Lessons learned at the dinner table

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

I was raised to anticipate catastrophe.
Our kitchen table overflowed
with piles of food, dinners began
with appetizers, a half-cantaloupe,

or half yellow grapefruit,
a bowl of chicken soup
packed with carrots, celery and meat,
schnitzel, potatoes, green beans as main course,

apple cinnamon coffee cake for dessert.
I was fattened up before the next famine
could start.  Maybe tomorrow?
My mother’s hands always busy cooking,

teaching me I would never starve,
like she had in Poland, not here in America.
Every night after dinner,
my mother and I watched T.V. news.

Her blue owl eyes on constant alert,
muttering under shallow breaths,
“Is this bad for the Jews?”,
worried we’d be removed from

another promised land once again.
I was raised to know that within every
celebration lived a kernel of catastrophe,
like the fragile glass required to be broken

at the end of a joyous wedding,
reminding us of bitter disasters in the past.
I was raised with my mother’s fears tangled
around my unripe heart, my small hands,

afraid to untie the red ribbon of my future
already anticipating the catastrophe
coiled within the sparkling tissue paper,
waiting to be awakened, waiting to strike.

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, The San Diego Poetry Annual, The Jewish Writing Project, and the Paterson Literary Review. In August 2025, Annette along with artist Judy Langhoff published a book of ekphrastic poetry and paintings titled Pen and Brush: In Contemplation. She was honored to be chosen for third prize for her poem, “The Salvation of Books, Newark, N.J., 1959” in the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.

The Torah Ark

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

After Untitled by Mark Rothko (US, b. Russia), 1948

It’s been a long time since I saw the bima, the Torah ark,

block Hebrew lettering in the sanctuary.

It’s been a long time since I held a siddur,

shuffled along the pew to find a seat.

It’s been a long time since I marveled

at stained glass windows, at the reverence

with which the rabbi held the Torah,

the finials gleaming in the light,

the reverence we all had for the Torah,

tallit tsissis or our fingers touching, kissing

our past, present, and future.

It’s been a long time since I sat

in the sanctuary. But I think the Torah,

the rituals, the millennia-old traditions

will restore color to my life

as only Rothko could paint.

Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet whose work has appeared in more than seventy journals, including the Jewish Writing Project, Minyan Magazine, Jewish Literary Journal, Vita Poetica, and Of the Book. Recent books include Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (dancing girl press), The Wanderers: Poems (Shanti Arts), and the forthcoming Memory Collector (Kelsay Books).

Eli, Eli

by Judith R. Robinson (Pittsburgh, PA)

eleven tolling 

orchestral bells 

as Elgar tries 

with eloquence

to grieve like a Jew

but the cello cries out

O God not again

as I do each New Year

for Akiva for Masada 

for the executed 

piled deep in pits

at Belarus and Rawa Ruska

for Chelm, Lelow, for Telz,

for the hundreds of shtetls

for Sobibor for Belzec

for the dozens of camps

my people incinerated ghosts

ash in the soil of Europe

O God, now for Pittsburgh

my city in America

for friends I knew

the freshest blood

for the Rosenthal boys

for the other innocents 

the eleven souls praying 

in the synagogue

for the eleven new dead.

*dedicated to the victims of the Tree of Life massacre, October 27, 2018

Judith R. Robinson is an editor, teacher, fiction writer, poet and visual artist. A summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, she is listed in the Directory of American Poets and Writers. She has published 100+ poems, five poetry collections, one fiction collection; one novel; edited or co-edited eleven poetry collections. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website: www.judithrrobinson.com 

Author’s note: The poem (and the painting which inspired the poem) are part of the permanent collection of the Rauh Jewish Archives at The John J. Heinz History Center of Pittsburgh. PA. Regarding the reference to Elgar, he was Sir Edward Elgar, a British composer who wrote some very moving, very sad music, such as the Cello Concerto in A minor, which is considered a masterful expression of grief, hence my reference to him as “grieving like a Jew.” Here’s a link to the Center if you’d like to browse through its collection: https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/research/rauh-jewish-history-program-archives/

The Calling, a Triptych

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

I.

I can still see the cardboard box my father brought to me when he cleaned out his father’s house in late 1969 after my grandfather’s death at ninety-three. I can still see the curled edges of sepia photographs, fading penciled names and places in Yiddish or Cyrillic or German or Polish. I couldn’t read any of those languages then. I can now. I can still see myself on our playroom sofa rifling through the box. Saying to my father, I don’t know who any of these people are. He stashed the box in the basement boiler room.

II.

It has been thirty-five years since I visited his house looking for that box. He turned to me and said, The boiler burst and the room flooded. I felt sick, nauseated, that all that history was gone. My grandfather, being the last of his generation to pass, held onto these artifacts. Irreplaceable. 

I miss the way my father and I talked about his family’s history on the way home from monthly Jewish Genealogical Society meetings. How I could tease out his passive knowledge by offering a bit of what I knew. I am the only person in the family now who knows where our grandparents are buried. The only one who’d been there, placed stones on their graves in remembrance, honoring their memories.

III.

How lucky it was my father and I had that time together. How lucky it was his mother came to America in 1913, before the Great War that drove her family into safety’s diaspora. Before Soviet occupation drove her brother to a Siberian labor camp and Nazi occupation carried the others away, never to return. How lucky it is, dear ancestors, that I am the one you’ve tasked with remembering.

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD in Holocaust & Genocide Studies (HGS) from Gratz College, where she teaches in the HGS graduate programs. The author of two poetry chapbooks and three novels in verse, her work has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, Tiferet, Minyan, Jewishfiction.net, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She serves as Director, Mercer County (NJ) Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center.

At Sixteen

by Annette Friend

I tell my mother
my honest truth
edged with blades

from a teenage
tongue that knows
only a pinch of the life

my mother suffered.
I am blinded by
my good fortune,

sheltered behind the veil
of my birth here in America
not the streets of the shtetel

in Poland where she grew up,
facing famines and pogroms,
the horrors of World War I,

Russian soldiers pillaging
her small village, friends, family,
when they invaded.

I listen, but don’t hear
the sad stories she tells me,
surrounded by the glow of America

even if the streets she found
weren’t paved with gold.
I scream, I will date whom I choose,

a handsome Italian-Catholic boy
who looks like Paul McCartney
What does my mother know?

This is a new world.
I cut her to the quick
with my sharp knifed words,

standing here well-fed
and clothed in freedom,
instead of buried

in an unmarked green grave
of the Poland she left
now almost Judenfrei

free of Jews as Hitler wanted,
only because of her courage
to book passage in steerage

at sixteen.

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, The San Diego Poetry Annual, The Jewish Writing Project, and the Paterson Literary Review. In August 2025, Annette along with artist Judy Langhoff published a book of ekphrastic poetry and paintings titled Pen and Brush: In Contemplation. She was honored to be chosen for third prize for her poem, “The Salvation of Books, Newark, N.J., 1959” in the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.