After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Being Jewish

Being Jewish My mother’s family was made up of loving women. They were, on the whole, bearers, though Esther, the rich sister, had only one, she was the exception. Sarah, the oldest, had five with her first husband (that was still in Poland), was widowed and came here, where she married a man with four of his own, and together they had another five, all of whom she raised, feeding them in relays, except little Tillie, who sat in the kitchen and ate with everyone, meaning all the time, resulting in a fat figure that made her despair of ever finding a husband, but miraculously she did, for God has decreed there is someone for everyone, if you’re desperate enough and will take what you can get. Aunt Rachel had twelve, raising them in a stable. She was married to a junk dealer who kept horses to haul the wagons. He was famous for his stinginess, so they lived in a shack surrounded by bales of hay. That was in America, in a slum called Bronzeville that the black people have now inherited from the Jews, God help them. Then, as now, plenty of kids turned out bad, going to work for that Jewish firm, Murder Incorporated, or becoming junkies like one of my cousins did. My mother only had six 117 but that’s not counting. . . I’ll say no more than she was always pregnant, with a fatalistic “What can you do?” (“Plenty,” her friend Blanche replied—she was liberated. “You don’t have to breed like a rabbit.”) Like her mother who had a baby a year in Poland until Grandpa left for America, giving her a rest. There were women who kept bearing even then, mysteriously, as from habit. Women were always tired in those days and no wonder, with the broken-down bodies they had and their guts collapsed, for with every child they got a dragging down. My mother finally had hers tied back up in the hospital, and at the same time they tied those over-fertile tubes, which freed her from “God’s terrible curse on women.” And not just the bearing, but the work: the pots couldn’t be big enough for those hungry broods— Sarah used hospital pots for hers. And then the problem of filling the pots, getting up at dawn to go to the fishing boats for huge fish carcasses cheap, buying bushels of half-spoiled vegetables for pennies, begging the butcher for bones, and then lugging it all home on their bad legs. They didn’t think of their looks for a minute, and better they didn’t, shapeless as that life made them. (And yet they remained attractive to their men, by the evidence of their repeated pregnancies.) They just went around wrecks, always depressed, unable to cope, or hiding in bed while the children screamed. 118 “Escape, escape, there must be escape” was my mother’s theme song, until at last her children escaped from her and her misery, having wrecked her life, that endless sacrifice, for what? I see the proletarian women like them on the streets, cows with udders to the waist lugging black oilcloth shopping bags, the mamales, the mamacitas, the mammies, the breeders of the world with loving eyes. They sit around the kitchen table with full hearts, telling each other their troubles— never enough money, the beasts their men were to them, how Leo hit Esther in the face on the street, the sorrow life was for a woman, a mother, the children turning out no good— and fed each other pieces of leftover meat from the icebox to make up a little for life’s pain and sighing, drank tea and ate good bread and butter. 119 ...