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A Jewish Wedding
Deep in fields the klezmers can be heard
Driving horses foaming at the mouth,
Relatives, both poor and rich, arrive
To Reb Sane’s daughter’s wedding feast. [ . . . ]
But from a…
How can it be told in simple, quiet words?
How can you gloss over the sharp outcry
So that people will listen to it and be silent,
With mute eyes, even without a sigh?
Without a sigh, since every…
So since we are in the midst of writing a song,
We will write also about the destruction of the holy community of Kremzir,
Even though this happened five years before,
In the year 1643, on the 9th of…
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…
…I remember a woman
who sat on the pot where the apples cooked in the cold
basement, her face black from smoke. And here, near this brick
building with a red tile roof, is one of our family, Mausha
V…
“Is it true, dear mother,What grandfather tells us?That a chalice stands in heavenBefore the throne of God?“And with each blow struck usAt the hands of cruel men,Does a tear fall in our chaliceFrom…
For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.
My mother, when she was dying…
After you, the killed of the Ukraine;After you, butcheredIn a mound in Gorodishche,The Dnieper town . . .KaddishNo! Heavenly tallow, don’t lick my gummy beards.Out of my mouth’s brown streams of…
Every day they took from us whatever their hearts desired. They said to us, “We are needed to protect you from the mob.” We had no choice but to believe them. We had to take being cheated. They…
Sky, have mercy on me!
If there be in you a God and to that God a path
and I have not found it—
you pray for me!
I—my heart’s dead and there’s no prayer left in my mouth
and no strength and no hope…