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.
