New original works by local Jewish writers
Galicia 1890
by laurel benjamin
Berezhany (Brzezany), town in Eastern Galicia of Western Ukraine: formerly in USSR 1944–1991, Poland 1921–1939, and Austria-Hungary 1772–1918
Russians called them the stupidest Jews in all of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
as they drove through breasts, leaving only the man who
supplied them with bread, eggs, and leather.
That evening the vase stood where he had left it on the small table
delicate blue flower pattern, his wife and children absent, bed clothes strewn,
and in the cream colored fabric, curly hair. They held him
for hours in his own shop, and when he turned his eyes to the road,
tornadoes of dust warming in what light was left, he saw
human forms wriggling, vital fluid, palette of red,
a child’s head facing the wrong way, kerchiefed women
pointing towards the forest, and tomorrow would be Shabbat, but the temple
engulfed in flames — He saw the lines of good and evil
drawn as on a yellowed map, Rabbis and craftsmen
in the foothills of the Carpathians, bordered by the Dnister River.
He was just a man, not my family,
but scrap of fabric in hand, he witnessed a girl leaving —
my grandmother, boots in mud.
Her sisters’ wedding bands sold, she made her way to an island,
New York tenement and a dinner table with middlemen below
chanting, the sons of cantors selling chickens and corn.
She outlived her first husband, her second, sisters, and son.
With the diamond edges of a needle, silk thread attached,
she sewed in her Queens apartment for 80 years
fingers working with the rhythm of her voice
reverse words in English, a symptom of Yiddish,
plaid cotton smock crisp, the body’s insistence for sharpness.
Now I make my way to the island, pausing
mid-winter. It appears more pixilated, blurring
into doubles. Boxes under the bed,
cotton smocks folded with a few grey hairs, recipes.
Curtains softly flutter, reminder that when she spoke her hands
used long brush strokes, and when she stopped
they echoed through all borders.
Laurel Benjamin teaches English at Laney College in Oakland. She is a member of the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Teance writing group. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She lives in Albany. Her personal essays appear on her blog: http://thebadgerpress.blogspot.com.