Collecting Languages

After White Squares by Lee Krasner (USA) 1948 *

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

I won a Hebrew contest once,

not because I understood

the text blocks reading right to left,

            although I knew zeh meant “this”

            and ha meant “the”

but because I understood the random

algorithm of standardized testing

and that I couldn’t color in

too many D choices with my No. 2 pencil.

I won Honorable Mention

in a German Declamation contest once playing

a Hausfrau in Wolfgang Borchert’s “Die Küchenuhr,”

my hair in pink curlers, wearing my mother’s housecoat

on the Rutgers stage, the only top contestant

who did not speak German at home.

As a teen, I performed “Tri Medvedya,”

the “Three Bears,” to get eighth graders

interested in taking Russian classes

at the high school.

            Odna devoshka poshlya v lecu i zablyudilas.

            A girl went into the forest and sat down.

I took Greek classes from a Rutgers professor,

            So much based on the aleph bais of Hebrew

            Even the Russian kukla for doll

Czech lessons in Prague,

            Where I recognized from Russian

            Infinitives k’ pti to drink and plakat to cry

tried French with Rosetta Stone.

            L’éléphante est dans l’avion

The elephant is on the airplane

But it was my frustration with not knowing

my grandparents’ Yiddish that led me

to formal classes, to confront what little

I knew, what little I had absorbed,

robbed of linguistic heritage

by immigrant grandparents

who died too soon.

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.

* Editor’s note: This poem–an ekphrastic poem–was inspired by Lee Krasner’s work, White Squares. To view Krasner’s artwork, visit: https://whitney.org/collection/works/504