In 1939, my father began an odyssey through Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy and eventually left Europe illegally, headed for the United States. He was stranded on Ellis Island for four months until the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society offered him the opportunity to go to the Dominican Republic, where President Rafael Trujillo had created a safe haven—an agricultural settlement for the Jews—called Sosua. My father became one of the first settlers of Sosua; he was a farmer, then an importer/ exporter. He later moved to the capital city, Santo Domingo (then known as Cuidad Trujillo), where he lived throughout the war years.
My mother was unable to get exit papers to leave Europe, so she remained in Prague, working illegally, until she was deported to Terezin, with her father, on July 23, 1942. She had exceptional stenography and typing skills, in both German and Czech, and became very useful in the central office of Terezin, where she worked the night shift, typing the lists of names of individuals to be transported to the east. My mother remained in Terezin until she was liberated in 1945. My father’s parents, two sisters, two brothers-in-law, nephew, and his brother’s wife and daughter perished in Auschwitz. My mother’s two brothers were sent East. One was shot in a mass execution, the other perished in Dachau. My mother’s father died of dysentery in Terezin. In 1946, my mother joined my father in the Dominican Republic, and I was born there in 1947.
I live my life in the present, a contemporary woman with a family, a profession, and an unyielding sensuous enchantment with the world. I gravitate toward a kind of surrealism in my work and allow my senses to be my interpreter as I write of lost people, another time and place, shadows and grief. I fuse the tangible objects and recollections I keep from my childhood with those stories heard in fragments and whispers, those ephemeral pieces of my history and of those people whose photos fill the old brown leather box in my parents’ closet—people who look like me, laughing in the sun, standing by lakes, in the mountains, walking, arms linked, with lovers or friends on cobblestone streets, whose faces I know, but whom I’ve never met, people who did not return, but who live in my poetry.
In Berlin
Through a neon tunnel
of pink yellow light
a woman emerges and
steps off the curb into pouring rain
her black velvet cape skimming
puddles, a rhinestone tiara
making an inverted rain shower of
hot white above her dark hair.
She hurries to a café under the tracks
where the vibrations of trains
shake the wine glasses on tables
swilling garnet liquid against
the hard sides of the crystal.
She can stay only a short while
as she must weave a shroud
before dawn. It will be red because the water
runs red from the faucets, like someone
bleeding into the pipes,
in this city of trains, this city
where mementos of destruction
begging to be forgotten
fit just inside hidden pockets,
cower under black velvet capes,
and leach into rhinestone fingers.
In the House of the Thousand Candles
In the house of the thousand candles
old women pray for the safe return of soldiers
while eating little duck hearts sautéed in butter.
Fig and almond orchards grow in the place
where the sky and earth meet. When their prayers go unheeded,
the old women wrap holy stones in white lace-trimmed handkerchiefs
and place them inside the coffins of their dead men.
Draped in black, they sit at heavy tables and eat yogurt with date honey.
Oddly, there are pink roses in silver pitchers on the mantle.
On days when their prayers are answered
the old women cover their shoulders with small white shawls
and light a thousand candles in the windows
overlooking the sea. After dinner they open crimson umbrellas,
and walk arm in arm in the black of night.
Berlin Fragments
Platinum hair slicked back
a young waiter in a café
brings me rolls and marmalade.
At the edge of a horizon
an industrial chimney
spits gray smoke...
Stay on the S-Bahn line
No. 1 until the last stop.
It’s just a short ride to
Sachsenhausen
OPEN DAILY
from 8:30 A.M. until 4:30 P.M.
Dresden saucers in the window
of a dark antique shop
on a ruler-straight boulevard.
The buses run precisely on time.
Why Marlene Didn’t Come Back to the Fatherland
They say Marlene Dietrich
was married in the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church
which is now a war memorial, half bombed out,
iridescent blue at night. Across the street,
in Berlin’s largest department store,
people in scarves and coats sample wursts,
cheeses, and coffee on a February afternoon
in the food emporium on the sixth floor.
I buy slippers for my father in that store,
wondering whose feet have been in them.
The chanteuse, dead now, lies under birch
trees in the Stubenrauchstrasse Cemetery
while her 440 pairs of shoes, 400 hats,
150 pairs of gloves, 300 dresses and suits,
are piled in a brick warehouse
in the Spandau district waiting for cataloging.
They joke there is enough to stock the women’s
section of Berlin’s largest department store.
The right wing to this day doesn’t like her.
They think she sold out to Hollywood,
was a traitor to the Fatherland—though there are some
who regularly send sprays of white roses for her grave.
My father says the slippers don’t quite fit.
Something on the inside is rubbing a sore.
Memory Interruptus
Roll call and she stood for hours...
with the small pot she found...
wedged between her legs... so later...
she and her sisters...who...because
they were blond and young... were often...
well...so what was it?...
oh yes...so they could boil
the two potatoes...they had hidden
in the wall of the lager…
The Absurd Messiah
It will be in the season
of the magnolia’s blossoming.
The messiah will wear
a helmet and biker’s spandex
when he arrives holding
in one hand photographs
of someone’s dead lovers,
and cupped in the hollow of the other,
the foggy bellow of a French horn.
Two cranes destined for each other
will collide, then part. In a café
on a side street lovers will smoke
cigars and eat black olives with onions.
Women will seduce men
by crying. And then,
after one full year of light,
followed by a hundred of darkness,
a crescent moon will hang backwards
in a night silent as the inside of a violin.
Die Nachtigall
It means the nightingale and it’s because
he sings not on stage anymore but in cafés
late at night where he makes rounds with his
German songs at his side, pulling off a black
felt hat—his small head with toothless mouth
perched above a checkered scarf—and then
pulls from his pocket old news clippings
from a time when he was young though
&
nbsp; he claims still to be less than 31 years old,
this nachtigall who has been out of work
for more than one third of his “age,” who
sings for his supper and gums a smile
while he moves on to the next café and the next
as young people endlessly smoke cigarettes
and the city quiets down, this nachtigall
who flits as if he were moving between
the branches of lilac bushes in the spring
carrying under his thin wings
the tunes of their thousand souls.
The Tattoo Lady
It’s a blue blur on her arm
while she reaches
across the table for a fig.
You don’t see it at first.
You think your eyes
are playing tricks, that there’s
a smudge, must be some ink
from a letter she was writing
to one of her unaccented kids
in some American city.
She reaches over again
and you look hard. And then you see it.
It makes you think maybe
you should drop a note to her kid
and say I saw your mother
and she’s OK and I guess
you know this but somehow
she can’t get rid of that tattoo.
And then you want to say to that kid,
you must have spent your childhood
trying to rub it off.
Sister Maria Roberta Says the Dead Miss Us and Are Jealous
There’s a coffin on the gondola
and the woman going to the funeral
has one hip higher than the other. Her name is
Sister Maria Roberta. Later, over a wooden table,
in the shadow of death and afternoon light,
she fills a white ceramic bowl with pomegranates,
talking of angels. Her favorite is called Pascal.
Sister Maria Roberta talks incessantly and sprinkles aromatic ashes
on bread hot from the oven. One prayer will take away
one hour of fire from hell she says. Sister Maria Roberta
grinds seeds, and says death builds its scratchy nest,
and carries under his hairy arm the blue straw of our muscles.
Sister Maria Roberta says that five generations of the dead
attend each wedding and even the blind must bless the moon.
Music for Lovers and Then Others
Cosima Wagner woke up one morning
to the sound of a full orchestra in the hallway
at the bottom of the stairs because, for her birthday,
her husband, Richard, had written a symphony.
Richard was not known for such sentimentality.
But for Cosima, the mother of his children,
and from whom he could not be parted,
Richard would do anything. His tenderness to her
masked his passion against things he did not like.
Anarchist, vegetarian, anti-Semite, Richard regarded himself
as the “most German of men” and after tea
each day, played long melodies for Cosima.
When Cosima died it would be twelve years
before someone played Richard’s music
as accompaniment to the parting of wives, husbands,
and children in the stained courtyards of Poland.
Lovers and Gravediggers
In exchange for a bed with sheets, nine men,
two of them medical doctors,
hire themselves out as dancers at an elegant
hotel in Italy sometime in 1939. Like lovers,
sporting pencil-thin mustaches and white summer suits,
they lean on the arms of heavily upholstered
chairs in the gilded lobby, waiting for perfumed
women in good leather high heels with thin ankle straps.
But who comes instead is a woman in a brown
form-fitting suit, Persian lamb at the cuffs,
sheer stockings with seams like line drawings
down the center of each leg. She wears
no perfume and is sad: she has come from a funeral
where the gravediggers set up chairs on the muddy
hump of dirt under which her mother is buried.
The woman tells the nine men, two of them medical doctors,
how she watched someone sit on her mother’s neck
throughout the funeral. One of the lovers
with a pencil-thin mustache begins to cry,
surprised at his own sentimentality.
The woman in brown decides to call him
“my pretty man.” They leave together to settle
near the graveyard where angels sing under lampposts.
A Shawl of Spanish Moss
listen: in the rain forest behind banana trees
a sugar bird chirps
can it finally
be time for the end of grief?
dust off the coffin and sing songs
plant the moonflower atop the dirt
but don’t forget: in Poland
grave no. 3 had 2000
grave no. 6 had 800
my father must be in grave no. 2
can it finally
be time for the end of grief?
don’t be fooled:
grief remains distilled
and draped over the shoulders
a shawl of Spanish moss,
that fibrous lace, a boa of bones...
A Small Piece of Blotting Paper
The summer she can’t stop crying
she opens an old leather case
filled with partially used
toiletries and finds a small piece
of blotting paper which holds
the handwriting of her father.
Two immortals catch her eye
from the left side of the room
and on the right, thin-boned,
white-haired women wear masks
and beaded dresses.
She anoints the edges of the pillows
and the lace antimacassars
with his cologne, the oils
of his scent. A coronation of grief.
Closing the old leather case
she puts it under her arm
and walks down the rain-slicked street,
the words of her father’s letters imbedded
in the blotting paper in the box
and indelibly, under her skin.
Outside, a woman, her belly big with child,
sells blue flowers and on the train to Paris,
a man looks at a young woman’s legs while
he reads Primo Levi because he knows
the dead see the dead before they die.
How a Child of Survivors Says Good-Bye
First of all, we never say good-bye.
It’s see you soon. And then, whether
someone is off to the grocery store
or en route to, let’s say, Paris,
we add I love you be careful and more
see you soons. In the time before
we were born people left thinking
they would come back but they didn’t.
So, as if to cast a spell of protection,
we hug and kiss even when they
look at us and say But I’m not going off to war!
(What do they know?) Then—we wait,
in a fluttering kind of anxiousness,
until the door flies open, spilling bags or suitcases
and we breathe again until
the next (good-bye) see you soon.
Lullaby to my Father When He Finds His Mother at Long Last
We are freezing down here and the Amaryllis has broken ground
like a small dove trying to reach heaven.
I go to the next room and think of Saturday afternoons
when I used to boil pot
atoes for your lunch.
Then I ride my bicycle to Paris where on the right side of the street
I see the man who makes doll furniture carving a wooden cradle.
You would have painted it white.
Your mother is kissing you a hundred times.
I take from my pocket the last of the cake, balls of crumbs
rolling in the black cotton place. You bought me red corals
from a vendor by the sea but I think when the circus comes,
I will not wear red anymore. Did you notice?
you followed the small dove and left me here
to tend the Amaryllis. Did you notice?
your mother is kissing you a hundred times.
MIRIAM MÖRSEL NATHAN’s poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Gargoyle; Arts & Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture; The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review; Sojourner: The Women’s Forum; the GW Forum and Moment Magazine. Her work is also included in the anthology From Daughters and Sons: What I’ve Never Said (Story Line Press, 2001) and Cabin Fever: Poets at Joaquin Miller’s Cabin, 1984-2001. She has read her work at The Knitting Factory and The Jewish Museum in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, Cable TV’s “Takoma Coffee House,” and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has been awarded a fellowship by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is Director of the Washington Jewish Film Festival. She and her husband live in Maryland and have three children.
Chapter 12: Letting Myself Feel Lucky by Lily Brett
For my late mother, Rose Brett,
and my father, Max Brett