This poem is part of the special section, New Poems of U.S. History, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence selected by editors Carolivia Herron, Summer Tate, and Robert Bettmann. You can read more about the section on the Day Eight website here.

(for my grandfather, Sigmund Rottenberg, 1910-1994)

You left me only those coordinates, but how easily
I can conjure it: quick search reveals the two stories
of flowered geometry, steel Deco scrollwork
long and tightly curled as payes on either side

of the fragile glass doors to survival you entered
for four years. You would’ve seen the German
Gothic font—pale, familiar, menacing—bricked
two floors tall into the side of the 20-story building

announcing the address. You would’ve seen stone
fox heads like gargoyles mounted on the façade
celebrating the debased deities of this palace,
reminders of how people crave stolen softness,

how they sell exploitation as luxury—anything
to stay warm. This place was a vision, the dream
of Bernstein, a Pole a generation ahead who took
his 30-year head start and built this temple

for accented men like your boss Horowitz to sell in,
a fur blanket for mute newbies like you to hold onto.
Bernstein once started just like you: slicing skins
of foxes, minks, sables, rabbits; snipping paws,

heads, and tails from silken, lifeless pelts to erase
any truth from this pilfered velvet; planning ribbons
of fur he would carve, match, piece with his hours
similarly shorn of his underpaid sweat, made beautiful

for someone else’s showroom. You would have had to
stand to best wield the furrier’s knife, your Nazi-ruined leg
throbbing by the end of each day. How many animals,
how many men does it take to make just one coat of gold?

It didn’t matter that you were a Horowitz in Berlin.
Your life now depended on every strict incision, every slit
you scored to make Horowitz richer, so Horowitz could
make Bernstein richer. Welcome to America, they smile.

Lori Rottenberg’s debut poetry collection, The Enchantress Queen and The Ghost Who Made Me, won the 2025 Changing Light Novel-in-Verse Prize from Livingston Press and will be published in 2026. She has shared her poetry, flash, creative non-fiction, and poetry reviews in many journals, anthologies, and even podcasts, most recently in Literary Mama, Club Plum, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, Mid-Atlantic Review, and december. She was a finalist in the 17th annual Naugatuck River Review poetry contest, she received honorable mention in the 2024 Passager poetry contest, one of her poems appeared on county buses as part of the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition, and she served as a visiting poet in Arlington Public Schools for over a decade. She holds an MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she teaches English to international students and poetry to Honors College students.

Featured image Samuel Herman Gottscho, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons