CLAL on Culture Archive

Welcome to CLAL on Culture where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on contemporary culture: high and low, material and ethereal, trendy and retro, Jewish and otherwise. Every other week you will find something new on this page.

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Poems for Yom Hashoah

By Janet R. Kirchheimer

At The Picture Window      

The snow falls
and I watch my father
shovel the driveway
and the more he shovels
the more snow
falls and he
can’t clear away
the snow and I
can’t stop the snow
from turning to ashes
before it falls to the ground. 

For Ruth, My Father’s Sister 

In an old black and white photograph
you looked just like Dorothy
with long, dark braids
and a small black dog on your lap.

But it was not Kansas, and
you could not click your heels
three times and go home,
you did not own
a pair of ruby slippers,

and the yellow brick road
did not lead to the gates
of the Emerald City.

 

It Has Been Reported  

Swiss banks laundered money and gold for the Nazis.
I ask my mother if any of our relatives had money in Swiss banks.
She says no.
I ask my father.
He tells me his mother had gold in her teeth.

Opa 

As a child I wished you
survived Auschwitz, survived
each selection, survived
the work details, the experiments.

I wished you were liberated at the end
of the war, were stuck behind the Iron Curtain,
had amnesia and couldn’t remember us,
or didn’t know how to find us in America.

I wished one day you’d knock on our front door
and tell me what my father was like as a boy.

Civic Duty

Welcome to jury duty. 
We'll try to make this as painless
as possible, says the man in charge. 
He means it as a joke. 
I notice he carries a gun. 

I begin to knit, knit one,
purl two, knit one, purl two,
the needles click clack.

He announces we are about to begin
the selection process. 
I drop a stitch.
If I call your name report to the left.
He calls my name.

 

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