1.1 / JEWISH DIASPORA

“Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.” – Elie Wiesel When I sought out the curation of this folio, I had no idea the world was going to shift so dramatically. This has been a horrible year.

Humming What did I want? Everything in the commercials, what my parents couldn’t afford. A talking mermaid doll who lit up at night and covered the ceiling in angel fish, entire galaxies filled with fantasy, a Milky Way, a Snickers, as a child I stole so many things and never apologized once.

  It seems a former lifetime— those two-day Passovers in the Bronx, standing in the little room above Tibbett Ave fingering the dust on glass flowers as I felt the migrations of multitudes.

“Do you really need that?” my mom asked when I first tossed the tote bag into our cart during a shopping spree at Century 21. It was a plain beige canvas with five bolded words printed on the front: WE ALL HAVE EXCESS BAGGAGE The double entendre thrilled me, but my mother was less enthusiastic.

CARS “During the Gorbachev era…most people really wanted blue jeans, VCRS, and most of all cars.” — Svetlana Alexievitch   So that we can fly beyond the Urals make all the neighbors jealous. A car for half-uncles and second cousins. A car for our catalogue clippings to come to life.

25 years later, my mother’s still unsure we should have come. You’ve never really suffered, she reminds me, as though it were a flaw. You don’t know what it means to be a Jew. To be a family. She calls us broken.

  If He had split the sea for us, and had not taken us through it on dry land, it would have been enough.

After Pittsburgh, for Auntie Joyce Fienberg   They say souls of the unburied are not at rest, but martyrs go direct to heaven; is this a consolation for the mourner or the mourned? I hope, but can’t say I believe.

Corseted waists alternate with swelling breasts, their weight borne on wide-hipped bases. The twinned silver candlesticks are graceless but hold a century-old history. The pair stand voiceless as my own mother who belatedly surrendered them to me. Every Friday night Mama and I polished the hammered metal and made the blessing.

I have been riding this bus for two thousand years. This, of course, is my interpretation. The old rabbi beside me says, “We have been riding on this bus forever. Forever implies eternity.

  Trypophobia and Ars Poetica   To soothe a backache, my ex would dip a silver quarter in camphor, pull it across my shoulders until the skin bruised in stinging streaks. Scraping wind, she called it.

a Yom Kippur ghazal   With heart, soul, and strength I love. I dream—my God ladders, angels, fistfuls of copper earth—my lifesap yearns to beg. Like the fingertips of a mezuzah, a hand rises seeks alms from air, reaches upwards like flame.

  Wind through the ram’s horn. Bone-stench, a blast from the varicose canal.

Why? / And why? / And how many? / And how often? / And in what ways? / In which cities? / For how much? / And is there any way to stop it? / How few of them are left? / Can you tell me which ones? / Can you see it in their

My husband and I hike a trail in Jasper National Park, linger at lakes the color of fresh celery. The Athabasca mountains unfold across a pewter sky, brood beneath a mantle of clouds. A charm of magpies punctuate the sky.

  Amen as we gather beneath the mantle of delicatessen where the Marx Brothers held court in kippered herring barrels and I’ll have what she’s having—a Danny Rose Special with marinara and cream cheese.

  it’s been a year since he died since i scalded dishes thanked well-wishers returned to work a year and nights still conjure death-mares spin nooses from tumorous bowel loops turn doctors to jesters   a year of their cackling circling my bed until i soak sheets, compress to a fetal curl a year a year  

  A little Poland of Yiddish candlesticks, bread and honey, apple slice and omen, Lipton in a clear glass mug, indisputable as cotton slippers scratching out half-erased ceremonies from a floor that grunts like America (a Mediterranean drained of accordion and starlight) Caravans of matzoh and salt haul pads of butter in a rain of

In ghettos and in camps, was lice something that reminded them that they were alive? “Mom’s positive.” I am sitting in a lice clinic in Waukesha, Wisconsin. One wall is covered in children’s drawings of happy and oversized lice. All the lice are smiling.  The rest of the place is a sterile white.

I’ve been counting the Omer* by the way your eyes flicker into feathers before flight. Once I got to the tenth day– then you noticed me. I didn’t have the heart to keep counting. Instead I swallowed grief whole without a blessing. I didn’t have the hands to say I was sorry.

Later, in America In New Hampshire, my grandmother tried to tell a French-Canadian nurse they’d wait until the circumcision to name him. So when my father, Nathan, applied for his first passport, he discovered he officially began as Later. Funny for a man always at the airport early. His mother’s English never prospered.

My ancestors, at table, somewhere around 1928-29.

  First Miriam devised a spreadsheet. Next she typed a grocery list. Then she tore up both the spreadsheet and the grocery list and Venn-diagrammed the meal. Of course, nothing in the circles intersected. Making dinner for the New Year demanded more logistics than the Mideast talks.