semitism.net

Here is the third of the parasha poems. I’m trying to write one each week, based on the Torah portion of the previous Saturday. The portion this past week introduced Joseph; but the character who interested me the most was Judah. If you read the portion, you’ll see there’s this long digression about Judah, his sons, and his failure to arrange a proper second marriage for his daughter-in-law Tamara after her first husband dies. One of the more touching incidentals in the passage is Judah’s friendship with Hirah, the Adullamite. It’s especially interesting because it’s a cross-ethnic friendship, which the text neither approves nor condemns. Anyhow, this poem is trying to find a modern voice for Judah…

Hirah is always on the corner
Where the steps down to the basement of his grocery
are covered by bright green doors.

He sits on a folding chair
next to bins of oranges and bananas,
and also cassava roots and yams and guava.

He once offered me an ackee.
It looked like it was looking at me with three eyes.
I said, “No, thank you.”

Once this was a Jewish neighborhood. Hardly any of us are left.
After the war, people started saying “The schvartzes are moving in” -
They all went up to Westchester. Or Connecticut.

I said, “What do you care, the schvartzes?
What is a schvartze but a different-colored Jew?
The guys to watch out for are the ones in the big offices uptown.”

Later there were broken windows and some streets you avoided at night.
By that time, Shui was dead
and I was too old to settle in a new place.

The Jewish Home is not for me.
No. They’ll find me in my apartment some day.
What do I care?

So, I, an old Jew -
I go up almost every day now
and sit with Hirah.

I smoke. He doesn’t.

Hirah has been here forever.
Do you know, he introduced me to Shui?
“Look at that girl,” he said: brown skin, black hair, big eyes. Beautiful.

Oi, were my parents mad.
I could never do right by my father.
None of us could, only Joseph.

With Shua I had three children.
Ernie was killed in the war.
And that Tamar he married! –

She was a nafka. I’ll say it- a whore.
While Ernie was overseas, she fooled around with his brother.
I think she gave him something.

He died and she wanted Shelah.
“No,” I said. “You’re bad luck.
Not my youngest. Stay away from Shelah”

She wanted children, a family.
She came to me one night
after Shua died.

In the dark I felt hair, teeth, skin.
I thought it was some girl Hirah had sent
to comfort me.

That was a side-business, for him.
I didn’t see it was Tamar.
Months later, I found out.

Now she lives in Yonkers with the twins.
They hardly feel like mine.
She was right. I shouldn’t have interfered between her and Shelah.

Maybe I need three eyes, like the ackee.
And Joseph,
with his visions:

he was right too.
He said he would rule over us
and there he is,

in his big uptown office, gantseh mentsh, with his expensive suit.
He was very gracious about it, really -
considering that we tried to murder him.

These people who can see the future -
feh.
What I know, I learned the hard way.

Every morning I take the elevator down.
I ask the boy about his family in Eritrea and give him a dollar or two
if I have it.

With my arthritis, it takes me a long time
to walk to the corner.
I notice where the water pools

between the paving stones
after it rains.
I see when the red oak in the park starts to bud.

I smell peanuts and pizza and coffee.
I see people come and go.
I notice when they have children and when they die.

This is it: the present. It’s a suit, I think
that God wears
on special occasions.

Lucky us.

When I get to Hirah’s store
there’s a folding chair waiting for me.
We can sit there all day, without saying anything.