it is the first

of at least ten that gleams

in the gloom of the back room.

It’s a cold room.

I notice my father’s room;

their bedroom, where he died, a sad room.

It has light now and flowers

but still you can’t help hearing him, groaning.

She says, “There really aren’t

that many lamps in junk shops,”

as more and more Jews die

and their sons clear their house for scrap.

She says, “Only this one, and that.

You can’t leave them. In shops

You have to rescue them.” She hangs

a hand on the brass candle cup.

We take candles wherever we go

something requires that we light

before full dark – it isn’t law,

it is the need for someone else to see the match.

If you find a lamp – please do not leave it –

somehow you’ll find your way back

to when you were at home, and light was with someone

and a spark fell before dark.

Atar Hadari’s “Songs from Bialik” was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award. His Pen Translates award winning “Lives of the Dead: Poems of Hanoch Levin” is out from Arc Publications in January 2018.

Image via Wikimedia

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The first poem here emerged from a practice I’ve adopted over the past few years of combining close study of Jewish texts with creative-writing prompts. I was introduced to this sort of work through classes offered by Amy Gottlieb at the Drisha Institute in New York; after those courses ended, a few of us decided to continue meeting on our own. “Birthright” stems from study of Parashat Toldot—which is to be read in 2017/5778 on November 18.

Birthright

Eyesight dimmed, aged Isaac

could nonetheless discern

the sound of one twin’s voice

from the other’s

and detect the scent

of each from his garments;

alas, how the story

might have shifted

could he have distinguished

Esau’s skin from a goat’s.

For this next poem: I struggle somewhat with my level of Shabbat observance. And I also struggle with my addiction to my iPhone and various social-media platforms. About a year ago, following the rush of online reactions in the aftermath of the presidential election, I began trying to disengage for one day each week: Shabbat. And that’s the impetus for “Sabbath Rest 2.0.” 

Sabbath Rest 2.0

About that Fourth Commandment:

I’ve always remembered the Sabbath day;

I just haven’t kept it holy.

But these days, I do keep it

free from Facebook and Twitter.

And when the sun sinks and sets

and the three stars appear,

I’m renewed and refreshed

and ready, once again,

to face all that awaits.

Erika Dreifus writes poetry and prose in New York. She can be found online at http://www.ErikaDreifus.com and on Twitter @ErikaDreifus, where she tweets “on matters bookish and/or Jewish.”

Photo by slgckgc, via Flickr.

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I wrote this poem last November, after Leonard Cohen had passed away (his yahrtzeit is later this month), and I was constantly listening to his music. I was also heartbroken, because the person I call here the Kabbalist’s son had finally walked out of my life on Sukkot just a few weeks earlier. I’ve never felt as unsheltered as I did then. Sukkot wasn’t primarily on my mind when I wrote the poem, but its underlying motives of giving and losing shelter, fleeting joy, and the convergence of transience and permanence echo some of the holiday’s themes. 

I loved the Kabbalist’s son, who came to me in starry nights

immersed in the secret wisdom of his ancestors.

In the shadow of the candle light

I heard them singing in the Temple,

I saw them swaying by the river,

their silhouettes transposed from ancient lands

onto my crimson painted bedroom walls.

His beauty smiled in the deepest crevice of my loneliness.

I drank his words. His pale skin was my firmament,

his name in every blessing.

For just one moment out of time

his touch repaired forever and again my world.

He came to me past the tents of his brothers and sisters

who had forsaken him.

He came without allotment or inheritance

but with his share of splendor and eternity.

I fed him tea and peanut butter, I mended his suit

while he washed and scrubbed his body,

water dripping down the tiles and from his clothes.

I shared his dreams when he slept near me,

for one moment out of time.

I saw him dancing with joyous black-clad men,

I heard him crying on the doorstep of a foreclosed home.

His sweetness was broken, his kindness impure.  

There was nothing I could do. He told me:

I have no love to give you.

The stars turned into snowflakes,

the snow turned into rain.

Last year’s man is gone and with him,

the Kabbalist’s son.

Julia Knobloch’s poetry has appeared in Moment Magazine, Rascal, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. She works for the Union for Reform Judaism and lives in Brooklyn.

Image via PxHere

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Hannah Szenes has become a near-legendary figure in Jewish heroism: After escaping Nazi-Europe in 1939 and making it to Palestine, she decided to volunteer as a paratrooper and return to her native Hungary to rescue Jews. She was then arrested, tortured, and ultimately executed for treason at age 23.

But what makes her legacy so enduring is her writing; she was a poet from a young age, and her most famous work, “Towards Caesarea” (often called “Eli, Eli,”) was put to music, and can be found in summer camp songbooks,  Regina Spektor concerts, and playing over the ending of some versions of Schindler’s List.

But here’s the thing: Szenes had other work. She didn’t have the time to be prolific, but during her short life, she wrote in multiple languages: poems, diaries, and at least two plays.

Here’s the translation of a poem she wrote when she was only thirteen, which reads sort of like the emo poetry you wrote when you were her age, only better:

“Life is a brief and hurtling day, pain and striving fill every page.
Just time enough to glance around,
Register a face or sound
and—life’s been around.”

In retrospect, sure, the poem seems prophetic, but the darker work was yet to come. Though it’s really a shame that Szenes is known as a tragic figure, when some of her writing was joyous, and even hilarious. Take this adolescent diary entry:

“Do boys interest me? Well, yes, they interest me more than before, but only in general because I didn’t see a single boy I really liked the entire summer. True, I didn’t meet very many. This is my idea of the ideal boy:

“He should be attractive and well dressed, but not a fop; he should be a good sportsman, but interested in other things besides sports; he should be cultured and intelligent, but good-humored and not arrogant; and he should not chase after girls. And so far I have not met a single boy like this.”

She didn’t make it far past being a teenager, but maybe her stint on a kibbutz found someone at least approaching that standard.

Szenes continued to write in captivity, and after she died, a poem, likely from early on in her imprisonment, was found written on the wall of her cell. It’s sad, and resigned, but not regretful.

For this one Jewish girl, from worrying about boys, to facing her own mortality head-on, Szenes fit a lot into a short life.

The poem reads:

“One – two – three… eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark…
Life is a fleeting question mark
One – two – three… maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.”

Image credit: Wikimedia

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