The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.

An Apology to my Grandfather

I called you Gloom and Doom
when I was ten.
You pressed your face against
the television screen,
watched the McCarthy hearings.

In high school I studied psychology.
I was sure you were paranoid.

You stripped my Kennedy
sticker from my old Plymouth.
The bumper sticker
would upset the neighbors you said.
By “upset” you meant they would
know we were Democrats
and maybe even guess we were Jews.

For me, America
was a bright balloon I could win
and wave. I hung out at Santa Monica
Beach hoping for a glance of
the handsome Presidential candidate.
You came to America
when you were thirteen.
Officials at Ellis Island
changed your last name
to Heyert. After McCarthy
Heyert wasn’t safe enough.
Without telling your wife
or your brothers and sister
you became Mr. Taylor.

Your siblings were upset.
You donned a prayer shawl
and a yarmulke, had me snap
a picture to prove to them
you were still a Jew.

You sat outside, under an arbor
of bougainvillea. You sipped your glass
of tea. I joked you imagined Cossacks,
riding their horses, coming
for you.

Grandpa, you were right to be afraid.
Nazis murdered Jews in The Tree of Life
synagogue in Pittsburgh,
and just a few miles from me in a Chabad
in Poway.

Your great great grandson is in a
college where someone posted
a swastika on a dorm room door.

I picture myself sitting in a
safe, grassy park and telling him
he should change his last name.

I’ve been nominated for a Pushcart Prize six times, by six different publishers. Garden Oak Press has published two of my poetry books, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage and Woman with Newspaper Shoes. My poetry has appeared in many publications, including in California Quarterly in the 1970’s, as well as Lilith, Poetry International, San Diego Poetry Annual, Paterson Literary Review, and Limestone Circle. My novel Selling Pencils and Charlie was a finalist in the San Diego Book Awards. I was the prose editor at Knot Literary Magazine for ten years. In the early 1970’s, I was one of the first female screenwriting fellows at the American Film Institute; a screenplay I wrote there became a film on PBS.

Featured image in this post: Bougainvillea in Shenzhen,GuangDong China(32), Dinkun Chen, creative commons via wikimedia commons.