by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)
Annette.
Yes, that’s right.
Like Annette Funicello
if you are old enough to remember
the most popular Mouseketeer’s
television career.
Yes, named after my grandmother,
Hannah, or, in English, Anna.
A Jewish tradition,
naming for the dead,
so their memory and names are not lost
like forgotten pages in time.
Annette is “little Anna”
but definitely not French.
Ancestors from what is now Ukraine.
Before that Russia.
Before that Poland.
Before that a genetic mutation
hurtles me back in time
to the First Temple
in Jerusalem.
We Jews assimilate
but carry our names and histories
with us where ever troubles
and travels take us.
Our names, reflections
of double or triple identities.
In Hebrew
my name is Channah Bat Shayna
and Bat Lev.
Channah daughter of Shayna
who became Jean,
Lev who became Leo
when they crossed
the Atlantic sick in steerage.
We carry our heavy histories,
sometimes unbearable,
fastened on our backs.
I asked my mother once
why she never named me
for her sister Mae,
killed by the Nazis in Poland.
She said there were too many tears
that soaked that name.
But my new great niece
is named Paisley Mae.
A red-cheeked North Carolina baby
who carries the past
as a piece of her
like a pure white pebble
perhaps smoothed over
by the passage of time
until the rough edges
of history disappear.
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, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.
The Jewish Writing Project 