After the Fall: Poems Old and New

From Poland

From Poland “After soulless Germany,” my sister writes, “to be in an absolutely soulful land . . . the zloty not buying much even if there were anything to buy . . . the bureaucracy frightening, but everyone used to it, patiently standing on line . . . sweet and helpful and unspoiled.” Reading that, I think I could live there on bread and potatoes. Ma said that from Lamaz, her village, Warsaw was a two-day trip by horse and wagon. My sister writes that now “it’s an hour by superhighway. . . . “Some old houses are still there. . . . a countrywoman came out of one, we just stood staring at each other, me in western clothes, my passport full of border stamps. . . . her daughter in the background wearing torn leggings and a quilted vest. Inside, just a little room with a porcelain stove in the corner and a bunk on each wall. . . . onion skins on the floor of boards and dirt— cozy enough to move into at once.” Ma always said her brother, Jake, the favorite, got to sleep on top of the stove. She slept in the rafters with the chickens and the barrel of herring and sack of groats to last the winter. They called her little pig, she was so fat, 139 too slow for blackberrying when her sister went at dawn— Esther yelled at her for trying to follow, Esther, the smart one, who learned to read and write and kept in touch with their father in America. He was a tinsmith and when he worked on the church roof drank with the priest. But then, he was half-goy, the child of his mother’s love affair with a Polish landowner. Ma told it proudly, the old scandal, but lowered her voice to explain why she herself was always taken for Christian. Grandma was from prosperous Jews with a farm who never approved of the big, fair-haired tinsmith, so they eloped to poor little Lamaz, where people lined up to read the only newspaper. “I kept my father’s photograph until we got to America,” Ma said, “and I was so happy to see him at the dock, but when I picked up a pretty candy box in the gutter in wonder at such a treasure being thrown away, he smacked me across the face and called me dumbbell. That night I tore his picture up. I was only happy in Lamaz.” “Did I ever tell you,” she tells me again, “how the milk turned sour in the pail and we drank it that way?” “There were no demands on me there,” she says, an old woman in Florida now, her children grown and gone. “I didn’t have to do anything. I could sit eating my bowl of kasha all day long.” My sister writes: “We asked the oldest people in town about the Jews. . . . None left, they told me, vaguely, the Nazi time was the end of them, and showed me where the Jewish cemetery had been, a grassy area with trees, fenced in.” 140 ...