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“Y’minah, Y’minah,” c. 1941. Photo credit: The Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
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 set my table with metaphor:
the curling parsley—green sign nailed to the doors
of God’s underground; salt of desert and eyes;
the roasted shank bone of a Pascal lamb,
relic of sacrifice and…
Yom Kippur, when the narrow alleys of the shulhoyf
cradle the small shtibls, pious and scared,
householders hurry with their taleisim
and old men shuffle along in their socks—
I feel the narrow…