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Yiddish Illiterate

Posted on May 2, 2011 at 12:25 AM

I’m sitting on a lawn chair in our backyard in Skokie, my relatives all ringed around me, the sun beating down on our heads, mottled through the leaves of the trees overhead. There’s a lot of boisterous conversation going on around me, but I sit there staring straight ahead, the idiot American granddaughter. They talk around me, over me, under me, like I’m a vegetable. I don’t understand a word they’re saying. They’re speaking Yiddish.

I’ve made a concerted effort not to learn Yiddish. For some reason, from the moment I hear it as a small child, I cast it off, decide it’s not for me, that it’s a relic of the Old Country. I resist Yiddish, fight its penetration into my brain tooth and nail. I give my mother a blank look when she tries to speak to me in it. I make her translate.

I give myself several reasons for my antagonism. First of all, I decide right off the bat that it’s a dead language, so there’s no reason to learn it. After all, only the grown ups around me speak Yiddish, none of the kids. I figure I can wait this thing out. I’ve also absorbed my parents’ desire to be American in all things, to cast off the Old World and embrace the new, and so I cast off the Old World’s Yiddish and embrace the New World’s English. Of course, they don’t mean to do that with language; they want to be able to speak to their children in their mother tongue. And, last of all, since Yiddish is used to hide everything interesting and tantalizing from me, I have a certain amount of hostility towards it.

My refusal to learn Yiddish causes some problems because one set of grandparents, my father’s parents, never learns English. They resist English as well as I resist Yiddish, eventually dying without letting a syllable touch their lips. And why should they learn it anyway? Yiddish serves all their needs; they commission their sons and daughters to learn English for them, to handle all their transactions with non-Yiddish-speaking merchants, to handle their communications with the outside world. These two grandparents of mine seem to know that it just might not be worth the time and effort to learn such an elaborate, messy and confusing language like English before they die.

My Dad’s parents are determined to spend their days in America relaxing and enjoying their new status as “senior citizens” in this new country, even if those days stack up together into years and even decades. They never get over the novelty of safety; never take it for granted. They never stop marveling at the amazing American innovations. The convenience of grocery stores - so much better than starving! The traffic signals on every street corner regulating the cars - so much better than cars and horses and wagons all insisting on going at the same time! The mild weather in Chicago compared to Poland and Siberia - a heat wave!

Just because I can’t speak Yiddish doesn’t mean that I can’t understand some of it. I do understand adjectives and imperatives and direct commands and reprimands. If my mother is mad at someone and decides to hurl an insult under her breath, I can understand that too, the goniffs, the schlimazels, the yachnehs. But the regular conversational ebbs and flows, the make up of ordinary sentences with nouns and verbs, that escapes me.

My other grandparents, my mother’s parents, learn English, my grandmother better than my grandfather. She understands every word I say; there’s no escaping her, tricking her, or pulling a fast one on her. She’s watching me all the days of my life with eyes magnified by her glasses and ears sharp with the nuances of five languages. All this while my grandfather sits nearby in a suit, his fedora always on his head, even inside the house, practicing the words he has just learned on me.

“Linda, mameleh, tell me again. Beetles are bugs, nu? Monkeys are animals. But now the Monkees and the Beatles sing songs on the radio? How can this be?”

Holocaust Memorial Day reminds me of my grandparents, all Survivors, and the Yiddish in our family, now long gone, so today I ran a blog post that is an excerpt from my book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, available on Amazon.

Thanks for Reading JWorld Cafe, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie is available on Amazon and other venues. Her work has appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, in Brain Child Magazine, and has been anthologized in several works including Mizmor L'David, an anthology of work by children of Holocaust Survivors. She blogs at Bar Mitzvahzilla and on Open Salon.

My Brother/My Self

Posted on February 13, 2011 at 4:15 PM

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This is the time of the semester where my Composition students begin working on research papers. They're free to choose their own topics, which is both a blessing and a curse. For those who fall into the "cursed" aisle, I assign a topic. What sweet relief for them! Until that is, they can't find any material, can't muster the energy to explore another's idea, even when that idea was carefully selected as perfect for them.

I feel their pain. I'm with them, right here, right now, trying to find the words to fulfill the assignment suggested by JWorld Cafe's editor. Loss and Creativity. It was at least a month ago when she asked if I wanted to write about the loss of my brother, Jack. My first instinct was to say, no, second was yes, then no, yes, no, yes, and finally I put the idea on a shelf, thinking I'd be ready. But is there such a thing as being ready to write (or talk or think) about a brother's death? My brother's death.

Before you think that I was a perfect sister, I have to say that the last years of our lives were fraught with conflict. We didn't speak much; when we did there was anger, intensity, yearning. How we yearned! Both of us, in our inadquate ways to remember a bond we'd had in childhood--not perfect--but still. We wanted to get that familiarity back but couldn't. Those gorgeous days when we shared comics and baseball cards (he taught me how to flip them), and did acrobatic feats where I stood on my big brother's knees and felt like I could fly.

Back in the late '50s and '60s, before I could ever have dreamed I'd be a writer, Jack was accruing experiences I'd one day memorialize on the page. Picture him: Dark, brooding, smoldering unhappiness. Montgomery Clift? No, more James Dean, except my brother was a Rebel with a Cause. He spent his elementary school years railing against the yeshiva education my parents had insisted upon. As a girl, I was allowed to attend public school. We slept in rooms next door to one another's. But we lived different lives. My Saturdays were coed parties; his were shul with my father, until the Rebellion and then he davened at a pool hall in Flatbush.

I began writing about my brother's life and mine and the ways they intersected, many years ago. His unhapiness had eclipsed the joy I was able to find in the world. I buried my thunder, put out my light. I vowed to not embody my life, until Jack embodied his. My brother never knew it, but I raged at my parents and the damn yeshiva, too. How could he know it? I did it as I did everything. Quietly.

There was a sibling line I wouldn't cross, and so I didn't publish my work about Jack and myself. I found my writerly voice--or at least my publishable voice--writing about my parents, who were Holocaust survivors. My relationship with them--conflicted too--was my entree onto the pages of newspapers and magazines with a Jewish readership. It was the engine behind all my creative work.

After my father died (my mother had passed eight years before), I needed to write; there were so many reasons. Mostly, I think, I needed to make sense of my parents' lives. And too, my enormous love for them that had often come out all twisted. Through words I righted us, tweaked us this way and that.

Then, last summer my brother died. He had suffered from alcoholism, and his body gave out. All the mixed feelings that I had carried for half my life--they didn't make it to the page. The stories about the yeshiva and the pool hall--meaningless. I was in a place unimaginable, yet real. The last one of my family. The last. Free from trying to solve our conflicts, make us better. Bound in sorrow, knowing I can never make us better. And free, to let myself shine.

This would be a good time to take to the page. But, I can't get started. I tell my students, "Writing can help you figure yourself out." I believe that; but for today, my grief unfinished, I want to fill myself on life not words.

I can write essays, articles, lesson plans. I can lose myself in many creative projects. But my most creative endeavor will be figuring out how--and allowing myself--to finally and fully embody my life.

Thanks for Reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Sandra Hurtes, Guest Blogger

Sandra Hurtes' essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Poets & Writers and numerous other publications. She's the author of the essay collection On My Way To Someplace Else and the chapbook, RESCUE: A Memoir. She holds workshops in Manhattan in creative nonfiction and is an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College, CUNY. Her website is www.sandrahurtes.com. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Postcards from the Past

Posted on November 15, 2010 at 12:05 AM

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For me, one of the hardest parts of writing a poem is knowing when it’s done. Even harder is knowing when a book is done. I’d been working on a manuscript for over ten years, and sending it out to contests, was a finalist or first runner-up in some, and got some lovely rejection notes. But, I had this nagging feeling that it wasn’t finished. It had a beginning, it had a middle, and an end, but it just wasn’t done. I was close, but needed more. I didn’t know what the “more” was; all I knew was I needed it.

My parents are Holocaust survivors, and I’d been listening to their experiences since my teens, and writing short stories. But when I was accepted into my first poetry workshop, I realized that poetry was the language I needed. It was the way to take these experiences and get in them and muck around and see what poems would arise. I wrote for years, and finally my poetry teacher said I needed to put together a manuscript.

In March of 2006, I got an email from my cousin with a link to a website listing Dutch Jews killed in the Shoah. I’d been on the site before and saw the names of my father’s mother, Jenny, his father, Simon, his older sister Ruth, and little brother, Josef, on the list. My father’s family was from Germany and got as far as Maastricht, Holland trying to get to America. In one of his last letters to my father, Josef wrote “with God’s help we will get to America.” Since my family weren’t technically Dutch Jews, I didn’t think the site would tell me anything I didn’t know. I went on the site, and my entire life changed. I saw everyone’s names, birth dates and dates of death, and next to Josef’s name was an icon. I clicked on it.

Here’s what I knew – the family was deported from Maastricht to Westerbork on August 17, 1942. On November 2, 1942, they were sent to Auschwitz and killed on arrival. What I didn’t know literally took my breath away. On the website were four postcards that Josef had written to Paul Lardinois in Maastricht. When I could breathe again, I called a Dutch friend of mine and asked if he could find Paul. He called ten minutes later to say he’d just spoken with Paul and that Paul had given the postcards to the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam, and they put them on the website. I found them two weeks after they’d been put up. After letters, phone calls and emails, I found out that Paul, who is Catholic, and Josef, both eleven-year-old boys, were friends in Maastricht, and Josef wrote to him from Westerbork.

I knew I had to go to Holland. In January, 2007 I arrived in Amsterdam and made my way to the museum to hold the postcards that Josef wrote. I then went to Maastricht. Paul took me to where Josef and the family lived before they were deported and to the synagogue in Maastricht. It had been looted used by the Nazis during the war for storage.

When I arrived home, I began working on poems about my trip. The poems appear in my book which was published in November, 2007, and the poem below is the last poem I wrote for the book. As I worked on the poems, I realized what the “more” was. It was me. I needed to encounter the Shoah directly. I needed to go to Maastricht.

Poetry has given much to me, from teaching poetry to teens, adults, and seniors to judging a poetry contest for soldiers stationed in Iraq. But I never imagined poetry would lead me to Josef.

Maastricht, January, 2007

I am outside Wilhelmina Singel 88.

The skies are gray.

I take a deep breath and enter the building.

I walk up to the third floor. That’s where you lived.

Before deportation.

Before Westerbork.

Before Auschwitz.

I knock on the door, hoping someone is there.

Hoping someone will let me in.

The door is locked.

I stay for a while.

I walk back down and sit on the curb across the street.

I stare up at the third floor.

I wonder what your life was like in 1942.

Did you stay at home most times, afraid to go out on the street,

the yellow star on your overcoats announcing

you wherever you went?

The synagogue you went to is still there.

There is a plaque to those deported from Maastricht to Westerbork,

then to Auschwitz or Sobibor. That’s where most of you went.

Cars go by, people walk past, and I sit

watching the third floor, waiting for something to tell me it’s time to go.

The street is beautiful, you know, tree-lined, well kept.

A light rain begins to fall.

Oma, Opa, Ruth, and Josef, you jump from the third floor window. I catch you

and carry you to America with me.

Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine blog

Janet Kirchheimer, Guest Blogger

**Oma and Opa are German for grandmother and grandfather.

Janet R. Kirchheimer is a poet whose work has appeared in journals including Atlanta Review, Potomac Review, Limestone, Connecticut Review, Kalliope, Common Ground Review, on beliefnet.com and babelfruit.com, among others. Her collection of poems about the Holocaust, How To Spot One Of Us (2007) received endorsements from Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, Sir Martin Gilbert, and Rabbis Harold Kushner and Irving “Yitz” Greenberg. In 2007, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2010, received a Citation for her work from The Council of The City of New York. She is a Teaching Fellow at Clal–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

When Writing Takes On a Life of its Own

Posted on September 6, 2010 at 12:05 AM

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Soon one of my dreams will become a reality: my book, The Hatchet Man” will be published by Poetica. Publishing. The story of how I came to write a book of Holocaust-inspired poetry, however, isn’t in the book.

The poems that comprise “The Hatchet Man” represent the culmination of a creative process based on history, secular and biblical. I don't know how else I can account for this collection. The more I studied the Holocaust and learned about my subject, the more prolific the creative instinct became. It was if the writing took on a life of its own, a not uncommon subconscious endeavor that all poets experience. In retrospect when I read some of the poems, today, I am reminded of what Alexander Pope said, “A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.” The Pierian spring located in Macedonia was a sacred meeting place of the nine Muses. This is where they bathed, drank and ate the fruit of creativity later to be presented as gifts to the artists. Another quote from Pope that I find appropriate as it relates to a creative bent is, “Education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.”

My inclination was to study the Holocaust, everything from Mein Kampf to the atrocities committed in Death Camps. Once I was full of the knowledge of my subject matter, the creative process took hold somehow, with the result being that I produced uninhibited accounts of poetry that depicted historical events. These events, as horrible and as unspeakable as they were, came to life in an organized fashion. It was as if these fossilized congealed heinous acts had been looking for a voice, and not mine only. Many other voices have been raised to bring to remembrance the genocidal treatment of human beings by malignant narcissists; not only in the geographic areas I have depicted, but around the world.

Should we wait for sweet dreams

To comfort us,

Sugar plums or cedars?

Should we be patient in our dream state

And wait for pleasantries,

Dainties designed to encourage hope?

Or should we sleep

With one eye open

And embrace the dreams

Of our realities,

The dreams with the skin still on?

The poems have not been particularly organized in any specific sense, but there does seem to be a logical beginning and ending. In the beginning the poems reflect the humiliation and degradation that was heaped upon a particular people based on where they have come from and who they are. Further on the poems change and reflect how certain events unfolded politically and almost obliterate any shred of hope. Towards the end of the book there is a miraculous victory along with acts so supernaturally performed that they defy human understanding. Finally, there is an admonition to treat each other as equals with an eye to brotherly love, a place where communal peace will reign in the hearts of men and women.

My hope and desire is that many people will read the book and keep the cry of “Never Again” alive with due diligence and look for opportunities to “Love their neighbors as themselves, and to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine blog

Richard Ilnicki, Guest Blogger

Richard Ilnicki is the author of six books of poetry, his latest of which, The Hatchet Man, is currently in the library of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library in Washington, D.C. He has written two unpublished novels as well, Mr. Monstriparity and The Bibliophile. An avid supporter, defender, lover and contributor to the state of Israel, the book deals almost exclusively with the Holocaust experience. Mr. Ilnicki lives and works in Tarpon Springs, Florida. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

The Unanswerable Question

Posted on June 20, 2010 at 9:44 PM

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It's next to impossible to rid my mind of haunting Holocaust imagery. The fact that these images opened the gate to creative writing is a mixed blessing. There is this compulsion to pull from the library shelves anything that has to do with that tragic time in history. I have gone on to write poetry with more light-hearted themes, but in order to depart from that painful topic I found I needed a coda - an ending, a final note.

After serving several years as a volunteer at the Red Cross Holocaust Tracing Center in Baltimore, I found my emotional in-box full to bursting. Either I had to give up my efforts or find an outlet for the horrific imagery indelibly imprinted on me from those soul-rending cases. And so I took pen in hand. Actually, it is the computer that has fostered any artistic expression I may have, since this wonderful enabler allows my creative voice, such as it is, to be heard. Without the computer to unscramble my thoughts and decipher my scribble, I would have remained mute.

The result was several Holocaust themed poems circulated among my colleagues at the Center. “You should send them to Elie Wiesel,” they said. In the innocence of a first time writer who has yet to fear baring his soul in public, I did so. He wrote back telling me, "I was touched to read your words - I am not a poet, but I think your words are moving and will do much to make sure that those who were lost will not be forgotten..." Can you imagine, Elie Wiesel infers I am a poet?

I wrote the following poem in an effort to find an answer to an unanswerable question.

I BELIEVE

Where was He when evil swept

Through villages where innocents slept,

Faithful to commandments kept,

Did David's shield protect them?

Gott mit uns in another tongue

Damn them all, the old, the young

It's from the Jews our ills have sprung

Death for them is in ordnung.

Useless were their tears to quench

The fire, as was their blood to drench

The Almighty's sacrificial bench.

The search for His existence in vain.

If we are made in His image,

If mercy triumphs over rage,

If all is written on one's own page,

Was infinite wisdom forsaken?

The millions marched to certain death,

Shouting His name with final breath,

Their ashes greening mother earth...

Where was G-d? Why omit the "o"?

Ani ma'amin,

And yet I omit the "o."

The oft repeated remark, "anyone is a poet who thinks he's a poet," still gives me pause, as does finding my name among the others listed as poets in an anthology. I'd like to think I deserve the appellation as well, but I am still startled when a jumble of thoughts rattle around my brain in the early hours of the morning, then appears as if by magic on the clean white page later in the day in some semblance of order and meaning.

Thank you for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Jerome Shapiro, Guest Blogger

Jerome Shapiro writes from Naples, Florida and Baltimore. Another of his Holocaust-themed poems appears in the current issue of Poetica Magazine's Mizmor L'David Anthology,The Shoah - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor.

Knowing and Not Knowing

Posted on February 28, 2010 at 5:22 PM

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In the decades since the Holocaust, a “children of survivors” literature has grown up. The phenomenon is worldwide. From my days as a book reviewer, the following titles come immediately to mind: See Under: Love by David Grossman (Israel), Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman (United States), What God Wants by Lily Brett (Australia), and Nightfather by Carl Friedman (Holland). Different as these books all are from one another—and each is wonderful in its own way—what they have in common is the child’s struggle to come to grips with the parent’s unspeakable legacy.

Inevitably, the iniquities visited upon the parents return to haunt the children. The ways in which this happens are as varied as the individuals themselves. Even when the children know very little of their parents’ ordeals, they cannot but be affected.

My poem Curse VII (“Now in her eighties...”) is about one such mother-daughter dynamic. In this case the mother’s life was saved by her inclusion in the Kindertransport. The poem was inspired by a Yom Ha-Shoah program at my synagogue. Erika, the survivor, told her story to a group of assembled Hebrew school parents and children that included her own grandchildren as well as her daughter. Erika’s personal journey to share her story took nearly 70 years—a Biblical lifetime. Until she began to speak out publicly, her own daughter was ignorant of much of her mother’s history.

For me, the cement that holds the poem together is the tension between what parents know and what they choose to tell their children—in this case, what Erika’s parents knew or suspected and did not tell her, and what Erika knew and did not tell her own children.

When someone like Erika, who has suffered so greatly, chooses to break her silence, it is important to pay attention. I tried to pay attention, and the poem seemed to write itself. I sent the poem to Erika. “I’m glad to know that at least one person was listening to me,” she said.

Curse VII

Now in her eighties,

Erika sits in a chair in a circle of chairs

to tell us her story for Yom HaShoah.

“During the Second World War,

the British took in ten thousand children

from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.

I was one of them, sixteen years old in 1938.

“I was scared, lonely, unhappy.

When the blitzkrieg started,

the bombs fell indiscriminately all over London.

Then I felt better;

I had wanted to be like everyone else,

and now I was.

“I never dreamed my parents were murdered.

I didn’t learn until after the war.

I was completely unprepared.

The way I felt – it’s more than anger,

it’s the deepest despair.

I lost my faith in God.

I’d made a bargain—

I’ll get through all this,

and You’ll reunite my family.

“The bargain was one-sided.

When I found out,

it was Yom Kippur, 1945.

I went to a non-kosher restaurant.

The meal I ate stuck in my throat,

but I wanted to make my point.

“After Chamberlain and Munich,

I remember my father saying,

‘It’s a good thing there’s no war.

If there’s a war, they’ll kill the Jews.’

My parents might have known

they were saying goodbye for good

at the dock in Hamburg in 1938.

“I was the youngest

and they considered me useless.

All my efforts were for them.

I wanted to show them what I’d accomplished.

In some ways I’ve never gotten over it.

I think of what they did for me.”

Erika’s daughter Kim says,

“My mother was P.T.A. President

and led the Girl Scout troop.

She never talked about herself,

but I knew she was different.

When a friend said,

‘Your mom has an accent,’

I replied, ‘She does?’

my voice rising in a question,

knowing and not knowing.”

Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Anne Whitehouse, Guest Blogger

Anne Whitehouse’s books include the poetry collections, BLESSINGS AND

CURSES and THE SURVEYOR’S HAND. Her chapbook BEAR IN MIND is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2010. She is the author of the novel FALL LOVE, now available as a free e-book from Amazon Kindle as well as Feedbooks and Smashwords. Please visit her website at http://annewhitehouse.com - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

How I Came to Write Curse XXII ("On September 1, 1939...")

Posted on January 25, 2010 at 12:06 AM

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As I wrote in my guest blog last week, some of the individual poems in Blessings and Curses are about me, and some are about other people whose stories impressed themselves on me. In the case of Curse XXII (“On September 1, 1939...”;), the poem came as a pure gift from a Holocaust survivor who told me her story. Ms. E (the initial is invented) was in her nineties when I was asked to interview her through my job for a not-for-profit agency that serves the elderly. I arranged to visit her apartment one evening in early summer after work. Like most of the other ladies I interviewed, she was a widow living on her own in a neat one-bedroom apartment. First we sat down at a card table where she plied me with cookies and fruit, and then I pulled out my Palm with the folding keyboard and took notes as she spoke.

Taller than average, slender, with thick white hair cut in a bang across her forehead and lively dark eyes, she expressed herself fluently in accented English. She had been widowed twice: her first husband was murdered in the Holocaust; the second was a survivor like herself. With her second husband, she had one son, who was her mainstay, and two grandchildren on whom she doted, both in college.

She proudly showed me the framed photographs of her family, starting with the grandchildren and moving backwards in time. The last photograph she showed me became part of the poem.

“No matter how many books or movies about the Holocaust one has read or seen, it is impossible to understand what it was like to survive it,” she claimed. She was born and raised in Poland, and for the duration of the war, she lived in hiding under an assumed name. “I was taught to tell the truth always,” she declared, “and it does something to your psyche to live a lie. You have to be careful to remember what you say. It’s harder than you think. Sometimes, when I think of what I survived, I can’t believe I did it.”

Her story affected me strongly. Instead of going home when I left her apartment, I went to nearby Riverside Park. It was a beautiful summer evening. I sat down on a park bench. The peaceful green park enveloped me, and the poem poured out of me—her words in my voice. When the poem was accepted by the literary journal, Earth’s Daughter’s, I asked her permission to publish it and received her blessing.

“On September 1, 1939,

when war broke out,

I locked myself in the bathroom

and wouldn’t come out.

I was crying; I knew

my world was ending.

“We had a good life in Warsaw.

My father owned a business;

we kept two servants;

my sister and I went to private schools.

“After one week the city was bombarded

from morning to night.

Warsaw was beautiful,

and it was completely destroyed.

“No one knew at first

of Hitler and Stalin’s secret pact.

Soon the city was reorganized

and the ghetto set up.

“Young Jews were going to Russia.

Before the ghetto was closed,

my fiancé and I escaped

across the green border to the East.

“It wasn’t so easy.

He was very smart at arranging things

and on the black market bought me

an original birth certificate

of a person my age

who’d been taken to Siberia.

“I spoke excellent Polish

because we’d spoken Polish at home.

He and I lived in the suburbs of a city

that was Judenrein.

I looked Jewish but he didn’t.

He had blond hair and blue eyes.

“One day he left in the morning

and didn’t come back.

I still don’t know what happened to him.

The Germans picked him up.

They killed people for nothing.

With men, it was simple,

‘Pull down your pants.’

“My parents perished

in the Warsaw Ghetto.

My sister died with her daughter

in a terrible concentration camp.

She couldn’t think like a person

after her husband died

in the Army in the short war.

“He was wounded at the front

and brought to a hospital in Warsaw.

The Germans used poisoned bullets.

His wounds weren’t mortal,

but infections developed.

“My second husband

saw his wife and daughter

killed before his eyes.

There are things you don’t talk about

or understand.

Until the end of his life

he screamed in his sleep

and I would hold him.

He was a good husband,

a good father, a good man.

“For a year and a half,

until the end of the war,

I survived on my own without means,

with no family or home.

I had a twenty dollar bill

to buy my life if I were arrested.

No one knew I existed.

I believe I was fated to live;

I don’t know why.

“Truman is my favorite president

because he let us in the U.S. after the war.

In New York I found my cousin.

She took me into her bedroom

and showed me her photo albums.

‘Take what you want,’ she said.

Can you imagine what it meant to me

to have a picture of my parents?”

Thank you for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Anne Whitehouse, Guest Blogger

Anne Whitehouse’s books include the poetry collections, BLESSINGS AND

The Book of Life

Posted on September 29, 2009 at 1:24 AM

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This has been a big holiday season for me. For some reason, in the several weeks around Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, I attended four funerals or memorial services. I sat a long time in these various services and thought about the Book of Life and about these people I knew who hadn't been written in it and what that says to me as a writer.

Ever since I began writing, I've felt an obligation to tell the stories of the people who died in my family who can no longer speak for themselves. Since my parents were both Holocaust Survivors, there were, of course, the family members who died in the war, but I also felt an obligation to tell the story of my father, who died in 1975, as well as the stories of my two grandmothers and my aunt. When writing, I can feel the pull of history and the pull of my family wanting these stories to be told.

But there I was at a service for a high school friend who died too soon of breast cancer. Besides our various reunions, we had just gotten back in touch in the last year on Facebook. I had never known such a cheery, optimistic person, and she was cheery and optimistic while in active treatment for breast cancer. I didn't know everything about her, of course, but as I sat at her service, her son read off a list of her character traits. One was that she had wanted to be a writer. Dead at 49, but she wanted to be a writer.

My first writing teacher told me one time that she didn't write poetry because she wanted to make money, she wrote it for eternity, because writing was the only immortatily she knew, short of heaven. That when we open a book by an author who's been gone 500 years, we know that's true - that words live on.

My friend can no longer write her book, but her early death and this New Year make me wonder how I can best speak for those who will never get to write their books, those who will never get to tell their stories. How can I, hopefully, not only be written in the Book of Life, but write a book that teems with life, that maybe even touches lives?

Happy New Year from JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor