by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)
After Lauren Russell
A butcher’s apron pockmarked with dried blood that banging it against the river’s rocks cannot erase. An abacus to calculate the change he owes his patrons. The skill to sever an animal’s carotid arteries, jugular veins, and windpipes in one swift move. A sharp butcher’s knife to cleanly sever a chicken’s head and to break a cow down to its finest parts to sell at a premium to anyone who can afford it. His cleaver whacks away his disappointments until his own fingers bleed with hope for his children. Evening candlelight to read the sacred texts and pray. Meetings of the Baron Hirsch School trustees. His children, even the girls, will get an education, damn the naysayers. An American stamp on his passport from when he arrived in New York with younger brother Benzion. An Austro-Hungarian Empire stamp on his passport from when he returned because Pesia was pregnant. She needed him. No photographs to fold into Chava’s hands when she leaves for America. Plans for his widowed mother’s aliyah to Palestine. The burden of this place and time. No prescience that all but two of his children–the eldest and the youngest–will be murdered. Of the four grandsons named for him, only Herman Krasner is born under the flag of the American Dream.
while the others lie
in the sky in the ashen
shadow of the moon.
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.
The Jewish Writing Project 