Richard Michelson

my father said, again and again, shaking his head in disbelief at any ostentation; the neighbor's gold- plated knocker (we still banged fists) or my own lust to own the autographed edition or the waxed bronze bust. It is not only the idea—which should hold all of the pleasure— but the poet's pencil marks on paper which we treasure above the memorized poem. And so I fan my flushed face, signaling the fast-talking auctioneer, who has traced the provenance, and picks up the pace, multiplying offers. And who now does my father's bidding? Heaven's coffers, perhaps, are for the destitute; but why did he have to die to escape the shitty, crime-ridden, never-t0-be-gentrified neighborhood of both our births? The cost of living, he would argue, is not the worth of being alive. But still he checked each lottery ticket which littered the empty lot next door, praised their silver latex glitter, praying to the beautiful unscratched, like little gods. Money talks, he taught me. But nobody beats the odds.

. . . you have inherited its burden without its mystery. —Elie Wiesel I.   March 1979 and I am watching Nazis march through Chicago. The bold type of the Sun-Times describes a small band of hoodlums, undereducated boy scouts, the better to be ignored. My grandfather, back hunched over his Bible, agrees. Jews like myself should stay home, should lay down our stones and pray like the Jews that we are. II.   Grandfather, you are easy to love with your long beard and the way you sway like a palm branch in the storm. It is easy to romanticize your spiritual search, worldly naiveté and wise rabbinical words. You belong in the books I read by Singer, Peretz, Sholom Aleichem. But their characters are ignorant of the chapters to come. You know where their prayers will lead. III.   A circle. Six Nazis. Your wife in the middle. One soldier says all Jewesses are whores and the others agree. You say nothing. Years later you'll decide to speak: "Do we not serve Hitler's purpose, we who would sooner renounce our beliefs than assume our burdens?" IV.   A generation after the Holocaust and I know no Hebrew. No Yiddish. No Torah. I fast only on the Day of Atonement and even then I've been known to cheat. A generation after the Holocaust and I apologize for my grandfather's bent back and wild gestures. I used to tremble to the rhythm of his prayers. I feared the mysterious words that kept us from the devil. Now, from my window I watch Nazis march. Their feet strike the pavement like the ticking of a clock. I am a Jew a generation after the Holocaust. Poorer, my grandfather says, without a past than he, who has no future.

The way my grandmother put back the green bananas, unwilling to make an investment in her future, is how I’m feeling, watching my grown children watching CNN, sitting side by side on the sofa—no teasing, no tattling— just image upon image of Armageddon: starvation, explosions, long lines at the gas pump, and even the Rabbi abandoning town. Biological, my son says. And my daughter answers no, nuclear. I’m too embarrassed just now to admit how happy I am to have them home again, even though they’re only visitors, no longer “at home.”I built my house too close to the water, my grandmother used to say whenever I went away. She meant she was easily moved to tears, and it took my own mother years to teach me the impossibility of protecting the weak from the strong.Enough crying, she’d say, clicking her tongue like she was contesting the intricate but historical patterns of sudden death. Y ou don’t die so easily. You have to suffer first. She meant, I now know, to comfort me, to protect me from her brother’s tank blown upside down in Germany, the long lines at the gas pumps, the clergy blissfully following their prayers back home. O but then she’d kiss whatever ailed me, while my sister railed against injustice, her theme song exploding above the cushion separating her rights from all I’m still doing wrong. How can we expect world peace, my father would have said, —if he wasn’t at that very moment watching I Love Lucy’s slide across the world’s stage on an overripe banana— when under one roof my own two children can’t get along. As for me, just now I’m setting the table and filling the fruit bowl, whistling like Ricky Ricardo, unaware of his wife’s grand schemes, the well intentioned but certain and coming disaster.Please stay, Grandma, I say, holding her tightly in the aisle, unashamed of my tears. But of course, she died that very day, falling into honeydews, the melons, like hand grenades, rolling every which way.

I . Sleep faster, my son says. He’s poking at my eyelids, pulling at the pillows, the helicopter hum of anticipation rising in his throat as I reach out and spin him onto the bed. I want to set my heels once more in the soft underbelly of his childhood, airlift him from danger, from disease, from all his fears, which are maybe not even his fears at all, but only mine. Yet now as he hovers above me, my body splayed out like my father’s before me, my every breath is less a prayer than a love letter torn open in desperation. II. Remember, I say, when we counted to six million, a visualization of tragedy, one half hour a day for two years, and that, for the tribe only; it would take another whole year for the gypsies, the Catholics, the gays, the foreigners, the Negroes, the artists, the philosophers, etc. You were barely six at the time, your mother wondering what the hell I was thinking, and even now I can’t fathom why I didn’t just hold you close— It would have taken only a moment— And say whatever it was that I really wanted to say. III. I’m watching Batman reruns when the telephone rings. Holy Charoset, I yell at the kitchen wall,call back later. Maybe I threw some raisins, I don’t remember. We’re already married, your mother and I, but at the time, don’t ask, I was living alone. And so I’m laughing, mostly from boredom, but still, laughing, while my father lay dying, gasping for breath in some dirty gutter, gunned down for a half-empty briefcase, a gefilte fish sandwich, and a New York Post which the next day would have his picture on the twenty-eighth page; one more dead Jew. IV. You burst into the room, fifth grade facts burning your tongue like Moses’ coal.100 people die every minute, you tell me as I turn down the TV; and then, gleefully:50 since I’ve been in this room, and now 75 and now . . . O my little census bureau, my prince of darkness, my prophet of numbers, riddle me this: how many grains of sand before you can call it a desert? And where were you the day Kennedy was shot? CNN, interrupting, asks. My grandmother clicks her tongue like she’s chopping onions in the old country . Poor boy, she says, pointing. And there’s John-John again, waving that little flag, still saluting. V. And who will remember my father when I am gone? And how many have died since his death? And what’s one more. or one less. And what do I know of my father’s father? I’m waiting outside, engine humming, as my son, eighteen, registers. And now he’s shouting, running towards me, arms pumping above his head. He’s Moses the moment before spying the golden calf. He’s his great grandfather crawling underground to freedom. He’s my father flying medical supplies, surviving the crash. My mother must have held him close.You’re home, she cries , safe. VI. Vietnam, I say, or Sarajevo.  Afghanistan, my son answers, or Iraq. My father would have said Germany. He could have said Japan. Nobody says anonymously. Nobody says Gotham. Korea, my cousin says, or Kosovo.  My great grandfather says South Africa. His great grandfather says Spain. Somebody says Egypt now; somebody, Egypt then. Nobody says suddenly. Nobody says Brooklyn. I’m counting myself to sleep, when my wife hears a sound at the door.Careful, she whispers. We’re alone, in an empty house; my every breath reminding me I’m older than my father, on the day of his death. VII. There are more people breathing this very moment, my son insists, than have ever died. He’s home from college, so I don’t double-check. He’s driven a long way to surprise me on my birthday. Are you sure you can’t stay, I ask, holding him close. He looks full of hope; a woman I’ve never seen before at his side. Welcome home, I tell my wife. She’s just turned twenty-four. I’m childless, fatherless. It’s the day of the funeral; Nineteen years until the twin towers. Three thousand since Moses murdered the overseer. But that’s not what I’m thinking.One,two, three, she says, guiding me inside. How could we not fall back in love?

I. I watch them line up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher passes, one pushes, and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in '42, I tell the behaved ones: orderly and under orders. And I'm about to begin that horrific story, the one they don't yet know, when I pause to open the door for a little air. And there they are again, arms akimbo, like two stooges, the Angel of Death, and the Angel of Forgetfulness, those vaudeville comics, those incorrigible face-making kids, stuck forever—you first—no you—in the undersized doorframe of the museum I will, for lack of a better word, call childhood. II. Did I say Angels? Clearly, I meant my great-aunts whom you haven't yet met. My sister called them From-This-You-Shouldn't-Know and May-You-Never-Forget. I preferred Horseradish and Charoset, that bittersweet matzoh sandwich munched at Pesach between prayers. Everyone I knew was still alive, and no one cared that in Venice, that very summer, Ginsberg, in the name of the Jews, forgave Pound. Hadn't I'd forgone my own bar mitzvah for a weekend in Miami Beach where that borscht-belt-south social director and shuffleboard champ first shticked There's Noah business like Shoah business, soon after Lillian Hellman ushered her de-judaicized Anne Frank onto the stage. III. Are you writing another Holocaust poem? my son asks. He's gauging my anger at this interruption—a love sonnet, less so?—but it takes eight dollars of gas just to get to his summer job.To Hell with the poem, I need me some shekels, he sings, misquoting both Ravikovitch and Snoop Dogg. Poetry was nowhere in my father's house, or money either, our doorposts marked pass-over; although in a pinch Dad could recite Kipling's "Gunga Din." Make fun if you must, my mother says, but look in the mirror and I'm here to tell you that your father was a better man than all those anti-Semitic Pounds and Eliots rolled up into one. IV. That was twenty-three years ago, before my mother, cradling his neck and not yet crying, waited, while in East New York, the ambulance raced, and the Angel of Death loitered. Are you comfortable? she asks, adjusting my father's pillow, while he, ever the emcee, mimics Henny Youngman's I make a living. Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden might repeat, were he here, and what wouldn't I give, at this moment, for his stiff British upper lip. What's one more death in the family, Otto Frank argues, expunging not grief but sex from his daughter's diary, and what parent today would dare to play jury or judge. V. Are you writing another Holocaust poem? the Angel of Consciousness, who sits, while I muse, on my right shoulder and whom I often confuse with her errant two-headed twin, the Angel of Conscience, asks. And now I'm recalling my home office, the Akeidah above the desk, the knife blade drawn downward, that Angel, what's her name, restraining Abraham's implausibly blood-stained arm. And because I, exiled to the basement when my Isaac arrived, overlooked that drawing, it hung ten months above my newborn son's head. I feel wicked sleeping in this warm bed, my daughter proclaims, rehearsing her Anne Frank and pausing anxiously for applause. VI. Burn everything after I'm dead, Kafka said, poking his prewar Jewish head into yet one more of my poems. He's trying to explain the fatherland to the fatherless. No one reads poetry anymore, anyway, my mother, quoting from her own unpublished diary, writes.And who doesn't want to go on living even after death?