The Dead Prince
“…the entire heritage was lopped off… So they’re starting it all over again in Charleston. Every one of them… was an intellectual…[I]t was as if they were taking up the rabbinical heritage…but in secular terms… But nothing is known… about the family overseas at all.
– Louis D. Rubin, Jr., in an interview with the College of Charleston’s Jewish Heritage Collection, 1996
I was wandering around the marsh
when I stumbled upon a shack that looked like a ticket stall
or maybe even a fortune teller’s booth, albeit derelict.
As I stepped inside, I heard the moaning
one only hears during Kol Nidre.
I turned to find the door had become a cordgrass wall.
The spartina overtook me, well-anchored and burgeoning.
The moaning voice was seducing and primordial like lowcountry tides,
whispering words waiting to balance on my shoulder.
Close your eyes, it said. I trusted it.
When I awoke, I saw a portrait of Rabbi Yechiel Dancyger
and three men in white shirts with black hats who told me:
I am at the family home in Sokol, Poland,
we are Aleksander Chasids,
and everyone can be a tsaddik, not just the wealthy.
They draped me in a tallis smelling of sheep. I rocked from side to side,
fringes of the garment slicing back and forth like a violent metronome,
my pace the same as my father’s heavy hand on my back.
They placed a revolver in front of me, on top of two booklets:
The Song of Songs, an ICOR communist pamphlet.
I felt scared like a child in the dark, like the cordgrass would suffocate me–
its branches dead in the air waving
as if they were mocking me–and they were mocking me,
they were mocking me because I was not from this land;
suddenly I realized none of us were ever born in this country
and none of us were ever born from this ground, no,
we came from the sky and we came from the sea
but never from this ground from this ground I was possessed–
and then I knew: you either raise the salt-corroded revolver or you remember.
Kishinev and Crown Heights
Based on “Hepp-Hepp,” an 1819 contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.
‘Hepp! Hepp!’ is the hallmark of our nation:
we are the dead walking.
As the rioting grows around us, I realize that it is necessary
to be inundated and subjected to extreme scrutiny.
A nation is nothing without its mythos.
It started like it always does.
Easter 1903. It is warm and my neighbors are drinking.
“Grant a Jew free reign, and he will reign over our Holy Russia, will take things
into his own paws.”
Leaflets cover the street and the plink of rocks thrown echoes throughout Chuflinskii Square.
‘It seems like you haven’t slept with a Gentile yet. Now you will know the taste of one.’
Don’t touch me. You have known me for many years. I have no money.
We hear the shrieks of the girls for a short time and then everything is quiet.
I apply for divorce.
“Schneerson’s automobile crossed Utica Avenue on a green light and proceeded along President Street at a normal speed, but Lifsh’s vehicle had fallen behind. Not wishing to lose sight of Schneerson’s car, Lifsh crossed Utica Avenue on a red light… Lifsh’s vehicle struck a car on Utica Avenue, veered onto the sidewalk… pinning two children against an iron grate. Seven-year-old Gavin Cato, the son of Guyanese immigrants, who was working on his bicycle chain, died instantly. His seven-year-old cousin Angela Cato, who was playing nearby, survived but was severely injured.”
“We respect the right and the obligation of the American government to prosecute us and send us to jail. No one gripes about that…” The problem is that they have not given the young Jew any reason to feel Jewish.
Charles Price shouted “Let’s go get a Jew!”
August 1991. It is warm and my neighbors are sober.
To the Man Who Went Into Shiva After His Daughter Married a Catholic Boy
“Then, when God asks him, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ he arrogantly responds, ‘I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ In essence, the entire Bible is written as an affirmative response to this question.”
– Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
I woke up hearing the screen door banging over and over.
The Alter of Novarodok once had himself sealed in a brick room for two years,
with no door or exit. Sh’ma is to listen, to hear, to lead, to do.
Only in silence is it possible to hear.
‘Aren’t shiksas for practice?’ I ask my brother, but he could not hear me.
“Then I say to the young man, ‘Open the holy Ark.’
He may ask, ‘Rabbi, now?’ and I answer, ‘Yes, now.’ After he opens the Ark, I ask him to take out the Torah scroll. Again he may ask, ‘Right now?’ and I answer ,’Yes, now.” Then I tell him emphatically, ‘Throw the Torah on the floor! Stamp on it and spit on it!!’
I was back in Krakow and I saw claw marks from those trying to escape.
I had never felt a sense like this, I was not in control of myself, my body told me
Leave now! Run now! Do anything but stay here!
But I could not hear it anymore, I was stuck,
my tallis covered my forehead and fell down to my shins,
I rocked from side to side,
The fringes slicing back and forth like a violent metronome,
My pace the same as my father’s heavy hand on my back,
But I was always one word behind the chazzan.
Nobody could hear me anymore, not even Zhitlowsky or Yehuda Al-Harizi,
And especially not my brother, not because of his choice but because of Sache Petreanu,
Because it was something I had never felt before and have never felt since then
I knew that I was not me but rather my great grandfather whose name I do not know
but whose blood runs through my veins because I am one of them I am always and will be
one of them
even though I do not live the same life as them I know that, you don’t have to tell me,
and I shouted Yes, I am his keeper!
