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Dear Reader,
A number is exact. Something so clear can give you a sense of understanding, even over a news cycle this unwieldy. I’ve been holding onto numbers. It’s been thirteen days since Donald Trump declared himself a nationalist. Since then, as if deputized, there have been four separate, calculated terrorist attacks from people on the far right, one of which became the deadliest anti-Semitic attack on US soil.
In her must-read poem below, Anya Josephs writes, “i can tell you number / after number / after number / after number / but i cannot tell you the stories, which are the things that really matter” and she’s right, so let’s tell each other stories, beyond the facts, that can illuminate what we’ve lost and what we could gain. Let’s sing, pray, cry, rejoice, and never, never forget our history, because as Marya Zilberberg reminds us, “history never ends.”
Let’s read each other poetry.
-J Spagnolo
Editor
Poets Reading the News
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Numbers
Anya Josephs
other than the names of food1
and the nonsense words of a song my grandfather used to sing2
in his wavering and tone-deaf old-man voice and also the two
words he used to call me which were “avud alshig” and which sometimes became part of the song and which mean “little girl” though i am not sure which word is which, aside from these i know exactly twelve
words in armenian: i can say “hello.3”
i can say “priest.4”
and i can count to ten.
on the street corners of paris, when i was nineteen
i saw for the first time the signs which number
the arrondissements and some of which also number
how many were taken how many were killed how many of those were children: thousands,
sometimes, from a single neighborhood, from a single street, alongside the words, “avec la complicité active” of the french government and at the time i remember that i wondered how you can be actively complicit anyway but i also remember being impressed that they bothered to put the signs up at all and horrified but not surprised at how big the numbers
were. i was living in the tenth
and every day i would walk by the sign and think about the numbers
of children that had lived in the house where i now lived and how numbers
were written on their arms and now they are remembered only as numbers
in new york city i was rushing to see a play as i did so many
times and i was running down forty-second
street and i saw it a billboard which read: truth = peace which is an equation
which does not quite make sense when it is presented alongside a link to factcheckarmenia.com which is a website that denies the turkish genocide of one point five million
armenian people between 1915
and 1917
a billboard which goes alongside: the official position of the turkish government, the opinion of the average turkish citizen, and the unspoken approval of the united states which has never acknowledged the genocide5
i walk down forty-second
street only three
weeks later and the billboard has been replaced with a photograph of a dark-haired little girl and the text “i remember what my family survived for me” with the child’s name and the words fourth
generation genocide survivor and i, too, am a fourth
generation genocide survivor on my mother’s side and a third
generation genocide survivor on my father’s side and i stopped for a minute on forty-second
street while people hurried past me and i stared at the billboard and i cried because i thought:
at least someone else remembers too and i thought thank g-d i never have to look at that awful genocide-denying billboard again and i thought my g-d what a heavy burden for a little girl to carry how much to remember and i thought not as heavy as watching your family be murdered and i thought is that the only reason to survive for me all for me and i thought then i realize i thought then that little girl and i had no burden but to tell these stories and that was heavy enough
in front of the jewish museum of paris there are four
security guards and i saw one
of them push a woman (headscarf, stroller, baby) off the sidewalk and onto the street. i did not say anything to the guard. but i helped the woman with the baby back onto the sidewalk. i think i helped the woman up. i don’t remember. but i remember thinking about the street signs and as i walked through the museum i saw the sacred ark left behind in 1476
and the tombstone of the martyrs of the thirteenth
century and the edict which in 1306
expelled the jews of france for the first
of many, many times that we would be expelled from that particular country let alone all the others and i thought: thousands
of years running from place to place and six million
dead and is it still only fear and never compassion that we have learned6
around the corner from my old apartment on beverly glen boulevard in los angeles there is a large synagogue. the entrance is manned by one
security guard, who always smiled at me when i walk by although this was not the synagogue that i attended. in the previous six
days there had been over forty
bomb threats made against US synagogues and so then there were two
guards at the large synagogue around the corner from my old apartment on beverly glen boulevard and one
of them, the new one, who must be younger than i am, has a gun. he nodded at me, and smiled, as i walk past him. it was january and the sun is shining. this was months ago and yet i remember quite clearly being
both afraid and ashamed. afraid that something will happen to me. ashamed that i could be so selfish. ashamed that i was relieved at the thought that at least one
of the men who walk around with guns is keeping me safe, for once
since in the last hundred
years my family spent a lot of time being chased out of their homes by men with guns and that even if that man with the gun is only nineteen
years old even if i don’t think anyone should have guns at all actually even if really i’m just being paranoid even if — oh yes i am ashamed but i am glad
and for the first
time in six
days i didn’t have the dream the one
i can’t stop having the one
where they come for my parents and they come for me the way they came for my great-grandparents and their great-grandparents and their great-grandparents every four
generations for several
thousand
years7
there are two
quotes i wish everyone could hear. this is one
i should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. go ahead, destroy armenia. see if you can do it. send them into the desert without bread or water. burn their homes and churches. then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. for when two
of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a new armenia8.
and this is the other one:
who remembers the armenians.
this was said by adolf hitler, in 1939
twenty
years after my mother’s grandparents fled to make a new armenia in this country and six
years before my father’s parents would learn, horrified, that the communities they left behind to make a new life in this country no longer existed and that everyone they had known before had been murdered and that was seventy two
years ago today as of today the day that i write this seventy two
years and i can tell you that there were one point five million
armenians killed in the genocide and that there were six million
jews killed in the holocaust and i can tell you that four
generations later the pain has only just started to fade and i can tell that there were nine hundred and thirty seven
jews aboard the st louis alone trying to get into this country and you let them die and i can tell you that eight
months ago an executive order was signed to keep out refugees from four
majority muslim countries and i can tell you that there are three thousand five hundred
frightened people, of whom two thousand and three hundred are children, who have left behind their homes and their countries and everyone they know to be met not with open arms but with fifteen thousand
men with guns and i can tell you that three million
women marched in the streets and screamed their pain and no one listened and i can tell you that eleven
people were killed this shabbat, while welcoming a baby who was only eight
days old into our tribe and now he will always know that to be one
of us means death and means pain and means you never know when your neighbors are going to try to kill you and i can tell you number
after number
after number
after number
but i cannot tell you the stories, which are the things that really matter, because i only know twelve
words of armenian so i could not understand. and no one
talks about it anyway.
and even if we could
how would we find the words
to say
it is happening
again.
_______________________
1 lehmujan. kofte. choreg.
2 dadi lo lo dadi lo lo dai dai
3 so i have all the necessary vocabulary for a trip to the bakery, anyway. inchbesses. choreg. meg. i can interact with my culture only by consuming it. i think this explains a few things about me.
4 which is also the word for “father,” which is ironic because it is not my father’s half
of me
5 this is not a very poetic word but i feel quite obligated to use it as often as possible. in fact the american government has referred to “war crimes” and to “atrocities” but will not say “genocide” so i will
6 why don’t i remember? is it because i am afraid? is it because i am ashamed? i am both
i know that i am both
7 you try having multiple genocides on each side of your family. see how well you sleep.
8 this was said by william saroyan, and it is quoted incessantly by armenians everywhere as they build again their churches and museums and bakeries and recreate a new armenia
What Grief and Loss
Yvonne Daley
What grief and loss had you already
Packed into your siddur of sorrows
Daniel Joyce Richard and Rose each
A bough in the Tree of Life
Old and older the synagogue’s steady hand
The spine of faith the bullet’s burn
Bernice and Sylvan no quiet rest no goodbye
The last Shabbat for brothers David and Cecil
How hate percolating behind closed doors
Took Irving from his quiet life, a grandfather
As Jerry and Melvin too, unwarned except the vitriol
A species’ evolutionary triumph: the loner’s poison
Repeated and repeated again, the deadly dose
Unheeded unstopped fed from the top
Our free speech a weapon in the coarsening
The devolution. Alas, the withering tree.
America’s Covenant
Marya Zilberberg
In the aftermath, what’s left? A few stains on the floor, an echo of voices (yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba) and bullets (clap-clap-clap), a vanishing sense of peace (shalom). Sabbath (Shabbat), we are taught, is a covenant, a curvature in space-time subject to gravitational deceleration (Einstein’s general relativity). We convene. We burrow. A bris is a commandment (mitzvah), a contract, a wax seal on our relationship with God. The Sabbath on the seventh day of the week, a bris on the eighth day of life, one a summation, the other a gate toward, a promise of a future, a liminal existence of one with the other (the present).
A thunderclap of doors thrown open, a rush to receive a stranger with hollow eyes and a soul filled with death. Was there time to blink, to kiss the Torah, to cover their heads with prayer shawls (tallitot)? Did the old ones recognize the madness even they had believed would never again be a part of the vocabulary of the species? (Never Again.) Was God present in the wedge between the arms reaching to embrace and the sprays of crimson and lead, grief once again soaking the earth in response to a reach for some psychotic divine, America’s covenant bleeding?
We sing. We praise. We cry. We rejoice. Our mouths caress the names of our dead. We pack them in our suitcases, just in case. We keep them by the door, touch them like the sacred scroll (mezuzah), kiss the air where their breath lingers. Because “never” and “always” are luxuries we cannot yet afford. Because history never ends. Because peace (shalom) is “a thing with feathers.”
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Work and Days
Devon Balwit
Originally published in World, 13 January 2018
Nine years in the Gulag, Little Weather Devil,
hid her wit
in the palm of her hand from the hangman’s rope
from the bullets aiming
to still it, her secret, stick-figure self not erased
for 115 pages.
Riding wolf-back, stubbornly wielding her shovel,
her avatar was not undone
by losing her coat, her last piece of bread,
her husband, her son.
She preserved, despite grief, Pushkin and Lermontov,
Hesiod and Latin axioms,
the whole damned world, distilled to pocketed
brightness, to a miracle
passed hand to hand until, stubbornly, like her body,
it was freed.
She responded to evil with something of quality,
her publisher marvels.
Stalin wanted to wipe her from the earth.
Instead, he is gone
while Olga M. Ranitskaya’s Little Weather Devil
remains.
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