Mehitzah
- Mehitzah
It's long and unfamiliar,
the road of returning to myself.—Angela Hernández Núñez
I work at making it real, asphalt with concrete curbs. Sometimes I imagine my great- grandparents standing by the side. His face is hidden by his black beard. Hers is in shadow. A burning yahrtzeit candle sits on a shelf in a kitchen miles away. I walk past the blank-faced houses, the stories of pogroms and wars, the family history no one ever told me.
Walking is our word for a life well-lived. My hands know more than I do, touching old wine cups, prayer shawls, braided bread, even when I resist. I will not cover my hair. I will not accept the mehitzah, the seat in the balcony behind a screen. A pair of candle flames glows through the window where a family sits for Shabbat. No one has imagined my life, a woman with no family to cook for, [End Page 85] no children to bless. This is not a complaint.
A little at a time I begin to read the old language, though it is still an iron grate, a bricked-up window. When I put my ear to the wall, I hear men's voices, a sobbing sound. Dogs bark behind me on the road.
Judith Kerman has published eight books or chapbooks of poetry, most recently Galvanic Response (2005) and the bilingual collection Plane Surfaces/ Plano de Incidencia (2002). Her book of translations A Woman in Her Garden: Selected Poems of Dulce María Loynaz was published by White Pine Press in 2002. She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to the Dominican Republic in 2002, translating the poetry and fiction of contemporary Dominican women.
