Bones and Ashes

I am descended
From a long line of rabbis.
A genetic memory
Of the captive audience
Tells me I must speak,
Must always speak
To whatever congregation
Is huddled before me.

In Lublin town, great grandfather
So they tell me, kept a school,
Not a cheder but a high school
For Jews of promising intellect.
His name appeared as the author
Of books on theology.
The books and school
And all that told of their existence
Burned with the bodies
Of my relatives still in Lublin
After the cold invasion.


Swirling in that bitter breeze
Ashes carried the intoning
Of my great-grandfather
And of the bright youths bending an ear
To lessons of the world.

Through a shroud of deafness
And almost forty years I hear them:
Late but heeded messages
From Treblinka,
From Mae Donnick.

(Some say the Holocaust never occurred.
Of course. The Holocaust
Like many Jewish memories
Is a memory of nothing.
A history of nothingness,
Daily upon more nothingness
And to be without a past
Is surely to be without a future).

No, this line begins again
With what my dreams and memories tell me:
A son escaped Lublin and came to America
To sing the liturgy on the East Side New York
With a wife, four daughters,
And a son who was my father.
And I resume the liturgy
In a different language
For a different audience
But the intent’s the same.
I must speak against every image
Of wind blowing ashes,
Of congregations silenced,
Of words, ignored, unheard,
Locked up, smashed,
Burned, gassed,
Put in a desk drawer and forgotten,
Stamped with the disapproval
Of a court I never elected,
Cut off for lack of funds,
Laughed down, interrupted.
All invasions of the temple
I shall stare down with an implacable wrath
And keyn eyn hora against the evil eye.
May my poems and stories be the living echo
Of that lonely hiss relict of the Polish nights,
The whispering of the Bronstein line
To its congregation of bones.

Glossary:

Lublin-city in Poland, formerly the home of the largest
Jewish population in Poland outside of Warsaw.

Cheder-religious school where students are instructed
in the Torah (five books of Moses).

Treblinka, Mae Donnick-concentration camps. My relatives
in Lublin died in these camps.

Keyn Eyn Hora-a saying “to ward off the evil eye.”