Jennifer Harp
asked
Jan Steckel:
Why the histrionics about Trump? Wouldn't it be "open-minded" to adopt a "wait and see" attitude? Isn't it quite un-liberal to condemn him before he is even in office?
Jan Steckel
Dear Jennifer,
Thank you for your comment. I've seen quite enough of Trump to understand what kind of leader he is. Why the "histrionics?" I'm Jewish, and we've seen this before. There's a reason everyone in my family keeps a bag packed. That said, I sincerely hope that you prove right and I prove wrong. I refer you to this poem of mine about what happened to my relatives for an explanation of my feelings.
The Maiden Aunts
by Jan Steckel
My grandmother was alive again,
the one who said to me on her deathbed,
“You must write!” and
“Don’t waste your life cooking, honey,
it’s all over in ten minutes.”
She told me again
about her rich Latvian aunts
who visited her in the squalor
of the Lower East Side.
Dressed in black, the maiden aunts
bent and kissed her eight-year-old head
saying, “Never forget, Selma,
you are one of the heher menschen,”
you’re one of the higher people,
a gentlewoman.
What they meant was,
you come from a line of ten chief rabbis
of the city of Riga.
Your grandfather wrote a treatise on Maimonides
that is in the Library of Congress.
Your family, the Widow Romm and Sons,
is the largest publisher of Yiddish books
in Eastern Europe. They own the lumber mills
that make the paper that makes the books.
Though you live in poverty here,
you are part of a civilization.
They kissed my grandmother’s head
and sailed back to Europe.
For two decades they wrote monthly to their faraway niece.
My grandmother sailed on a steamer to California
and joined the Anti-Fascist League,
but she couldn’t make her gentile neighbors understand
what was happening in Europe.
She remembered the day the letters stopped.
After the war, she learned
that all the Romms in Europe,
every last one,
had perished in the concentration camp
outside of Riga.
She and her sister
were the only ones left.
She dreamed of the last Rabbi of Riga,
turning from the door of the gas chamber,
as he shepherded his congregation in.
Beyond him, her two old-maid aunts
clutched each other’s hands
and stared at her past the Rabbi’s shoulder,
whispering “Never forget, Selma….”
"The Maiden Aunts" first appeared ” in The Pedestal Magazine online, Issue 30, October/November 2005. Also appeared in the anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, 2nd edition, edited by Charles Fishman, Time Being Books, 2007. Reprinted (in print and online) in Sage Trail Poetry Magazine, Vol. II, No. 4, April 2009. Appears in my chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006).
Thank you for your comment. I've seen quite enough of Trump to understand what kind of leader he is. Why the "histrionics?" I'm Jewish, and we've seen this before. There's a reason everyone in my family keeps a bag packed. That said, I sincerely hope that you prove right and I prove wrong. I refer you to this poem of mine about what happened to my relatives for an explanation of my feelings.
The Maiden Aunts
by Jan Steckel
My grandmother was alive again,
the one who said to me on her deathbed,
“You must write!” and
“Don’t waste your life cooking, honey,
it’s all over in ten minutes.”
She told me again
about her rich Latvian aunts
who visited her in the squalor
of the Lower East Side.
Dressed in black, the maiden aunts
bent and kissed her eight-year-old head
saying, “Never forget, Selma,
you are one of the heher menschen,”
you’re one of the higher people,
a gentlewoman.
What they meant was,
you come from a line of ten chief rabbis
of the city of Riga.
Your grandfather wrote a treatise on Maimonides
that is in the Library of Congress.
Your family, the Widow Romm and Sons,
is the largest publisher of Yiddish books
in Eastern Europe. They own the lumber mills
that make the paper that makes the books.
Though you live in poverty here,
you are part of a civilization.
They kissed my grandmother’s head
and sailed back to Europe.
For two decades they wrote monthly to their faraway niece.
My grandmother sailed on a steamer to California
and joined the Anti-Fascist League,
but she couldn’t make her gentile neighbors understand
what was happening in Europe.
She remembered the day the letters stopped.
After the war, she learned
that all the Romms in Europe,
every last one,
had perished in the concentration camp
outside of Riga.
She and her sister
were the only ones left.
She dreamed of the last Rabbi of Riga,
turning from the door of the gas chamber,
as he shepherded his congregation in.
Beyond him, her two old-maid aunts
clutched each other’s hands
and stared at her past the Rabbi’s shoulder,
whispering “Never forget, Selma….”
"The Maiden Aunts" first appeared ” in The Pedestal Magazine online, Issue 30, October/November 2005. Also appeared in the anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, 2nd edition, edited by Charles Fishman, Time Being Books, 2007. Reprinted (in print and online) in Sage Trail Poetry Magazine, Vol. II, No. 4, April 2009. Appears in my chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006).
More Answered Questions
Linda Carleton
asked
Jan Steckel:
Awake at 4am with the same leaden weight that's been pulling at my heart since November 9. Your poem Waking in Trump's America set something free- the grief, the outrage, the fury. It is helping to hold my torch this morning and I thank you. I wonder if you might start a site around the poem in which others share ways they have helped to hold the torch or been helped? It would be a beacon of hope in such darkness.
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