Tag Archives: remembering the dead

May 12, 2025 · 7:30 am

Ladies and Gentlemen Lunch is Served

by Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca (Calgary, Canada)

After Tadeusz Borowski’s ‘This way for the Gas Ladies and Gentleman.’

The well-groomed student 

Formal yellow jacket, white shirt black pants bow tie

Starched white napkin over his left arm

Announces lunch at the College of Catering

Where I teach English in a pristine environment,

‘Ladies and Gentlemen lunch is served.’ he says

No pistol by his side, no baton thrust into my ribs

No barking command for immediate compliance.

A flash of white sarees, black pants and white shirts

Move in animated chatter

Professional dress as per the code

Rushing up the stairs to the dining room

Following the tempting aromas.

Taking our seats quickly, we study the menu

Devour the three course French meal

Served to us in style, the company delightful

No food fights necessary, portion sizes are generous.

A walk around the campus

Works off the meal and it’s back to work.

No guards or dogs to chase us

The walk is leisurely, pleasant

The hot Bombay sun the only thing at my back

I imagine the barbed wire around the campus

My imagination cast back to prison walls 

Only beautiful trees and flowers bloom happily.

Here by the friendly gate.

Borowski lived  history, I read its horror

Dazed people stumbling out of cattle cars

Stripped naked headed for the gas chambers

Unaware of their gruesome destination

Unlike me headed for a sumptuous meal.

What evil could devise this violent plan?

I want to give away Borowski’s collection

With the haunting title, but to whom?

Everyone wants to read something edifying

So many are in denial

Survivors don’t lie, make up stories. 

The plateful of food  before me now could  feed two

I put some back into the pot, remembering

The children starved by hatred

The women beaten violently

The man calling out to his God

His mouth dry, his thirst unslaked.

When white smoke emerges from the chimneys

Here in the winter landscape 

I see the blackened sky

The birds fly frantically for fresh air

Trees turn to the color of ash

Some birds disappear and I weep

When I can’t see them.

The six million blur my vision.

What violence prompts people to herd others

Like cattle over a cliff?

Violent thoughts stirring in a violent mind.

The camps an invention of cruel machinations

The journey, the deliberate torment of hell.

I cry out to the oppressors with Borowski

Your country — a stock market transaction
 and hoarded sacks of grain.
My country — the gas chamber
and the Auschwitz flame.*

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: These lines are from Two Countries – Poetry of Tadeusz Borowski (wordpress.com))

(Editor’s note: This poem was originally published in the Usawa Literary Review in a slightly different form with the permission of the author.)

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February 19, 2024 · 7:30 am

Cover Photo

by Dennis Gura (Santa Monica, CA)

My mother brought back from France,

Sometime in the 1960’s,

An oversized book, these often-termed

Coffee table books, meant to be

Casually perused while comfortably seated.

She kept the tome prominently displayed, 

Moving the book from living room to family room

On occasion as if to insure that

Friends and family would encounter it.

In French, we could not read it. 

And she and I would spat, mildly, 

About it, for the cover photo of this

Photo book was gruesome, and was meant

To be: entitled La Deportation, a hollowed-

Eyed survivor stared dully out.

When I would come home from school,

I’d turn it face down, the photo 

Too difficult to see while sitting 

With a morning cup of coffee. 

I’d leave the house and, upon

Returning, be greeted by the grieving

Face front portrait. My mother never 

Chastised me for flipping the  book, and,

When I’d complain how disturbed the image

Left me, she’d simply say: we must remember. 

I miss my parents, who died natural deaths

In the natural course of days, and now

With pained reluctance, I must say I’m relieved

That they are exempt from witnessing again

Images as, perhaps, more gruesome.

This is a book which I cannot 

Flip over to avoid the image and

Alas

Will need to be left face up

To instruct us again

That we must remember. 

Dennis Gura is a father, husband, and an engaged and serious Jew who tries to understand a complex and confusing world as best as possible. A native Angeleno, he has been deeply engaged in Jewish thought and experiences his entire life–the ethnic, the ethical, the secular, and the religious.  He was privileged to study at Machon Pardes in 1982-83, and has since bounced around various LA synagogues and Jewish groups.

If you’d like to read more of his work, visit his Substack page:https://dennisgura.substack.com

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December 4, 2023 · 7:30 am

I forgot to light a candle

by Dennis Gura (Santa Monica, CA)

I forgot to light a candle the other day:

It was an uncle’s memorial,

But he was gone before I was,

And the recollections second-hand:

What my father mentioned,

The documents entrusted to me,

The rare, very rare, comments of my grandfather.

I did not know the precise date until

After they too were gone, when

I dug through the papers

And figured out the World War

Two details. They did not mark

The date.

Nor did they light a candle,

And certainly no prayer was uttered.

No kaddish for the boy gone in France.

My grandfather might have

Been bemused, or likely annoyed,

That I would recited the doxology

For his sons, or for him,

For that is an obligation I have

Saddled myself with.

But this year, I neglected

To consult my calendar in

A timely fashion, and the

Day on which I should have

Lit the candle to

Honor the sacrifice of

The too-young uncle

Had already passed.

No candle this year.

Perhaps this scribble will do

To recall the uncle gone

Before I, or my elder sibs,

Arrived, though both of them bear

His name in some fashion. Perhaps

Their lives will make do

For the absent flame.

Dennis Gura is a father, husband, and an engaged and serious Jew who tries to understand a complex and confusing world as best as possible. A native Angeleno, he has been deeply engaged in Jewish thought and experiences his entire life–the ethnic, the ethical, the secular, and the religious.  He was privileged to study at Machon Pardes in 1982-83, and has since bounced around various LA synagogues and Jewish groups.

If you’d like to read more of his work, visit his Substack page, where this poem first appeared (and is reprinted here with permission of the author): https://dennisgura.substack.com

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April 25, 2022 · 6:30 am

My Father’s Holocaust

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

My father escaped the Holocaust,
but suffered for it, and when, as a kid,
I pointed out he never actually
spent time in Auschwitz or Dachau,
he stared at me, “Same thing,” he said.
“You’ll see,” he added. When I pressed
him further, he said only one word: “Family.”
I didn’t see, the Holocaust becoming 
just one more historical fact.
I began my own very secular career.
Then I saw a picture at a lecture
given by a famous art historian.
Thumbprints of dirt, blood, ink, 
mounted upon rows of stripes
in different colors, an abstract
suddenly becoming very real— 
a line of prisoners awaiting the 
morning roll call in the freezing cold.
I looked closer at the thumbprints
and could see my father’s face.
“I am here, remember me, never forget.”
A generation later I am still safe, still free, 
but the picture still haunts me.
“I escaped,” I said to the thumbprints.
“Oh, no, you didn’t,” I heard my father say. 
And finally I understood his words.

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. You can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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April 5, 2021 · 7:00 am

Pink Azaleas by the Doorway

by Rick Black (Arlington, VA)

April 8, 2021 – the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

By the doorway, 

a profusion of pink azaleas

illuminates the growing darkness.

As dusk descends in the cul de sac,

the girl on a pink bicycle

circles round.

My daughter is spinning 

to an Israeli dance song, Moshiach*—

no redemption, though, 78 years ago.

Digging bunkers and underground tunnels,

acquiring weapons and bullets,

training groups of fighters.

The ghetto set ablaze block by block,

house by house—incendiary bombs,

dynamite, canons, etc.

No one was there to applaud the Jewish fighters.

Tonight no one is clapping for the Virginia Hospital workers.

It’s quiet. The windows are still alit, the lobby dim—

and one nurse waits to discharge a patient, her hand 

on the back of his wheelchair.

Oh, yes, remember the dead and mourn,

but don’t forget the azaleas

by the doorway, blossoming,

or the girl on the pink bicycle,

pedaling round.

Rick Black is an award-winning book artist and poet who runs Turtle Light Press, a small press dedicated to poetry, handmade books and fine art prints. His poetry collection, Star of David, won an award for contemporary Jewish writing and was named one of the best poetry books in 2013. His haiku collection, Peace and War: A Collection of Haiku from Israel, has been called “a prayer for peace.” Other poems and translations have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Midstream, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Frogpond, Cricket, RawNervz, Blithe Spirit, Still, and other journals. 

If you’d like to learn more about Rick and his work, visit his website: Turtle Light Press

*Moshiach means “redeemer” in Hebrew.

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May 27, 2019 · 6:20 am

As Our Father Neared Death

by Herbert J. Levine (Philadelphia, PA)

As our father neared death, his mind raced
between fantasies and the facts of his life,
his speech like the black box of an airplane that had crashed,
the record of its journey jumbled beyond reconstruction.
My brother and I cared for him, sometimes
feeding, sometimes reading to him
from the Book of Psalms. I led him
beside green pastures and still waters
when he, in a soft voice, as if from far away, blessed me:
May God bless you and keep you. May God shine His Face upon you
until its end. Am I not the brother who wrapped himself in a tallit,
who stood before the congregation on Shabbat and holidays
to lead it in prayer to an improbable God? But all that ritual
razzmatazz fooled my fond old man and me.

After his death, my brother came every Shabbat and holiday
to say Kaddish with our mother.
She said to me every Sunday when I visited her,
“Your father would be so happy
that your brother is saying Kaddish for him.”
Thus my brother received her blessing for the great kindness
he did her, a kindness that only the living can receive.

Herbert J. Levine published his first book of poetry, Words for Blessing the World, at the age of 67. His previous books were scholarly treatments of Yeats and Psalms. To learn more about Herb and his work, visit: https://benyehudapress.com/books/words-blessing-world/

Note: “As Our Father Neared Death” was first published in slightly different form in Words for Blessing the World  (Ben Yehuda Press, 2017). The poem is reprinted here with permission of the author.

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April 29, 2019 · 6:22 am

Standing in a Boxcar at the US Holocaust Museum

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

The walls seem so barren here.

     I cannot see the sky.

The car is standing still.

     We have been riding for two days.

I am alone in a cattle car.

     I cannot see my father.

I can step out at any time.

     Bodies are pressed against me.

I am in the Holocaust Museum.

     I am in a concentration camp.

I took a shower this morning.

     I am ordered to take one this evening.

Later I will go out for lunch.

     I haven’t eaten all day.

My parents are back in New York.

     Where are my little sisters?

I am 75 years old and retired.

     I am fifteen years old and scared

Nothing really bad has happened to me.

     Please, what will they do to me?

I am alive in Washington, D.C.

     I am dead in Auschwitz, Poland.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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