Poems from The End of Exile

The Curse and the Blessings

The desire to forget prolongs exile.
The secret of redemption is memory.
   Ba’al Shem Tov

Bubby Fegila made us swear
we’d never go back.
It is a terrible country, she told us.
In 1930, before she would marry,
she needed the promise of a one-way
ticket out. All she wanted was to leave
her tiny village, Czyzew,
between Bialystok and Warsaw.
Forget and start over.

Because we wanted to see for ourselves
what she’d left we broke the promise.
And when we got home we had nothing
to show. The memory chip of our brand-new camera
was corrupted, the pictures all gone.
Bubby’s curse or was it her blessing
we were forced to look deeper,
remember, recover.

How when we ate the borscht, pierogis,
kreplach, we could have been in her kitchen.
How when we listened to the music –
Chopin in Warsaw, Klezmer in Krakow –
she could have been sitting under the same trees,
on the same bench in the park, hearing it too.

What she could never have known –
the sound of five hundred Polish people
singing along in the synagogue with the cantor
in their complicated Slavic tongue mixed
with Hebrew words they knew by heart.
How we wept when they sang Shlomo Carlebach’s
Return Again, Return to the Land of your Soul
as the broken shards of her shattered past
flew back together, there in the pews.

She’d never know how safe we’d feel in this Poland she hated.
How we crossed the bridge on roads that circled round
each other in Kazemeritz, the Jewish quarter.
How our lives never felt in peril when we passed
the old ghetto, even when we wandered late at night.

But maybe she would have understood why, when we drank
the homemade lemon-flavored vodka, we made a toast –
Nah zdrov-e-yay – We will forgive. We will never forget.

---

Because We All Come from Somewhere

Even when we no longer remember
we all come from somewhere
known by a name or many names
given by its trees and its rivers,
given by the people who dwelled here,
given in languages we may never have learned
or no longer remember.

We all come from a place where we, or others
from the long line before us, were born,
a place claimed as our own,
even when its owners changed.

The place we search for now is Vilnius.
Or Vilno or Vilne or Vilna or Wilno –
in Yiddish, in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian.
Even after our grandparents left long ago,
running for their lives, this place still
sits on the banks of the Neris River
under the shade of the oak
and whispers to us in our sleep.

We look for a house that floats
in the sky down a winding street,
find the door and knock.
Someone answers. But we have no records.
No one knows us and we don’t know
our great grandparents’ names.

Sometimes where there once was a house
we find only a field. Dogs bark.
Peasants tend to their work.
Gravestones hide in the grass,
the names rubbed off.
Sometimes we get lost.

Everyone comes from somewhere.
Even when no one remembers
we had a home here, this was the place
that gave us a name,
where we took our first breath.

---

The Keeper of the Land
-to Majken (pronounced “My-Kin”)

I found you at the end of the unpaved road
where a wooden sign points the way
through a stretch of yellow fields
of rape seed, golden barley, to the farm
in Fillinge that once fed the king’s army.

You are still holding on to the heart
of the Kingdom. Majken with you dark hair,
blue green eyes, white dress, you appear
as an angel, a sister, a soul mate. Keeper
of the land after all the rest left.
You welcome me with your lilting voice
our ancestors, you say, must have wanted us
to find each other. How else could this happen?

It’s mid-summer. You’ve set the smörgåsbord
out on a table the length of the room.
Familiar foods –Swedish meatballs, boiled potatoes,
eggs, tomatoes, a strawberry cake.
But so many people I’ve never met, distant
relations with names like Stig Arne, Ruben, Johan,
Goran, Gunnel, Ragnhild. On our family tree,
with roots going all the way to the Vikings
every single birth’s accounted for. We’re all
related when we go far enough back.

My grandfather, Lars Erikson, son of Eric Anderson,
named himself Heimer. Only kings chose such names.
Then he left home and never went back. That same year
Sweden made mandatory military service,
awarded the first Noble Prize he had just become an engineer
and wanted to build a life in America. Your grandfather,
his favorite cousin, chose the name Aswald, and stayed behind.
All of Lars’s family died without him.

The gravestones at the church in Medåker are still there.
My great grandmother, Maria Lovissa, your grandfather
Arvid, her brother. I finally followed the path of their letters
and found you, Majken, in the very same house.
I pinch myself. Look again, just to be sure I’m not dreaming.
Every piece of the grandfather I never met
is here persevered in you, alive.