The poems in this post are part of a special section, curated by Ori Z Soltes and Robert Bettmann, The Jewish Experience.
Just In Case
by Jane Schapiro
Even my father, the optimist, harbored a just-in-case.
He never let on, but after his death
my sisters and I found gold coins in his drawer.
We never knew he had a just-in-case,
had inherited the dread of pogroms and camps
from his parents, their parents,
on down the line.
We divided the coins for our own just-in-case:
a source for escape should hatred explode.
Months can pass and I forget the stash,
but last night, after listening to a victim’s account,
how she and her girlfriends, high on drugs,
had been dancing to a D.J. on a Negev field,
just dancing arm-in-arm
in a percussive daze,
boundless, whole
when the sky split
as the sun rose,
and missiles and bullets tore through the dark
and gunmen burst from behind barbed wire
dissolving the ground to a swamp of blood,
how she escaped but not her friend—
when she finished her story, a man raised his hand,
“why were you dancing so close to the line?”—
I counted my coins.
Bleak Jew
by Jane Schapiro
“When talking about 6 million murdered, what can you have other than a bleak Jew,
view, I mean a bleak view.” Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer
*
Bleak is why I’ve read all his books,
keep them close on a nearby shelf.
Bleak is why I contacted him,
hoped at 92 he could offer a salve.
Love of family, he tells me,
that’s what sustains him.
But love vanished in the camps, I replied,
even maternal love.
Bleak is that fact.
*
A husband and wife are on the news—
he saved his wife from a bobcat.
Film shows the husband
stepping out the door, a cup of coffee in one hand.
Good morning, he greets his neighbor,
puts his coffee on the car hood.
His name is Happy (I kid you not).
I’ve got to wash my car, Happy announces.
Out comes his wife, toting their pet cat in a crate.
A shadow leaps out, claws onto her back.
The wife, shadow, cat are knotted
in a tangle of screams. Happy races over,
grabs the shadow, lifts it over his head,
Oh my god, it’s a bobcat. Oh my god,
throws it on his front lawn, yanks
a pistol from his waistband,
I’m going to shoot that fucker.
The footage ends.
Bleak is the question:
why did Happy wake up that morning and put a gun in his pants?
*
A filmmaker travels the Darién Gap to capture
the horror migrants face and is captured himself.
Polluted waters, poisonous spiders, predatory criminals—
he believed he could weather them all. Off he went,
traversing rocks, mud, soiled diapers,
until men appeared with machetes,
took his camera, threw him in a tent,
called him Gringo, told him not to move.
Hearing screams, he wondered
was he next, unzipped the tent, fled into the night.
Safe at home, he can’t sleep, can’t find his way
to his pre-trauma self, thinks he should have stayed,
rescued someone.
Bleak is his cry:
My brain keeps saying I could have done something.
*
Love of family but what else,
I persisted as the two of us talked.
Can you say you’re thirsty,
trust your neighbors, believe in hope?
How do you emerge from history?
I pressed, harangued, harped until—
I write.
*
Bleak is a word.
Jane Schapiro is a writer living in Northern VA. She has published three volumes of poetry and a book of nonfiction (Inside a Class Action:The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks: Univ. of Wisconsin Press). Most recently, she has had work appear in Sheila-Na-Gig, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Quartet and forthcoming in New York Quarterly. Find more of her writing at www.janeschapiro.com.
Featured image in this post: Gold coin, Aureus, Auguste, Lyon. 7.90 g., unknown author, French National Library, creative commons via wikimedia commons.
