Birthright

by Lori Rottenberg (Arlington, VA)

For my grandmother, Margot Butterfass Rottenberg (1912-1996), and her father, Shaya ‘Max’ Butterfass (1872-1932)

The past is not decent or orderly, it is made-up and devious. 

—Robert Pinsky, “Gulf Music” 

A diamond horseshoe  

to pin the cravat of a man    

smart and squat, grand liar   

and survivor, continental pinball— 

gold to fix him   

to some ground  

after so many homes   

passed beneath his feet.  

Warsaw, New York, London, 

Berlin—Max decided  

truths carved on forms would be  

chiseled by him alone:  

Birthdays, dates, names, 

sworn oaths to bureaucrats  

whose countries didn’t want him— 

interchangeable as the chickens he raised.

 

What mattered were the chances 

he forged from an alchemy of blood:  

escaping pogroms, documents that unlocked  

borders like keys, wealth he could wear. 

***     

My grandmother transformed  

Max’s bit of glittering luck caught   

in the Weimar sun, turned tietack to ring  

after he died. She carried him  

on her pinky to America,  

sailing on the paper boat  

of citizenship that was his  

legacy. She wore him  

for 60 more years, married  

another hard man who bent  

only for her. The ring  

became promise—for me,  

granddaughter made daughter—  

while she lived, piecing  

a new life, joining  

family to family.  

She offered me everything   

else before dying but  

could not let go of her father’s   

sparkling horseshoe.  

When I die you will have it.   

This was a lie.   

It disappeared where I was not  

but should have been: at her side. 

 

*** 

Now without the light  

from her twinkling ring, reminder   

of the man who birthed my future,   

I pull strings of truth from tangled memory.

Almost as old as Max would live to be, 

I am bloodbound to tend his words,  

to pick the paper bones of his life:  

all that remains of my birthright.   

I am the one supposed to know,   

the one to smith our story into words   

that will last like gold, like diamonds.   

Max’s horseshoe can’t help me   

tell truth from lie—all   

I see is history’s churn,   

countries changing every generation,  

life’s work scattered; the ring’s one   

more thing lost in the journey.   

But its luck is my life, my great wealth  

the pinky it graced: an estate  

I will claim the rest of my days.

Lori Rottenberg is a writer living in Arlington, Virginia who has published poetry in many journals and anthologies. Her most recent work on her Jewish family history will be appearing in 2023 in Minyan Magazine and Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters. Through the 2021 Arlington Moving Words competition, one of her poems was chosen to appear on county buses, and she served as a visiting poet in Arlington Public Schools for over a decade. She works at George Mason University, where she teaches writing to international students and poetry to students in the Honors College. She is in her third year of studies at the George Mason University MFA Poetry program. For more information, please see  https://lrottenberg.weebly.com/ or https://yetzirahpoets.org/bios/lori-rottenberg/.