Avot Yeshurun

The Christian cannot be the pitying one because he is the one pitied. From a dusty road in a straight line from przedmiescie to Krasnystaw at the entrance to town at Zhitkovski's in his house we lived, he makes coffins with crosses. On the threshold I sat as a boy opposite a building held together by nails facing the church the cloister the impurity, my mother says, I sat as a boy. On the wall Jesus and Mary. Jesus and his mother were never parted. My mother's son left her not to be on the wall. Mary's son never left, and he paid the price. —October 26-29, 1989

Stars by the power of their orbit are stars in the order of the sun. But if they are not figures of orbit, they are not in the sun. Exactly like me: by the power of my yearnings I am in the family. And if I will not yearn, I am not in the family. Memories are a house. Time is a roof. All the time a roof. All the time time. I would like sometime to die unto them and see them. Benno Rothenberg related that when he saw some archaeology, he had a feeling of homeland. As if he were in his house. I do not deny that a man who reaches a certain age can no longer hope that those from whom he came will remain still alive with him, as my mother once wrote to me in one of the letters of her twilight. From the fadings of her letters into the fatedness of man: But when can they. After all there's no chance of seeing you. And once, in a discarded and forgotten letter: "Good night, Yehiel alter lebn. Slumber has descended upon me. I am caught in the throes of sleep.Khbin shlayferig gevorn." Said in a letter that nobody reads, that nobody read. —February 8, 1989