Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

in the language of silence

57 in the language of silence Ruth Kessler In memory of my mother, Blima Kluberg Traubner Not because in your language the word Holocaust does not exist you wore a noose of silence around your heart, or when you spoke the words War, Occupation, Camps, they flickered softly on your lips, muffled gunshot blazes fearing to injure me. How to collect the shards to piece up that other image concealed from me— the steel curtain of The War having slammed over your youth, your famous beauty irretrievably buried under the harrowing Siberian winter, turning all present and future tenses of your life into past continuous. To stitch your life from the drab patches of deprivation, disappointments, illness, you used such artistry of patience, graciousness and courage, the original materials were lost to the beholder’s eye. All your life having so little— having looked into the eye of the abyss, even the gray stones in life’s narrow corridor, even the chipped beads on the abacus of years, were miracles enough— your inexhaustible giving. 58 Risk, Courage, and Women Quietly, you tutored me in small lovely things: the true shape of the heart, and how to escape jealousy’s claws— that rare gift only the aristocrats of the spirit are rich enough to bestow. Your whole life flickered like the evanescent flame of this yahrzeit candle, almost imperceptibly. To be truly yours, this poem should be written in the language of silence. Reprinted from Common Intuitions Anthology(Palettes and Quills, 2005). ...