Poems: A Crown for Yiddish

December 28, 2009

A Crown for Yiddish (Antwerp: A Crown of Sonnets)

Diamonds, Art Nouveau, Flemish bric-a-brac
an inexhaustible supply of rain
and every once in a while, on a bike,
a black-suited, black-hatted bearded man
his hat made rainproof with a plastic bag
like the ones that dangle, bulging, from his handle-bars.
At first I half think it’s a sight gag,
that I’ve landed on some rain-drenched Jewish Mars,
but this is Antwerp, universal clearinghouse
for the commodity for people on the run –
and we’re famous for leaving in a rush –
still harping on the bread we couldn’t let rise …
which might explain the power of adaptation –
of our other portable prized possession: Yiddish

It’s precisely for that prized, portable Yiddish
that I’m wandering around in this unlikely
city, where it’s said against all odds to flourish..
Don’t tell me there’s Yiddish on Eastern Parkway;
I wanted it at its source: its native Europe.
Besides, the Brooklyn version is trumped up –
a non-holy Jewish tongue. I pity the children
growing up with no real conversation
in a language their parents can only speak
so badly that I’m able to understand them –
I who possess such a modicum
of the language that I once earned the wisecrack
You speak Yiddish like a convert. ( I was stung.
By rights, it should be my native tongue.)

III

By rights it should be my native tongue –
and I can barely distinguish it from Flemish –
(I’m eavesdropping , as I move among
the crowds in the diamond district. Yiddish!
on a cell phone no less! A shanem dank
he says it and I think it – a particular
I’ll savor forever: a shanem dank
to you, black-hatted man: Yiddish cellular.
What Yiddish I have is from the phone;
my father-in-law at my house, after his stroke,
having more on less the same conversation
a dozen times time a day, better than a textbook:
The kids were spoiled, noisy, the house a mess –
his son was on him like the SS.

They’d have come up sooner or later, the SS,
entangled as they were in the fate of Yiddish –
and, as I’d find out from Hugo Klaus
(The Sorrows of Belgium) in part Flemish:
the SS Volunteer Verband Flandern –
had a thousand Flemish volunteers –
not really a fact you want to learn
when you’re on a search for Yiddish in Flanders –
though – in retrospect– hardly a shock,
ambient hatred more or less a stock
component of Yiddish; it ricochets,
secreting in the simplest Yiddish phrase
a detonator with a short, short fuse:
that ragtag eloquence: nothing to lose

A ragtag eloquence – nothing to lose –
but that’s not accurate – there is something;
where else are you invited to confuse
pathos with precision comic timing ,
suspect the gravity of any word,
turn it inside out, upside down?
ransack every language ever heard
for its choicest tidbits, make them your own
even – who else is there? – your enemies.’
No doubt a thousand years of constant quibbling
would give any language the expertise
to deflect incursions from the outside,
however vicious , however disabling –
that is, short of wholesale genocide

Once you mention wholesale genocide,
it seems obscene to focus on a language –
but words are palpable, unlike the dead …
and these the only remnants of my lineage
that is, assuming that they do remain
beyond, say, the messer, goppel, leffel
confused with one another in my brain –
fork, spoon, knife interchangeable –
though how hard would it really have been
messer: knife, leffel:, fork, goppel: spoon …
to distinguish the components of the gibberish
happening around me all the time –
though who am I kidding – do I really wish
this were an Yiddish, not an English, poem ?

VII

This is an English, not a Yiddish poem
though my grandparents died of natural
causes, native Yiddish speakers all.
So the SS have to share the blame
for the fate of Yiddish with PS 63,,
The Shadow, Betty Boop, the pledge of allegiance
that first-generation, go-getter diligence
my parents managed to pass on to me
that stopped on a dime with my children –
though I give their names the same diminutive
my father always tacked onto mine,
his exaggerated, head-shaking “ Jakele”
inside my Magdale! Dorale !Malkele!
if a habit dies hard, will it survive?

VIII

If a habit does hard, will it survive?
Should it ? or is it pure sentimentality
that makes me long for Yiddish alive—
brings me to this ramshackle balcony
to sit among these women who won’t show
their hair or let their voices be heard
(men are present). My lone contralto
half protest, half involuntary reflex
since these are melodies I’ve always sung.
But who am I to say these rules are wrong?
What do I know? It works for them …
I forfeited my rights, rode the tram
to get here on this Holy Sabbath day.
How dare I sing along, pretend to pray?

How dare I sing along, pretend to pray?
I’ve only come here hoping to listen in
to bits of Yiddish gossip sotto voce,
and then to hear my second Yiddish sermon.
My first was at sixteen: on Yom Kippur,
at the shtibl favored by my high-school crush;
zeyer a beautifuleh . .. .is all I remember . .
and the noisy women’s section’s sudden hush
when the rabbi announced the men’s donations.
But the gossip here has French intonations,
the sermons’s in Hebrew . I rise to leave
when the Cantor starts announcing the new month, Av
with such intensity, I’m almost driven
myself to love of Torah, awe of heaven

A life of love of Torah, awe of heaven
He repeats the line again again again
Life. Love. Torah. Awe. Heaven.
a fresh inflection with each repetition
as if to underline his words’ pursuit
of what can’t be captured – Torah and heaven
at once elusive and infinite.
Precisely this is what is to daven –
I’m getting my Yiddish lesson after all.
Why am I so astonished by the obvious?
that these scales and scales of notes per syllable –
exaggerated, even ridiculous –
keep a fragile universe alive.
Without them, the month might not arrive . .

Without them, the month might not arrive.
But then who wants it? the month of Av,
when we’re meant to mourn, to fast and grieve
(our memories if nothing else survive)
for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem
and yet his announcement gives me comfort.
Call me a sucker. It’s what I am
How else explain my thrill at every word
of Yiddish uttered on the Pelikanstraat
as if it saved my essence from collapse . .
But I hear little of it, I’m getting desperate.
Maybe, despite the shreimels and skullscaps,
here, as in Brooklyn, Yiddish is stale
mazel und bruche at a diamond sale

XII

Mazel and bruche at a diamond sale .
Everyone says it – Christians,Hindus
(do Muslims trade diamonds?) when the sale if final.
They mistranslate and mangle the phrase
on the diamond museum’s audioguide.
Luck and blessing, it means is luck and blessing;
which seems to me a bit of wishful thinking
given the ugly source of what they trade . .
And the traders so fastidious lest their food –
(not just the Jews, but the vegetarian Hindus
whom I’ve seen eating kosher felafel and humus)
be tainted with the smallest drop of blood.
But let’s not go there. Business is business
My survivor father-in-law owned a slaughterhouse.

XIII

My survivor father-in-law owned a slaughterhouse
for pigs in North Philly – he’d shlep carcasses
alongside his workers, local black guys
whom he turned into Shmulkes, Yankels, Moishes,
names they’d answer to, cutting him slack,
(He worked in short sleeves; they’d seen his arm.)
Besides, if you were thick-skinned, he had charm,
though this chicken is good, not like last week
was the only sort of praise he’d ever give –
the birthright of a language whose first narrative
closes with a prayer to reach Jerusalem
or at least a village nearby. That Yiddish is gone.
How could it function here? It loathes the solemn.
I give up and cross the river for the skyline.

XIV

I give up and cross the river for the skyline,
but here’s a playground full of boys in yarmulkes
and girls in long skirts …their bright commotion
as they slide head first and crowd the monkey bars
so high-pitched and pristine, so sweet, so fresh
it takes me a minute to realize it’s Yiddish –
the real thing. I barely make out a word,
it’s as if my bubbe were on a sliding board –
though in my memory she’s far more like
the gossiping mothers sitting on the bench.
There’s no Flemish anywhere or even French.
Perhaps I’m dreaming this? When I come back
the few children here are speaking Arabic
beneath a skyline of Flemish bric-a-bac

One last diamond among the bric-a-brac
our once ubiquitous possession: Yiddish
still breathing, still some children’s native tongue,
despite modernity, despite the SS
despite how much we’ have had to lose
(who can calculate the reach of genocide?)
Surely, one of them will write a poem –
– habits die hard; poems survive –
will want to sing herself, not simply pray,
despite the allure of Torah, of heaven,
want a really new month to arrive,
a different kind of luck, a different blessing,
an end to slaughter, or at least a safe house
in a little town nearby, just past the skyline.

Poems: A Crown for Yiddish

Jacqueline Osherow

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