The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
DocumentAerie
Hardly anybody can name all eight of their great-grandparents.
Can you? Will your children’s grandchildren remember your name?
–Robert Pinsky, “The Forgetting”
I perched on a lonely branch of our family tree, hungry for slippery worms of story.
My father gone, my mother asleep, my grandparents’ immigrant clans impenetrable thickets of feud and diaspora, I penciled the causality I knew on scraps: from Isaac and Fanny, Sigmund; from Max and Eva, Margot; from Max and Fanny, Harry; from Herman and Nettie, Pearl. I snatched raw bits of Before America whenever the elders forgot themselves and quavered their own forgetting: blood tides outrun, shields made of visas, homes abandoned, families broken, universes extinct.
As I grew, I trained my eyes on prey: proof of their stories. I found names as they wrote them—Isak Chiel, Fáni, Shaya, Mendel, Fruma, Nechoma—and transliterations of their vanished worlds—Zmigrod, Gulacz, Bochnia—the alien phonemes as warm and guttural in my mouth as fresh kill. I glided over paper meadows and mountains of manifest and marriage certificate and immigration, searching, diving.
With each new fact I found—a line with my line, the black fluff of a ruined shtetl’s name—I built myself a nest of truth, a home. Only here can I feel their lives echo in the rustling wind and feed them to the gaping beaks of my young.
The Ark, 1978
My grandparents wanted to save me
from the rising waters of American Christianity.
They paid for my Hebrew school in our exurbian exile,
the white clapboard house the only synagogue for miles.
I was one girl amid five boys in a strange ark
meant to protect, like the red light glowing above the bimah.
Our teacher taught us to decipher the foreign
alphabet, the words for boy and girl, a key distinction.
Because it was school, I loved it; I was quickest
to remember the alien sounds, the significance of each squiggle.
But when they heard me leak snatches of “Rudolph,”
my grandparents took me to Israel: three weeks
and a sabra guide in the raw sienna landscape—insurance.
I saw a waitress with numbers on her arm, as close as I could
swerve towards the black hole that almost swallowed
my Berlin-born grandparents. They explained the tattoo, but not
how they escaped, the homes and loves they lost—the Shoah
indelibly needled on their lives without a drop of ink.
I stood on Masada with these survivors—my agnostic self—
as we each tried to imagine dying for God in our own way.
Was it really better to die than live without Jewishness?
I had the American luxury of thinking myself safe from this question;
they saw only their own dammed and diverted lives, could not empathize
with those whose land it was before it became our just-in-case homeland.
They bought me a sterling siddur encrusted with turquoise cabochons, a bribe
to close the deal. I learned the Sh’ma by heart, thought maybe
it could matter, prayed for beauty and boobs not yet mine. I glimpsed a future
in a kibbutz: e pluribus unum manifest, milk and honey, making the desert bloom.
I started to be convinced by Haifa’s golden dome, the King David Hotel,
the Chagall windows, the mosaics of Herodium, how I floated
in the Dead Sea, the crash of the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv: suddenly
Jewishness was a team I wanted to be on.
After I came home with my notebook proudly filled with new Hebrew words,
soon after Bella Abzug led the National Women’s Conference,
the Conservative shul told my mother girls could not bat-mitzvah,
so I let myself be pushed from the ark into the flood.
Daiyenu
The smell of lilacs, another Passover.
Except for a box of matzoh and Manischewitz
macaroons, I have again let it pass over
unnoticed. I can’t do it—I can’t do what they did.
My grandparents delivered flawless shows, the years
stacked neatly as Grandma’s linens. The iridescent Pesach
plate, Grandpa’s burgundy velvet afikomen bag, twilit
Maxwell House haggadahs: props in the world’s oldest play.
Without my grandparents, I choke—
I freeze before the archaic stage directions:
candlelit searches for chametz; where this vegetarian buys
lamb shank; how to make haroset; get maror.
Without them, I choke—
I can’t say my lines, ask the absurd:
Why do we eat reclining? Why do we dip twice?
I already know this night is different.
Without them, I choke—
I can’t celebrate the final act: death
of the firstborns of our enemies;
I don’t think I’m part of a chosen people.
My grandparents wore religion like a coat;
they put it on only when needed.
They were cultured Berliners, searching
themselves for what lay beyond the shtetl.
They were comfortable picking at the seams:
Grandma, annoyed girls were never taught
Hebrew; Grandpa, breaking a chain
of generations by refusing the rabbinate.
Daiyenu is the simple song we sang.
It would have been enough, it means.
I see what they did was enough,
but what about what I have done?
The Unitarians showed me how
to renovate this ragged theater, drape
it in civil rights, feminism, liberation.
“The pain of others diminishes my joy,”
they read in their earnest communal seders
even my hippie heretic mother called Passover Lite:
Passover without the Jews. Isn’t that what I wanted?
To not be a member of a chosen people?
The problem is without being chosen
I am not sure what to choose.
The years run through my empty hands
while the matzoh turns to dust in my mouth.
Lori Rottenberg is a writer who lives in Arlington, Virginia. She has shared her poetry and flash non-fiction in many journals, anthologies, and even podcasts, most recently in december, Pleiades, and Viewless Wings. She received Honorable Mention in the 2024 Passager Poetry Contest, one of her poems was picked for the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition and appeared on county buses, and she served as a visiting poet in Arlington Public Schools for over a decade. Some of her writings about Judaism have appeared in Poetica, Minyan, and the Jewish Writing Project and have been shared nationally on the Unitarian Universalists for Jewish Awareness website, https://uuja.org/resources/. She holds an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she teaches writing to international students and poetry to Honors College students.
Featured image in this post:Jacques Callot, Noah’s Ark, NGA 36913, Jacques Callot, creative commons via wikipedia commons.
