Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss

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Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss Page 13

by Unknown


  In 1939, my father began an odyssey through Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy and eventually left Europe illegally, headed for the United States. He was stranded on Ellis Island for four months until the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society offered him the opportunity to go to the Dominican Republic, where President Rafael Trujillo had created a safe haven—an agricultural settlement for the Jews—called Sosua. My father became one of the first settlers of Sosua; he was a farmer, then an importer/ exporter. He later moved to the capital city, Santo Domingo (then known as Cuidad Trujillo), where he lived throughout the war years.

  My mother was unable to get exit papers to leave Europe, so she remained in Prague, working illegally, until she was deported to Terezin, with her father, on July 23, 1942. She had exceptional stenography and typing skills, in both German and Czech, and became very useful in the central office of Terezin, where she worked the night shift, typing the lists of names of individuals to be transported to the east. My mother remained in Terezin until she was liberated in 1945. My father’s parents, two sisters, two brothers-in-law, nephew, and his brother’s wife and daughter perished in Auschwitz. My mother’s two brothers were sent East. One was shot in a mass execution, the other perished in Dachau. My mother’s father died of dysentery in Terezin. In 1946, my mother joined my father in the Dominican Republic, and I was born there in 1947.

  I live my life in the present, a contemporary woman with a family, a profession, and an unyielding sensuous enchantment with the world. I gravitate toward a kind of surrealism in my work and allow my senses to be my interpreter as I write of lost people, another time and place, shadows and grief. I fuse the tangible objects and recollections I keep from my childhood with those stories heard in fragments and whispers, those ephemeral pieces of my history and of those people whose photos fill the old brown leather box in my parents’ closet—people who look like me, laughing in the sun, standing by lakes, in the mountains, walking, arms linked, with lovers or friends on cobblestone streets, whose faces I know, but whom I’ve never met, people who did not return, but who live in my poetry.

  In Berlin

  Through a neon tunnel

  of pink yellow light

  a woman emerges and

  steps off the curb into pouring rain

  her black velvet cape skimming

  puddles, a rhinestone tiara

  making an inverted rain shower of

  hot white above her dark hair.

  She hurries to a café under the tracks

  where the vibrations of trains

  shake the wine glasses on tables

  swilling garnet liquid against

  the hard sides of the crystal.

  She can stay only a short while

  as she must weave a shroud

  before dawn. It will be red because the water

  runs red from the faucets, like someone

  bleeding into the pipes,

  in this city of trains, this city

  where mementos of destruction

  begging to be forgotten

  fit just inside hidden pockets,

  cower under black velvet capes,

  and leach into rhinestone fingers.

  In the House of the Thousand Candles

  In the house of the thousand candles

  old women pray for the safe return of soldiers

  while eating little duck hearts sautéed in butter.

  Fig and almond orchards grow in the place

  where the sky and earth meet. When their prayers go unheeded,

  the old women wrap holy stones in white lace-trimmed handkerchiefs

  and place them inside the coffins of their dead men.

  Draped in black, they sit at heavy tables and eat yogurt with date honey.

  Oddly, there are pink roses in silver pitchers on the mantle.

  On days when their prayers are answered

  the old women cover their shoulders with small white shawls

  and light a thousand candles in the windows

  overlooking the sea. After dinner they open crimson umbrellas,

  and walk arm in arm in the black of night.

  Berlin Fragments

  Platinum hair slicked back

  a young waiter in a café

  brings me rolls and marmalade.

  At the edge of a horizon

  an industrial chimney

  spits gray smoke...

  Stay on the S-Bahn line

  No. 1 until the last stop.

  It’s just a short ride to

  Sachsenhausen

  OPEN DAILY

  from 8:30 A.M. until 4:30 P.M.

  Dresden saucers in the window

  of a dark antique shop

  on a ruler-straight boulevard.

  The buses run precisely on time.

  Why Marlene Didn’t Come Back to the Fatherland

  They say Marlene Dietrich

  was married in the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church

  which is now a war memorial, half bombed out,

  iridescent blue at night. Across the street,

  in Berlin’s largest department store,

  people in scarves and coats sample wursts,

  cheeses, and coffee on a February afternoon

  in the food emporium on the sixth floor.

  I buy slippers for my father in that store,

  wondering whose feet have been in them.

  The chanteuse, dead now, lies under birch

  trees in the Stubenrauchstrasse Cemetery

  while her 440 pairs of shoes, 400 hats,

  150 pairs of gloves, 300 dresses and suits,

  are piled in a brick warehouse

  in the Spandau district waiting for cataloging.

  They joke there is enough to stock the women’s

  section of Berlin’s largest department store.

  The right wing to this day doesn’t like her.

  They think she sold out to Hollywood,

  was a traitor to the Fatherland—though there are some

  who regularly send sprays of white roses for her grave.

  My father says the slippers don’t quite fit.

  Something on the inside is rubbing a sore.

  Memory Interruptus

  Roll call and she stood for hours...

  with the small pot she found...

  wedged between her legs... so later...

  she and her sisters...who...because

  they were blond and young... were often...

  well...so what was it?...

  oh yes...so they could boil

  the two potatoes...they had hidden

  in the wall of the lager…

  The Absurd Messiah

  It will be in the season

  of the magnolia’s blossoming.

  The messiah will wear

  a helmet and biker’s spandex

  when he arrives holding

  in one hand photographs

  of someone’s dead lovers,

  and cupped in the hollow of the other,

  the foggy bellow of a French horn.

  Two cranes destined for each other

  will collide, then part. In a café

  on a side street lovers will smoke

  cigars and eat black olives with onions.

  Women will seduce men

  by crying. And then,

  after one full year of light,

  followed by a hundred of darkness,

  a crescent moon will hang backwards

  in a night silent as the inside of a violin.

  Die Nachtigall

  It means the nightingale and it’s because

  he sings not on stage anymore but in cafés

  late at night where he makes rounds with his

  German songs at his side, pulling off a black

  felt hat—his small head with toothless mouth

  perched above a checkered scarf—and then

  pulls from his pocket old news clippings

  from a time when he was young though

&
nbsp; he claims still to be less than 31 years old,

  this nachtigall who has been out of work

  for more than one third of his “age,” who

  sings for his supper and gums a smile

  while he moves on to the next café and the next

  as young people endlessly smoke cigarettes

  and the city quiets down, this nachtigall

  who flits as if he were moving between

  the branches of lilac bushes in the spring

  carrying under his thin wings

  the tunes of their thousand souls.

  The Tattoo Lady

  It’s a blue blur on her arm

  while she reaches

  across the table for a fig.

  You don’t see it at first.

  You think your eyes

  are playing tricks, that there’s

  a smudge, must be some ink

  from a letter she was writing

  to one of her unaccented kids

  in some American city.

  She reaches over again

  and you look hard. And then you see it.

  It makes you think maybe

  you should drop a note to her kid

  and say I saw your mother

  and she’s OK and I guess

  you know this but somehow

  she can’t get rid of that tattoo.

  And then you want to say to that kid,

  you must have spent your childhood

  trying to rub it off.

  Sister Maria Roberta Says the Dead Miss Us and Are Jealous

  There’s a coffin on the gondola

  and the woman going to the funeral

  has one hip higher than the other. Her name is

  Sister Maria Roberta. Later, over a wooden table,

  in the shadow of death and afternoon light,

  she fills a white ceramic bowl with pomegranates,

  talking of angels. Her favorite is called Pascal.

  Sister Maria Roberta talks incessantly and sprinkles aromatic ashes

  on bread hot from the oven. One prayer will take away

  one hour of fire from hell she says. Sister Maria Roberta

  grinds seeds, and says death builds its scratchy nest,

  and carries under his hairy arm the blue straw of our muscles.

  Sister Maria Roberta says that five generations of the dead

  attend each wedding and even the blind must bless the moon.

  Music for Lovers and Then Others

  Cosima Wagner woke up one morning

  to the sound of a full orchestra in the hallway

  at the bottom of the stairs because, for her birthday,

  her husband, Richard, had written a symphony.

  Richard was not known for such sentimentality.

  But for Cosima, the mother of his children,

  and from whom he could not be parted,

  Richard would do anything. His tenderness to her

  masked his passion against things he did not like.

  Anarchist, vegetarian, anti-Semite, Richard regarded himself

  as the “most German of men” and after tea

  each day, played long melodies for Cosima.

  When Cosima died it would be twelve years

  before someone played Richard’s music

  as accompaniment to the parting of wives, husbands,

  and children in the stained courtyards of Poland.

  Lovers and Gravediggers

  In exchange for a bed with sheets, nine men,

  two of them medical doctors,

  hire themselves out as dancers at an elegant

  hotel in Italy sometime in 1939. Like lovers,

  sporting pencil-thin mustaches and white summer suits,

  they lean on the arms of heavily upholstered

  chairs in the gilded lobby, waiting for perfumed

  women in good leather high heels with thin ankle straps.

  But who comes instead is a woman in a brown

  form-fitting suit, Persian lamb at the cuffs,

  sheer stockings with seams like line drawings

  down the center of each leg. She wears

  no perfume and is sad: she has come from a funeral

  where the gravediggers set up chairs on the muddy

  hump of dirt under which her mother is buried.

  The woman tells the nine men, two of them medical doctors,

  how she watched someone sit on her mother’s neck

  throughout the funeral. One of the lovers

  with a pencil-thin mustache begins to cry,

  surprised at his own sentimentality.

  The woman in brown decides to call him

  “my pretty man.” They leave together to settle

  near the graveyard where angels sing under lampposts.

  A Shawl of Spanish Moss

  listen: in the rain forest behind banana trees

  a sugar bird chirps

  can it finally

  be time for the end of grief?

  dust off the coffin and sing songs

  plant the moonflower atop the dirt

  but don’t forget: in Poland

  grave no. 3 had 2000

  grave no. 6 had 800

  grave no. 2 had only 1

  my father must be in grave no. 2

  can it finally

  be time for the end of grief?

  don’t be fooled:

  grief remains distilled

  and draped over the shoulders

  a shawl of Spanish moss,

  that fibrous lace, a boa of bones...

  A Small Piece of Blotting Paper

  The summer she can’t stop crying

  she opens an old leather case

  filled with partially used

  toiletries and finds a small piece

  of blotting paper which holds

  the handwriting of her father.

  Two immortals catch her eye

  from the left side of the room

  and on the right, thin-boned,

  white-haired women wear masks

  and beaded dresses.

  She anoints the edges of the pillows

  and the lace antimacassars

  with his cologne, the oils

  of his scent. A coronation of grief.

  Closing the old leather case

  she puts it under her arm

  and walks down the rain-slicked street,

  the words of her father’s letters imbedded

  in the blotting paper in the box

  and indelibly, under her skin.

  Outside, a woman, her belly big with child,

  sells blue flowers and on the train to Paris,

  a man looks at a young woman’s legs while

  he reads Primo Levi because he knows

  the dead see the dead before they die.

  How a Child of Survivors Says Good-Bye

  First of all, we never say good-bye.

  It’s see you soon. And then, whether

  someone is off to the grocery store

  or en route to, let’s say, Paris,

  we add I love you be careful and more

  see you soons. In the time before

  we were born people left thinking

  they would come back but they didn’t.

  So, as if to cast a spell of protection,

  we hug and kiss even when they

  look at us and say But I’m not going off to war!

  (What do they know?) Then—we wait,

  in a fluttering kind of anxiousness,

  until the door flies open, spilling bags or suitcases

  and we breathe again until

  the next (good-bye) see you soon.

  Lullaby to my Father When He Finds His Mother at Long Last

  We are freezing down here and the Amaryllis has broken ground

  like a small dove trying to reach heaven.

  I go to the next room and think of Saturday afternoons

  when I used to boil pot
atoes for your lunch.

  Then I ride my bicycle to Paris where on the right side of the street

  I see the man who makes doll furniture carving a wooden cradle.

  You would have painted it white.

  Your mother is kissing you a hundred times.

  I take from my pocket the last of the cake, balls of crumbs

  rolling in the black cotton place. You bought me red corals

  from a vendor by the sea but I think when the circus comes,

  I will not wear red anymore. Did you notice?

  you followed the small dove and left me here

  to tend the Amaryllis. Did you notice?

  your mother is kissing you a hundred times.

  MIRIAM MÖRSEL NATHAN’s poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Gargoyle; Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture; The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review; Sojourner: The Women’s Forum; the GW Forum and Moment Magazine. Her work is also included in the anthology From Daughters and Sons: What I’ve Never Said (Story Line Press, 2001) and Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin, 1984-2001. She has read her work at The Knitting Factory and The Jewish Museum in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, Cable TV’s “Takoma Coffee House,” and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has been awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is Director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival. She and her husband live in Maryland and have three children.

  Chapter 12: Letting Myself Feel Lucky by Lily Brett

  For my late mother, Rose Brett,

  and my father, Max Brett

 

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