Halvard Johnson wrote:
> Some Anthropology
>  
> ....I sometimes
> think about my lost tribe of Jews, American Jews, also part hoax and part
> invention, whose preserve is sheltered under brick where limousines hum
> and one hears the faint, familiar babble of the homeless.
If there is such a thing as a single fact, then the pattern is 
invented.  Big news. This is elsewhere, but for me bears repetition.

MAYBE I WASN'T LISTENING
(out of Barry Levinson's "Avalon")

Life, so we hear, is a journey, not a race,
but we all of us lost anyway.

My mother's father dies six months after I am born.
Allegedly (hold that word) he looks at me and, pre-emtombed
in his own eternal silence, nods to suggest approval.

How to disapprove of a baby unless its future is visible to the doomed?
Maybe he has the caul.
Maybe I am the family basilisk.

I am born in my parents' middle age.
They are both liars.
They say they are Jews, but
rage and adultery are their faiths
and their only God is to curse their thwartedness.

I am an only child: maybe this is good.
The damage is minimized.
One misused child is a dysfunctional family,
more than one is a State-subsidized madhouse.

But I am surrounded by endless cousins
older aunts and uncles,
substitute zaydes and bubbes.

I remember the smells of cooking
in Aunt Esther's kitchen on Marion Avenue.
My mother's oldest sister, first of six,
owns a brass samovar, bakes a Friday challeh
I can smell to this day, owns a huge record player
where I listen to Rodzinski conduct the Cleveland
in Tchaikovsky's Fifth.

But they do not talk, not in front of Kenny,
nor in front of Inez, or Toby or Bernard or any of my other cousins.
Sha! Yiddish! No, they might learn, go outside!

Maybe there were legends told, stories repeated down the years.
Maybe I missed them if only because there was nobody to tell them to me
and everything I've woven about me (this included)
is a cloak of fables and lies.
The poet is born in the land of liars.

Maybe I missed them because I wasn't paying attention
because I'd learned the art of Self-Pity early, and it shut out
everything else:

The Family Circle meetings, shots of J&B (aka, Jewish Booze)
oiling the conversation until it started to get nasty.

There were the brothers--Julius and Morty--
sons of my mother's second sister Rose and her husband Aaron,
brothers who would not speak for 10 years,
self-inflicted victims of a business deal gone bad.

Legend: Rose as a girl, age 3, still in Russia
pulled off the street by a neighbor because it was Good Friday
and the Cossacks were having their annual pogrom.

Truth: half-awake in Rose's sewing room, I hear the adults talk,
it is 1953, it is all about a family in the neighborhood,
Rosenberg, they are in all the papers, dead or going to die,
and the children, they weep over the Poor Little Orphans
and I start crying because they are children without even bad parents,
and--a wonder--my father is furious, and it is not at me.

Recall Miller's Salesman:
Nobody ever told the truth for one second in this house!
Not always: but you had to hear it by accident.

Aunt Esther stops cooking, gets lost on subways.
Yasha her husband, she married him in 1907, is dead.
She is dying in a Five Towns nursing home
where her oldest child, her firstborn son,
pays the bills but never comes, and where every male
from me to the Puerto Rican busboy
gets the same question: "Bist du Al?"

That is supposed to break your heart.
It breaks mine now.
If I'd been awake then mine might have broken.
Or maybe it did because that was 1962 and I
remember it to this day.

But what did I not hear?

KTW/9-20-05

--------------------
Ken Wolman				rainermaria.typepad.com

We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...

			Bernstein/Wilbur, "Candide"