Tag Archives: post-Holocaust

March 10, 2025 · 6:30 am

My Mother Museum

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI) 

First Gallery

My father lost her cookbook after multiple moves, the black-and-white student’s notebook in which she wrote down her favorite recipes in bold, foreign-looking script. It was the one possession of hers I wanted most after she died.  I relished watching her cook with the ease and flair of a professional chef in our dimly-lit Washington Heights kitchen with a view of another Depression-era apartment building across the street.  Same gold and brown bricks, with an equally ridiculously English name like The Windermere in a neighborhood that had been filled with German-Jewish refugees and was slowly becoming Hispanic.  But the book was unique, my mother as curator.

Second Gallery

The small cameo brooch of a woman in profile must be fifty years old or more but looks brand new because she never wore it.  A friend brought it back for her from Italy is all I remember her saying.  But who?  Was it the Polish man I heard about from a family friend after she died, the man she “should have married,” a socialist from Vilnius like her instead of my born-on-a-farm father?  Why did she keep it if she never put it on/why did she never put it on?  What did it mean to her?  I’m asking these questions too late.  It nestles in its white cardboard box lined with cotton, untouched, pristine, a buoy in a mysterious sea.  

Third Gallery

The cream-colored enameled compact weighs over half a pound, is embossed with leaves and a bird in flight.  Embossed in gold and made in France: modèle déposé, registered design.  There’s room for a lipstick, there’s a mirror inside on the left, there’s a lidded compartment for face powder on the right.  It’s an object out of a film noir, the kind of thing a lustrous femme fatale would use with magical, elegant hands to make herself up while people stared at her effrontery, her chic.  Oh, she was definitely chic.  One of her students from Belgium said “Elle avait du chien“: French for desirable, intelligent, and strong.  I see that in some photos from the late 40s.  By the 50s the look has disappeared and she’s an American housewife.

Fourth Gallery

Hanging in her closet in a plastic dry cleaner’s bag like any ordinary dress was the slave labor camp dress she was wearing when freed by Americans in eastern Germany, April 15, 1945.  Dark gray strips that seem almost purple on light gray stripes.  Thin, grim cotton with a roughly-sewn beige number patch above her heart.  The number helped me access German records of her incarceration in ghettos and camps.  Was this relic kept as evidence that she might not have survived if WWII had lasted longer?  That the crimes she endured were real?  It won’t tell me.  Can you really call it a “dress” or even a “uniform”?  Reality seems too big for such small words, for the bomb lurking there day after day. 

Last Gallery

This particular lined notebook has not been lost, but I wish it had been.  Black-and-white exterior, starker still inside: a record of her deepening dementia caused by years of chain smoking.  Here, instructions are repeated about when to take which pill.  Bits of news randomly copied from the New York Times.  Worst of all, grotesque, are the definitions of “Memory” she transcribed from a dictionary.  Remember, Remember, Remember says every miserable page.   The desperate lament of a mind drifting out to sea, the words of a voluble, witty, multi-lingual woman ordered at first, then scrambled, finally misspelled, broken, gone.  I want to destroy it but I can’t—it’s her anguished Last Will and Testament.

Gift Shop

CLOSED

Lev Raphael is an American pioneer in writing about the Second Generation, a project that he began in the late 1970s.  He’s the author of Writing a Jewish Life, Dancing on Tisha B’av, My Germany and 24 other books in many genres.  His work has appeared in fifteen languages and he’s done invited talks and readings in Israel, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, Canada and all across the US.  Venues included the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Oxford University, and The LIbrary of Congress. Lev taught creative writing at Michigan State University and Regents College in London, and has been invited to teach at Leipzig University in Germany.  Michigan State University has purchased his literary papers and they are available to students and scholars for research.

The piece first appeared in The Chaffin Review and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

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February 10, 2025 · 7:30 am

I Cannot Scrub Your Blood from My Bones

by Barbara Krasner (Somerset, NJ)

Deep within my marrow

flows my DNA, your blood,

your ambitions, your regrets,

your aches, your pains, your nightmares.

Deep within my memory

I call up your shtetl, its fields,

thatched roofs, unnamed streets.

Bold numbers nailed to door jambs,

revealing the town plan. Deep within

this hiccup murmurs your Galician dialect

of southeastern Poland, the bleats 

of goats, the shofar during High Holy Days.

Deep within the walls of the stucco homes

childbirth cries. Deep within

the burrows of the streets resounds the beat

of hobnailed boots and rapid gunfire.

You weren’t there during the invasions.

You weren’t there for mobile killing squads.

You weren’t there during deportations.

But you experienced it all the same,

just as I did. 

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.

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January 27, 2025 · 7:30 am

An Odyssey to Auschwitz

 by Cara Erdheim Kilgallen (Trumbull, CT)

I entered the gruesome gates of Auschwitz on a recent journey to Poland with my parents and husband.  Half-way through our guided tour, my stoic husband Bill turned to me and said, “I feel like throwing up.”  

The humid June air did not help our collective nausea.  As the sun beat down upon our shoulders, the four of us toured two of the darkest death camps from history and witnessed true Holocaust horror.

As a Jew with family members who perished in the Shoah, I had always felt determined to visit Auschwitz.  My eighty-three-year-old Dad, a Jewish former Marine who proudly wears a Star of David that says, “never again,” came along.  So did my mom, a seventy-seven-year-old dynamo who has worked as a psychoanalyst with Holocaust victims and their children.  Bill, my Catholic husband, wanted to experience history and planned the entire trip.  It had been on our bucket list for sure.

We began with Auschwitz, designed initially as barracks for the Polish Army, and then moved onto the darkest death and extermination site, Birkenau.  The structures at Auschwitz still stood, but they somehow didn’t feel real and the buildings almost resembled college dorms from the outside.  When I walked inside, the death site became more palpable.  Hairbrushes, belts, shirts, toothbrushes, and other discarded items from various victims highlighted the utter inhumanity of it all.  We began the brief bus ride to Birkenau, the neighboring camp, which was worse.

“Brace yourselves,” warned our guide Chris.  This next site will be tougher to take.”

“More difficult than this?” I asked incredulously while thinking about the gas showers we had just seen.

“Sadly, yes,” Chris responded.

Birkenau, the adjoining death camp to Auschwitz, made us all even sicker.  

As Bill and I stood in shock staring at the piles of wood upon which victims slept, Chris explained how those on the top bunks often bled onto those below.  The prisoners slept in old horse barns, each one of them containing hundreds of innocent human beings.  I wondered if they received blankets in winter and learned that groups of twelve or so sleepers were sometimes allowed one small sheet.  We stood inside these cramped quarters, which smelled like death.

My shock and sorrow manifested in an intense back pain that I had never felt before.  There was no place to sit on our three hour walk through dark dungeons and barren barracks.  Feeling too guilty to rest amidst all of the documented human suffering that we witnessed, I tried to stretch out my back as the tour guide led us into a room filled with children’s shoes displayed in a large case secure behind a glass wall.

Until this point, I had not cried at all, perhaps out of sheer shock; however, as the mother of a toddler, I could not contain myself at this point and my eyes filled with tears.  I thought instantly about my daughter, back home in the United States with excellent caregivers, and juxtaposed this privilege against the extreme evils.  The Nazis robbed every ounce of innocence from these young lives, for no reason other than their difference, which most often was their Jewish identity.  

We learned about the pride that those running the camp took in exterminating as many victims as possible.  Chris told us that the Nazis viewed destruction as economic productivity and recorded their killings with precise record keeping.  Furthermore, so many corporations profited from this loss.  Human hair from the deceased was used for clothing, and gold teeth were removed from mouths of the dead.  

Survivor and author Eli Wiesel has written and spoken poetically about the overwhelming silence at Auschwitz.  I felt this quiet all throughout our visit, and my normally inquisitive self held most of my questions until the end.

“As we conclude our journey today, I would like to leave space and time for questions,” Chris kindly offered as though he sensed my overwhelming curiosity and that of my mother the psychologist.  

“Have you encountered any Holocaust denial in any of your visitors?” My Mom jumped in almost immediately.

“Just once,” Chris responded.  “A man on one of my tours questioned why a picture contained no chimney smoke and claimed that this absence meant no gas chambers.  I countered him immediately with the truth that this very photo had documented a factory in Krakow, not the death camp, which contained countless ashes and human remains as evidence.”

I marveled at Chris’s calmness, intelligence, and sensitivity.  He explained that he and his wife had met giving tours at Auschwitz and felt more determined than ever to educate their young children on these historic atrocities.

“Although it would have made our commute to work easier, we stopped short of moving closely to the camps,” Chris emphasized when I remarked about the tennis courts down the road.  “We want them to be Holocaust aware, but having our home on site was too close for comfort.”

“Of course,” we all responded, and then discussed the clear contrast between Chris’ humane response with that of the Nazi Commander who chose to live and raise his family, children playing in the yard and all, on top of the gas chambers.

My family and I left the site of Holocaust horror, and immediately saw a woman run to the bathroom to vomit.  The one silver lining was that others had felt touched and moved by this experience.  They recognized and respected the most profoundly painful parts of human history.

How could I not have journeyed here before?  Why did it take my Catholic husband to plan such a trip for my Jewish parents and me?  My Mother had travelled with a friend twenty-five years ago to Auschwitz, but she has always felt determined to return with family.  

Bill, who had felt profoundly moved by reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at his Catholic high school, made it happen.  A survivor of multiple concentration camps, Frankl founded Logotherapy after his entire family perished in the Holocaust; he spent his life empowering others to discover purpose within their own lives. 

My intergenerational Odyssey to Auschwitz and Birkenau has strengthened an interfaith marriage, solidified firm family bonds, and made each moment of life feel all the more meaningful and precious.

Cara Erdheim Kilgallen is a mother, an author, an academic, an athlete, and a professor who truly treasures family and friendship.  She is dedicated to teaching literature and writing, as well as a lifelong ice skater and someone who is deeply passionate about sport (particularly tennis and golf).  Raised culturally Jewish, Cara deeply values her roots and embraces Judaism as foundational to the Judeo-Christian tradition and beyond.  She hopes for more interfaith and intercultural dialogue.  Cara hopes that through Jewish storytelling, this piece speaks to the horrors of all human suffering, which the world sadly has far too much of at present.

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January 6, 2025 · 7:30 am

I Heard My Grandparents’ Voices

By Esther Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

My grandparents stared from the portrait

Hanging on the wall — dead eyes, expressionless

I used to fantasize that they were somewhere 

Still out in the world, lost, but rescued at the

End of the war, not murdered horrifically, lost in

The mingled ashes at the hell that was Auschwitz

I dreamt that they were survivors who would

Miraculously be found so we could be reunited

Leave it alone! My hope was the naivete of a child

And then the discovery more than half a century later,

My mother’s papers:

Letters from Vienna during the war from

My grandparents to their children and a brother and 

Two sisters caring for my mother’s 

Mother — a tragic figure old and lost

My great-grandmother, an invalid with no words

She couldn’t speak English and I am

Not sure she even knew where she was

From my mother’s closet, several letters from

Her parents, hidden from us in her lifetime

Being read at our behest

In the vocally halting translation by a woman who

Struggled to decode the high German no longer in use

I heard the voices of my grandparents trying to

Encourage the Jewish children they had sent to the safety

Of loving arms in America

They spoke, sending regards to other relatives and friends

I knew well

Having grown up with — making my family suddenly full

Our two central figures included

Finally, part of me in a way that I could keep them forever

They had saved me too by sending their children 

To America…

But they were hiding behind window shades

In their once comfortable Vienna apartment

In terror they were suppressing while making small

Talk about daily life revealing true devotion to 

Each other and their children — hoping to be saved

Knowing they would do what they could to survive

Even as the chessboard of history was countering

Their moves, it was too strong

They used parental injunctions to their boy and girl

To behave and study well and to thrive

And there I sat and met my grandparents who were

Calmly discussing their household management

One time as if at a séance with spiritual intervention

Their tones alive with love; it was in that fractured moment

As if my dream had come true if only for that one–time

Visit — as if they had been merely misplaced in the fog of war —

As if they had survived

Esther Munshine started teaching when she was 20. Her career spanned 50 years, with a generous interruption to raise her family. In 2019, she began writing poems in earnest.  During the pandemic, she met online regularly with other writers sharing their work, safely at a distance. She was an invited featured poet to the second annual National Baseball Poetry Festival in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2024, where she read “Take Me Out” and “First Baseball Game for First Grandson”. “I Heard My Grandparents Voices” is an experience that their grand-daughter is still processing and she appreciates having the chance to share that experience with the community in the Jewish Writing Project. If you’d like to read more of the Esther’s work, visit: https://www.baseballbard.com and Reflections in Poetry and Prose 2023 https://www.uft.org/chapters/retired-teachers-chapter/retiree-programs/reflections-poetry-and-prose

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November 4, 2024 · 7:30 am

Baby-Boomer Blues

by Howard Wach (New York, NY)

I’m a baby-boomer, Bronx-born, a grandchild of immigrants from Poland and Lithuania, raised in a 1960s Long Island suburb, which was half Jewish and half other white ethnics, everyone newly migrated from city neighborhoods. I matured in the ‘70s, when Jew-barring (or Jew-counting) barriers collapsed across all kinds of American institutions. 

But sudden indifference to Jewish catastrophe and open Jew-hating—the post October 7 legacy—has pushed me and my boomer peers to revisit what we thought were rock-solid certainties. The last eight months changed everything.  

I’m a knowledgeable guy, a teacher, a scholar in my own modest way. But now I wonder what I’ve ever really known. History lulled me to sleep, then woke me with a klop. My everyday worries—money, family, health—have new company, a dangerous twist on the tribalism splintering our civil society. Suddenly, the hyphen connecting “Jewish-American” feels frayed, eroded, anything but certain. 

All my life that hyphen signaled a balance I had no reason to doubt. A birthright, if you will. It never felt conditional or one-sided.  

**********   

In 1906 Shai Wach, an 18-year-old immigrant from Warsaw, arrived in New York and renamed himself Charles. Eleven years later he returned to Europe, a doughboy drafted into the 77th infantry division, the “Melting Pot” division, a polyglot mix of immigrants from lower Manhattan. Charlie fought with the Lost Battalion in the Argonne Forest and returned to New York with a fistful of medals, his patriotism signed and sealed. He marched up Fifth Avenue with his old unit every Armistice Day for decades. Growing up in the Depression-era Bronx, my father Daniel, Charlie’s older son, absorbed the lessons of those parades. 

I never heard my grandfather talk about Israel. New York was his home. The United States was his homeland, and he had the medals to prove it. But his brother perished in Auschwitz (also never discussed); his sister disappeared forever into a wartime Polish convent. I suspect that like his Workmen’s Circle comrades, he had no personal Zionist convictions but believed that the Shoah made Israel necessary. Just not for him, or for his son, or for me. 

********** 

My father spoke more often about his World War II service as he aged. Before he became too frail to travel, he eagerly embarked on a veterans’ “Honor Flight” to visit war monuments in Washington. The day he died a biography of Churchill lay open on the magnifying reading device the VA had given him.  

I turned eighteen just as the Vietnam-era draft ended. A graduate of my high school was killed at Kent State. Some classmates sewed peace symbols on their jeans and joined antiwar protests. Others sneered at the “footprint of the American chicken” and enlisted the moment they could. My peacenik mother hated the war; my proud veteran father defended it. I didn’t know what I believed, but I acted the teenage antiwar hippie, singing along with Country Joe and the Fish and listening to Hendrix tear through the national anthem.  

It never occurred to me—or to anyone I knew—that Jewishness could have any relevance to that all-American strife. National identity was properly a civic affair. We all belonged to this country. I had no Zionist feelings, no desire to make aliyah. But I knew—even through the fog of adolescence—that Israel was a fulfillment, a source of ethnic pride heightened by the miraculous Six-Day War.  I grasped its importance and celebrated the victory, but we were Jewish Americans, secure in that solid identity, feeling no unsettling contradiction or tension. All the old barriers were falling. Wartime dissension aside, what could disturb our happy condition? 

**********

I have a different question now. What made me think I’d escape the history I studied and taught? I’m a lucky Jewish baby-boomer born into the post-Holocaust truce that sidetracked Jew-hating and enabled some of us to vault into corporate suites and institutional power. The truce has faltered for a while, but the October 7 aftermath blew it apart.  

We disappeared into benign, assimilated invisibility. Or so I thought. That dreamy moment in the American empire is over. The sudden disregard for Jewish lives unearthed my half-buried boomer memories: Charlie’s brutal, unspoken knowledge of genocide, my parents looking sideways at goyim, their memory of “Gentiles Only” warnings in employment and real estate ads. Blue numbers tattooed on the forearm of my friend Paul’s father. It all flooded back when I saw torn, defaced posters of Israeli hostages and heard noxious chants rising from massive rallies. I was rudely yanked back into history. 

The shock unleashed a stew of unwelcome emotions in me: anger at “progressives” who abandoned moral sense, who preach simple-minded theories of power, seduce the ignorant, and make Israel the centerpiece of global evil; anger at Israeli zealots who reinforce that corrosive lie—lunatic settlers running wild and the politicians who coddle them; fear for my children, who witness Jewishness embroiled in today’s American strife and may never recover the assurance that “Jewish-American” once meant, the hard-won allegiance my grandfather and father gifted to me. 

**********

In the 1980s I wrote a Ph.D dissertation at Brandeis University about civil society in nineteenth-century Britain. One day I was sitting with friends in a common room when a professor in the History Department, a brash and funny character, dropped by to share his latest insight. “Brandeis has a new theme song,” he announced, “a medley of Hatikvah and Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Then he laughed and walked away. 

Until recently the joke made playful, ironic Jewish sense. It fit perfectly at Brandeis, that model of postwar Jewish-American identity and ambition. In the last eight months I think of it more than any time in the last forty years. But its playfulness is gone, its irony soured. 

Here’s a sign of the times. Brandeis is recruiting Jewish students feeling displaced or frightened at campuses where keffiyehs are fashionable and Zionism is a seven-letter version of a four-letter word.  

That old joke isn’t funny at all anymore. 

Howard Wach is a semi-retired City University of New York academic. He’s written and published articles on educational technology and academic history in various journals, and now writes creative nonfiction and short stories. Palisades Review published his short humorous piece about not buying a time share. 

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October 28, 2024 · 7:30 am

Apple Strudel from Cramer’s Bakery 

by Julie Standig (Doylestown, PA)                      

Because it was Rosh Hashanah I was on the hunt

for good strudel and a mislaid memory.

Because of a trip to Poland, coffee and strudel

was a must-have at Café Mozart in Prague’s Old Town.

Because strudel and Eastern Europe are intertwined,

Rudy’s words, spoken long ago, come to mind.

Because he slowly stood up on our visit to Terezin’s

hidden synagogue to speak about his mother.

Because his eyes filled with tears as he recalled

the flaky pastry she rolled to cover the dining room table.

Because she crafted not only strudel but a tender memory

that Rudy clearly told at the age of eighty.

Because I left the bakery with apple strudel in tow, hands

tightly placed on the steering wheel, my wrists aglow in gold.

Because my left was adorned with the watch my father made

for my mother, and on the right, was a wide link bracelet once worn

by my Auschwitz surviving, parachute-making aunt.

Because these holidays always hold a mixture of salt and sugar.

Julie Standig’s poetry has appeared in Schuylkill Journal Review, US1 Poets/Del Val, Gyroscope Review and Crone editions, as well as online journals. She has a full collection of poems, The Forsaken Little Black Book and her chapbook, Memsahib Memoir. A lifelong New Yorker she now resides in Bucks County, Pa. with her husband and their Springer Spaniel. If you’d like to learn more about Julie and her work, visit: https://juliestandig.com

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October 21, 2024 · 7:03 am

Dancing the Night Away

by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (Calgary, Canada)

I was born and raised in a Bene Israeli Jewish family in Bombay, India.  The mezuzah on our door and the menorah on the shelf were to me the sweet and meaningful symbols of my Jewish identity. I lived with my paternal grandparents since the age of ten, and I loved raising my fingers to touch the mezuzah on the door of their home and bringing them in a kiss to my lips. The elders in my family explained that when I made that gesture, it meant that I was taking the name of God as I left the home and when I returned home safely. I felt protected and blessed. I didn’t know then that there was a scroll inside the mezuzah with the words of The Shema “Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” a prayer I recited on waking each morning and going to bed at night. An aunt of mine sent me a mezuzah from Israel and even my husband who is not Jewish, never leaves the home or returns home without kissing the mezuzah. 

On that fateful Saturday in October, I happened to turn on the TV and watched in horror as a young girl, with her arms waving frantically, was calling out for help sitting sandwiched between two masked men on a motorcycle taking her away to where I had no idea at the time. They were shouting the name of their God, a chant familiar to me as there was a mosque just a few steps from my grandmother’s home in Bombay. I had grown up listening to the muezzin’s call to prayer five times a day over the loudspeaker. The neighborhood had Muslim, Christian, Parsi and Jewish families living side by side in peace and harmony. At home we were taught respect for the customs and traditions of each of the different faiths and actually took part in their celebrations. 

Continuing to watch the TV, I soon learned what had taken place and that the young girl was at a dance festival and was being taken hostage.  In Gaza and in some Muslim countries as the news of the tragic events of the day began pouring in, I watched people in the streets rejoicing, chanting the name of their God.  Soon after I saw a clip of a crowd of people marching towards the Opera House in Australia, with banners reading “Kill the Jews!!! Gas the Jews!!!” My mind at once went back to the Holocaust.  The murder of six million Jews was not enough for them. The real aim of the protestors was the annihilation of the Jews, not their support of the Palestinian people.

In India, growing up in the sixties, nobody ever mentioned the Holocaust and there never was any talk about what was happening on such a large scale to the Jewish people in Europe. The Indian Jews were free from persecution and blended in completely with the local population of India, the majority of whom are Hindu.  I entered college in my mid-teens into the Arts stream, and along with other subjects like Logic and Economics, World History was also taught. I cannot recall a single mention of the Holocaust in our textbooks. Only much later, I watched a film on the Diary of Anne Frank, and a movie called Schindler’s List. In fact, the movie had such a powerful impact on me that I watched it twice, weeping throughout the film. I prayed that there would be more ‘Schindlers’ in the world. My mother always spoke about ‘the basic goodness of mankind.’ I believed there were as many good people in the world as there were who brought harm to others.

In the seventies, a discotheque called Blow Up was located in the basement of the Taj Mahal Hotel. That name would be considered taboo in the context of today’s world. Many of my cousins were musicians and played in the bands at the disco. I loved music and loved to dance, often dancing the night away till the early hours of the morning. The waiters would toggle the lights on and off in quick succession, to signal us to leave. A cousin of mine still remembers that I did not sit out a single dance!  The next morning in college, I attended the first lecture of the day with the green eyeshadow still prominently showing up on my eyelids. Those days we didn’t have access to make up remover and the soap we used did not do a decent job! 

The murder of so many innocent young people at the Dance festival touched a deep nerve in me. I had danced freely and without fear, at so many music festivals, it was beyond belief what I was seeing.   My love of dance will forever be colored by the tragic scenes playing out on the TV screen… I was contorted, frozen in that moment, unable to move, let alone dance.

 All I could do was pray…

In a career spanning over four decades, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca has taught English in Indian colleges, AP English in an International School nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India, and French and Spanish in private schools in Canada. Her poems are featured in various journals and anthologies, including the Sahitya Akademi Journal Of Indian Literature, the three issues of the Yearbooks of Indian Poetry in English, Verse-Virtual, The Madras Courier, and the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, among others. Kavita has authored two collections of poetry, Family Sunday and Other Poems and Light of The Sabbath. Her poem ‘How To Light Up a Poem,’ was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2020.  Her poems celebrate Bombay, the city of her birth, Nature, and her Bene Israel Indian Jewish heritage. She is the daughter of the late poet Nissim Ezekiel.  She currently resides in Calgary, Canada.

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October 14, 2024 · 7:30 am

Lord’s Prayer in Lebensgarten

by Miriam Bassuk (Seattle, WA)

Compassionate Listening Training 

between Germans and Jewish Americans

Lebensgarten – September 27 through October 7, 2002

Attic room full of light,

the Lord’s prayer written

in careful German letters 

on the back wall.

Vater unser im Himmel

Lebensgarten, once a munitions 

factory, now a community 

devoted to peace.

Our circle is thirty-five strong, 

half Germans, half Jews. We 

hold hands, pass the peace feather 

to speak what is most alive in us. 

Sounds of German translated to English, 

English to German. Make space for 

the wound, now layered by several 

generations, a curse that wants to be 

forgotten, yet keeps leaking out.

Together we move, the first grief cry,

afraid for so long to release it. 

Hold me sister, hold me 

brother. Embrace the child in me 

who still can’t understand.

Miriam Bassuk’s poems have appeared in Snapdragon, Between the Lines, PoetsWest Literary Journal, and 3 Elements Review. She was one of the featured poets in WA 129, a project sponsored by Tod Marshall, the Washington State poet laureate. As an avid poet, she has been charting the journey of living in these uncertain times beyond Covid.

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September 2, 2024 · 7:30 am

Klari’s Cameo

by Ruth Zelig (New York, NY)

Author’s Note: For economic reasons, my father decided in 1958 that he, with my mother, and me at age eight, would leave Israel and migrate to South America where we would wait until the United States allowed us in (1967). His goal was to settle in the United States, but American immigration quotas were too strict, in essence barring our entry. By December 1958, with utmost efficiency, my father made arrangements for a transatlantic crossing, and while waiting for the day of departure, we moved in with his step-mother, Klari.

“Early in the morning I’d look over at the bed and see your three sleeping heads. After you went away, the bed was so empty.”  This is how Klari described to us in her letters the lonely days after my parents and I emigrated from Israel in December, 1958. This is how she revealed how happy she was that the three of us had stayed with her at her one-room apartment for a few weeks after our own apartment was given up, our furniture dispersed, the suitcases packed, and the trans-Atlantic steerage tickets purchased, in pursuit of my father’s dream to migrate to America.

Klari was my paternal step-grandmother. She had luminous light green eyes. And some freckles on her face. Graying wavy hair that sometimes she gathered in a bun behind the nape. At other times worn short. But around her neck there was always a gold locket that opened to a photo. The locket cover was a delicate cameo.

She was my other grandmother, one of three, two of them living, another being my maternal grandmother. Klari married my grandfather, Deszö, in Transylvania in 1949, soon after he lost his remarkable wife, the grandmother I never met, and the two immediately moved to Israel to join my father. So I was lucky, I had three grandmothers, kinswomen shaping the foundations of my life.

The grandmother I never met was a venerated enigma; she was not a babysitter. But Klari provided childcare on occasions. She fed me madár tej — eoufs à la neige — floating islands. A dessert so milky with love, so whipped up with care, so easy to eat, it was like the breath of kisses on the lips. No one could match her dessert, not even the fancy French restaurants in New York City where I’d go chasing a dream more than half a century later.

When my childhood home was no more, and migration was about to turn my world over and revolve in the opposite direction, the few weeks of living with her kept me safe from worry. I did not know yet what loss meant, because she and her apartment were a haven. I continued to go to my old school from her home for a little while longer, walking two blocks to R. Arlozorov to catch the bus that went up the Carmel Mountain to Ramot Remez and getting off in front of the school. My mother had practiced the drill with me so I could do it alone. On the way back from school, after getting off the bus, I passed a beggar woman every day. One day I left her some coins. I had never done that before; I had never been homeless before.

After my grandfather died in 1956, Klari remained the widow who had been fun for me to visit. I watched her rapturously as she lit Shabbat candles and gathered the sacred light with her hands while murmuring the blessing. She loved my mother so much, and her attentive daughter-in-law reciprocated the affection. The year she married my grandfather, 1949, was also the year my two teenage parents wed in Israel. All these people living the second, improbable chapter in their life. It’s startling to think that Klari was married to Dezsö for less than seven years, a blink of an eye for people their age. She didn’t marry him for money; he had none, and he was very sick after years in a Nazi-led Romanian slave labor camp and needed a caregiver. He died aged fifty-nine leaving her a fatigued widow. Most likely a widow for the second time.

When I was with her, she never talked about her life before the calamity. (She did not have a tattoo on her arm.) Taking her for granted, I never asked about her prior family, her maiden name or maybe her prior married name. She didn’t have children. But maybe she had a husband, or a fiancé, who was deported during the Holocaust? There were no other relatives. She hid the pain behind a cheerful manner. I never heard a cross word; never heard a painful expression; never heard anger, wishful thinking, or regret.

How did my elders pick up the pieces and move forward? By getting married again so soon after losing an indispensable companion? By daring to cross the ocean and arrive at a Mediterranean land so alien compared to what used to be home? When the rug is pulled out from under you, when the walls around you are breached and the contents confiscated, when your livelihood is eliminated, when your essence is erased and your figure is spat upon as if you were a demon, how do you dare pick up the pieces? If you’re treated like an animal, you resort to being human.

Her humanity was boundless. Her little apartment on R. Yerushalayim was so pleasing. One room. That’s all a widow needs. A corner with a little icebox and a shelf-top two-burner primus; two small sunny windows with white lace curtains; a back door to a wooden staircase descending to the ground behind the building; a single bed. And an armoire with the prettiest dresses a seven year old girl could imagine: silk-like fabrics with pretty, colorful patterns. I’d riffle through them, feeling the fabrics, savoring the patterns with my eyes, unaware these were styles from the 1940s. I’d rummage through her necessaire de toilette, smitten by the little round orange box of Coty Airspun face powder, the one still sold today unchanged since 1935 when she was a younger woman, with the iconic design of white powder puffs on the box-top. I still delight in this design, it reminds me of her. 

In the middle of the apartment was a dainty Queen Anne dining table with four matching chairs. And a Persian rug underneath, where I’d lie on my stomach and iron the tufting with my fingernails in the direction of the weave, then alternating, learning that doing so in the other direction made the fiber stand up and change the character of the colors, while I was studying the Persian rug pattern with the medallion in the center and the repetition of the pattern in a satisfyingly predictable sequence, a fractal brain-teaser, intuiting that hand-weaving was about symmetry. And symmetry was about equilibrium, predictability, security.

But we emigrated. Equilibrium, predictability, and security disappeared. Life was not a Persian rug. 

My mother and Klari corresponded for years. Thirteen years after we left her behind, after she remarried, became widowed again, had breast cancer and radical mastectomies, a hacking which made her upper arms swell to twice their size, we went to visit her again in Israel, in a different city, a suburb of Tel Aviv. And she took us in again, and we sat at her table eating leben and drinking Nescafe. You had to heat the milk first then mix in the coffee flakes then add hot water. Old women have a way with rituals you shouldn’t challenge. She showed me her scar. She wasn’t shy. She was forthright. With the kind of uninhibited composure that made her survive the Holocaust nightmare, cancer, death, departure, separation, solitude, and foreigners. She never learned to speak Hebrew.  She managed, because there were enough contemporaries who were also Hungarian speakers.

More than anything else, I associate Klari with a cameo. Classically authentic, revealingly bas relief, unassumingly delicate, straightforwardly monochromatic, singularly solitary. She represented a woman comfortable in her own skin, devoted and caring when called upon, repeatedly alone without protest when no longer needed.

Ruth Zelig migrated three times before the age of 20, changing languages (at least five), cultures, and school systems. After earning an MA in Linguistics, she went on to study computer languages and became a computer programmer and systems analyst at IBM. As a mother, she raised her children, spent years volunteering in a NJ community at various levels of leadership, and became the president of her Conservative synagogue. English remains her primary language for writing.  She has written an epistolary memoir, “Letters From Brazil, Reflections on Migration and Friendship,” and  hopes to publish it soon. You can learn more about her and her work at these social media sites:zeligova.substack.com, jewishwomenofwords.com.au/author/ruth-zelig/, instagram.com/zeligova, and zeligova.com

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July 22, 2024 · 7:30 am

A Home With Dignity

by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (Calgary, Canada)

(A poem about belonging)

 I want six million Jews back to their homes

To their hat shops, their loved ones, and their bright mornings,

To awake in their beds with soft sheets and warm slippers

To put their feet into, and cross the threshold to kitchens 

Smelling warm with the baking of Challah bread.

I want sisters to whisper to each other from bunk beds

Scurrying up and down the ladder to exchange places

Laughing without fear of being muffled,

Like we did many nights with sleeping parents who

Unaware of our sibling shenanigans, dreamed in peace.

I want six million Jews to watch the butterflies 

Flitting across a kind sun that warmed their hearts

With promises of hope, of births, graduations, weddings 

Dressed in satin gowns with silver stars, the yellow ones 

Out of stock, discontinued, banned forever.

I want six million Jews to look out at the fields with cattle grazing

From train windows, with the fresh air blowing on their faces

Going on a family holiday to the beach with free minds

Surfing the waves, swimming with the dolphins,

Returning to their homes to wash off the sand from their happy feet

To wear shoes of the right size with no holes in them.

 In a career spanning over four decades, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca has taught English in Indian colleges, AP English in an International School nestled in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in India, and French and Spanish in private schools in Canada. Her poems are featured in various journals and anthologies, including the Sahitya Akademi Journal Of Indian Literature, the three issues of the Yearbooks of Indian Poetry in English, Verse-Virtual, The Madras Courier, and the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, among others. Kavita has authored two collections of poetry, Family Sunday and Other Poems and Light of The Sabbath. Her poem ‘How To Light Up a Poem,’ was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2020.  Her poems celebrate Bombay, the city of her birth, Nature, and her Bene Israel Indian Jewish heritage. She is the daughter of the late poet Nissim Ezekiel. 

Author’s note: Challah is a special bread in Jewish cuisine, usually braided and typically eaten on ceremonial occasions such as Shabbat and major Jewish holidays. Ritually-acceptable challah is made of dough from which a small portion has been set aside as an offering. The word is Biblical in origin. (Wikipedia)

(Editor’s Note: “A Home with Dignity was published in “Light of the Sabbath,” the author’s chapbook, as well as in the anthology “Heartstrings,” an anthology edited by Sanjula Sharma). It also appeared in the 25th Annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) Poetry Issue of Poetry Super Highway, April 2023, and is reprinted here with permission of the author.)

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