Uncle Isidore
Dannie Abse
1976
When I observe a toothless ex-violinist,
with more hair than face, sprawled like Karl Marx
on a park seat or slumped, dead or asleep,
in the central heat of a public library
I think of Uncle Isidore—smelly
schnorrer and lemon-tea bolshevik—my foreign
distant relative, not always distant.
Before Auschwitz, Treblinka, he seemed near,
those days of…
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