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Without Jews, no Jewish God.
If, God forbid, we should quit
this world, Your poor tent’s light
would out.
Abraham knew You in a cloud:
since then, You are the flame
of our face, the rays
our eyes…
I weep for you with all the letters of the alphabet
that made your hopeful songs. I saw how reason spent
itself in vain for hope, how you strove against regret—
and all the while your hearts were…
[…] I want to tell you about my brother’s ghost.
I had so looked forward to seeing him again: my Schorschi, my Czech brother, who had sent us a few postcards from Theresienstadt. But he wasn’t there…
At three in the morning, Rabbi Sholem Tuvim returned home from visiting his sick father. His father was in great need of comfort, and he, Reb Sholem, would have stayed by him the entire night if the…
In a dingy kitchen
Facing a Ghetto backyard
An old woman is chanting Jeremiah’s Lamentations,
Quaveringly,
Out of a Hebrew Bible.
The gaslight flares and falls . . .
This night,
Two thousand…
I always thought
I had been here before.
Each year of my patched-up life
I mended the fabrics
of my decrepit, tattered world.
In memory I recognized faces and smiles,
even my father and mother…
They went down in the elevator, the grey woman and Mr. Sammler, and through lower passages paved in speckled material, through tunnels, up and down ramps, past laboratories and supply rooms. Well…
When I crossed the ocean, I carried with me the habit of speaking to the shadows, and it became my way of life. I look up at the stars that were extinguished long ago. For me they still shine with the…
O mother
what have I left out
O mother
what have I forgotten
O mother
farewell
with a long black shoe
farewell
with Communist Party and a broken stocking
farewell
with six dark hairs on the wen of…
Meanwhile Joy was telling me things about her life that I’d never known as a single-minded kid searching the neighborhood for a grape to burst—Joy was tossing into this agitated pot of memory called…