Category Archives: poetry

By Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

We were Jewish when I was growing up,

American-style, New York-style Jewish,

the way our nearby kosher deli was kosher

but not kosher enough to be patronized by

the more religious Chasidim.

We patronized our local Temple Beth-El annually

on the High Holy days and smiled at all the strangers

in the fully seated congregation, pretended to

listen to the Hebrew prayers, imitated davening

with the others and nodded greetings of the day

when we all left to comfortably return to our

secular homes and apartments.

We knew that we were Jewish by the way we rooted

for the new-born state of Israel to survive the cold-

blooded attacks on its inchoate survival, by the way 

our friends celebrated holidays that others didn’t recognize, 

by the pride we felt when we noted the success of Uncle Miltie, 

the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers and Danny Kaye, 

Red Buttons, Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas — and rooted 

hard for Sandy Koufax (even as we privately kvelled 

in the memory of the grand accomplishments of the player 

and the man named Hank Greenberg, who, I later found out, 

had attended the same high school as I did).

My father didn’t make a big deal about religion,

never spoke about his European youth, and called me

Chaim (never once using my American name).

It wasn’t till my own old age (sixty years after he

found his forever home in Jewish Heaven)

that the wisdom came to me to comprehend

my Jewish-Yiddish name.

He had escaped the hell of his Polish ghetto and

had married a Latvian beauty of a similar escape and,

after they thought they were done filling our home

with loving girls, ten years later, I appeared, a son, 

to be loved without condition, a son who somehow 

represented life, a promise of the continuation, 

not so much of our Jewishness but of our name 

and our mystical — more than mythical — connection 

to Moses and David and our new heroes of the decade 

of my birth, with names like Herzl, Ben-Gurion, 

Eban, Dayan, Allon and Meir.

We Jews know well how to survive and thrive.

We understand the holiness and the value and vitality of life.

Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.