From A Few Words in the Mother Tongue by Irena Klepfisz.
for Khane
In ’67 you visited with your sister.
I was in Chicago. Richard Speck had just murdered
seven nurses. We were scared. The war was only
a few days over and everyone said
how well you and Gitl looked. Who would
have thought you’d just come
from a war-torn country
dressed chic in late ’60s fashion
smiling easy relaxed
confident the worst was over?
I still have the photographs.
How different that war
from that other in your life:
Siberia the Germans at your heels
your father chopping tress in the forest.
You learned Russian in the street
spoke Yiddish at home wrote Polish
in the segregated schools. You were
a linguist at eight ready to master
even more tongues for the sake of survival.
But in ’67 you’d already mastered
it all. You were so relaxed so easy.
It was a joke this war despite
the casualties. It was a joke
how relaxed you were.
And wasn’t I too? Weren’t we all?
Didn’t we all glow from it
our sense of power finally achieved?
The quickness of the action
the Biblical routes
and how we laughed over
Egyptian shoes in the sand
how we laughed at another people’s fear
as if fear was alien
as if we had known safety all our lives.
And the Bank?
I don’t remember it mentioned
by any of us.
We were in Chicago – it was hard to imagine.
But twenty years later
I hear how they picked up what they could
place it on their backs
how they marched through the hills
sparse coarse grass pink and yellow flowers
rough rocks defying cultivation
how they carried clumsy packs
clothing utensils images of a home
they might never see again.
A sabra told me who watched
their leaving as she sat safe
in an army jeep: it looked no different than the newsreels at school
of French Belgian roads. It was simple
she said: people were fleeing and
we egged them on.
Time passes. Everything changes.
We see things differently.
In ’67 you had not married yet and we all
wondered why never worrying about
marriage laws or rabbinic power.
And now more than 20 years later
you live in Jerusalem ruling
from your lacquered kitchen and sit
in that dream house trapped:
enough food in your mouth
in your children’s and enough warm things
for winter (coats shoes woolen stockings
good for Siberia)
and there’s no way out no one to call
about a bad marriage. It’s simple:
a woman without bruises
your lawyer says there’s not much hope
and you accept it:
I can’t say I’m happy but
I’ve got a truce.
Things fester. We compromise.
We wake up take new positions
to suit new visions failed dreams
We change. Power does not so much corrupt
as blur the edges
so we no longer feel the raw fear
that pounds in the hearts
of those trapped and helpless.
In ’67 in Chicago we though we’d be safe
locking the windows til Speck was caught.
We did not know there was a danger
in us as well that we must remain vigilant
and open not to power
but to peace.
