Good afternoon. My name is Martin Herskovitz from Petah Tikva Israel and I would like to share with you some of my poetry and at the same time give my own perspective on the idea of Boundaries.
The theme of boundaries appears in my poems in three main aspects:
1) Barriers to the past, specifically the Holocaust.
2) Barriers to my parents as a child.
3) Barriers in present day relationships.
The first poem I would like to read Photographs talks about three generations - the older and younger Survivor generation and our 2g generation and their relationship to the past :
1.
My cousin Haim Stern returned to Serednye
After the war
Took the key from the neighbor
To return shortly, a shoebox under his arm
And he strode toward the tree grove.
The bonfire in the grove burnt the photographs well
as he stood over the curling pictures,
prodding them deeper into the flames
the nitrate smoke burnt his eyes.
He sat in the clearing till the embers died down
then freed, left for America
his spare set of shoes now in the shoebox.
2.
My father has put away the pictures from before the war
and he can't find them.
But I think that he put away the pictures so he won't find them.
What good are those pictures, he says, they were all blurry
and in the posed pictures they all look like statues
Better we should take pictures of our wonderful grandchildren
not blurry and in color.
Let's finish the roll and in an hour we'll have new pictures.
Much better
3.
I don't have any pictures of my uncles who died in Auschwitz
not that it would help much.
My Uncle Meshulam died when he was 4 years old.
I would feel pretty silly holding a picture of a four year old
and saying this is my uncle.
It is hard for me to imagine that I had a family at all.
I'm not a god that can create a family out of motes of dust.
4.
Whenever I would ask about the War my parents changed the subject saying
"You have to put the past behind if you want to go forward"
After 45 years of all sorts of directions,
I am beginning to doubt their words. –
As a 2g whose parents never spoke about their experiences in the past I feel at a loss in trying to break down these barriers to the past. In my attempt to make the past real I toy with the idea of artificially humanizing them to give dimension to relatives I know nothing about such as in “ Names “ and “Names and Stories”:
My mother’s father was named Mordechai Kleinbart
But maybe, because he was the eldest son,
His mother called him Tateleh,
And his father probably called him Mordkhe
like my father sometimes calls me.
His sister and brothers called him, perhaps, Moti
Except for the baby sister who called him Momo
Even after she grew up.
His wife’s cousins at the winery may have called him Kleiny
And his children surely called him Tati
As did his wife
Except late at night, alone in the bedroom
She would maybe call to him with Yiddish familiars
In a soft erotic lilt.
Or maybe not,
Because Mordechai Kleinbart is the single name I have
So it is the one printed on paper laminated in plastic
And it alone is carved into stone
and molded in bronze.
All the other names are exist only in memories long interred
Or on pages yet unwritten.
Some of us have only names
Names are good for reading at memorial services
and putting on bronze plaques in the synagogue
next to a flickering bulb
which is almost as good as mourning
Some of us have stories without names.
Names have been removed from the story like fangs
so that it can no longer hurt the storyteller.
So I am destined to tell the story over and over again
unsatisfied
Sometimes I feel like putting the names in column A
and the stories in column B
like the test we took in grade school
1. George Washington and
c. first President of the United States
drawing a line between the story and the name
to give story has a name and each name a story.
And on Yom HaShoah I can feel I am mourning a real person
not just a name without a past
or a story without an address.
And I can hope that the tears fall more freely.
But if I match imperfectly
I have mourned a fiction
a phantom who existed only in my manipulations
and I have wasted the day.
Or do the dead know how to take the tears
from the page on which they have fallen
and carry them in cupped palms
to their proper page?
The answer I have given myself to this last question is an unequivocal yes because it is important that we break the barrier to the past and mourn those that perished. In fact it is our primary duty to them because others can protest and protect the Holocaust from trivialization but only we can truly mourn our relatives :
The souls of the dead lie dormant
under the filmy wrapping of the years
in anticipation for us to rouse them
like a child hiding beneath a blanket waits
for his parent to discover he is not there .
Our cries of protest do not move them
nor do our tears of indignation,
they huddle tighter at the bolts of anger .
But when we whisper their names
and cry tears of longing that they have yet to know
Then the warmth of the tears caresses their foreheads
and they blink open their eyes,
astonished
and stir themselves, loosening their limbs,
to fly down to our dreams
Yet even as I try to mourn, I feel inadequate. Living in Israel I unfortunately have too much opportunity to observe mourning:
It is a time of mourning in Israel
Grandparents mourn their grandchildren
And children their parents.
An entire country versed in mourning
Except for me.
Amid the mourners' wails
my grandparents hold their faces earthbound
To catch some of the tears deemed for others.
Tears they have never known for
All died with them
Except for a few.
And those were afraid
to not cease crying
if they ever started,
So they didn’t.
It is left to me to cry but
I have no rivulets of tears
and my face is but reposed.
I weep but meager tears
Not warm full tears to rinse their sorrow.
They long to be mourned
But I who have never known their embrace, cannot.
But I know their pain
And their sorrows are interred in me
This too is a link
And it will have to suffice
As yet
It is a time of mourning
And I sit among the unmourned.
Another way to break through the barriers is the fantasy of a child to find relatives who were lost in the War:
She would sit alone in her room
Practicing her alphabet until her mother came home
From cooking all day for the Yeshiva
And wait for her to lay on the couch
A damp towel draped over her eyes.
I'm going outside,
She'd announce
And go out in the neighborhood
To find her sister who Mother said
Was lost in the war,
"It doesn't matter
If I'll know who she is,"
she'd say to herself,
As she looked expectantly at the faces of strangers,
waiting to be found
"She'll recognize me."
But more than a search for a way to the past this poem describes a child’s search for love, love that is unavailable from an emotionally absent Mother.
This is in essence the second aspect of boundaries - the lack of emotional closeness to the Survivor parent.
This distance leads to the fear of separation and abandonment:
When I was five I was afraid that the Snow Queen
Whiteness and ice
Would kidnap me to her Arctic castle
While other kids were afraid of vampires and monsters
Who howled and roared
all violence and blood
I was terrified of her cold blue eyes and her kisses of frost
That could freeze my heart
My sister would say if she’s made of ice then she’s the Ice queen.
Ice queen, Ice queen she’s only ice cream ha ha ha.
But I still wouldn’t let myself sleep
And looked out the winter window
Waiting for her to fly by
And steal me away
And today as a parent I look at my daughter fear of abandonment and I recall my own childhood:
Her mother away
The child spoke on the phone
And her voice cracked
I miss you
And through the crack poured out
The vulnerability and the fear
As if she might fall
But quickly recovering
She straightened up
Closing the rift
Smiling with glistening eyes.
It reminded me of children past
Tutored to be impervious
Criss-crossing the cracks
With layer upon layer
Till nothing would show
Sturdying the wall
Against the churning inside
And eyes that would not glisten.
And as a result of this closing off ourselves in childhood, I grow into an adult who has problems with setting up barriers in his relationships - the third aspect:
My mother fed me out of love,
Out of love she clothed me,
Tucking my shirtail in my pants.
Out of love she first showed concern
then tried to transform,
and when that failed she sent me away out of love
so that elsewhere I might grow.
Once away I would never return to her
For while she acted out of love
I have never felt within her love.
And since I have known but amplitudes of love
Weaving in and out of intimacies
Cresting up then down
Turning back then away
You say I don’t love you
I love you no different than my parents
loved me.
Isn’t that love?
Neither of us knows.
Love has no formula
That can be held to the light.
I have what I felt
When my parents cared for me as they could
Is that love?
Or are they impaired
Am I impaired
So that what I grasped
was too full of holes
to be anything real.
You say I don’t hug you.
I will hold you.
You say I don’t care enough or care too much.
I will care more or less.
You say I shout
From now on I will whisper.
The problem isn’t proving to you that I am able to love
But believing it myself.
I cannot contain your needs
when you are near me,
When you are close
I feel inadequate.
Distance yourself from me
and I can mold you
to a shape I can contain
and love
When you are nigh
all I manage is to silence
the static that crackles in my mind,
Quietness not love.
Go from me
so that I can love you
The distance shelters me
and allows me
my stealthed love
But even as I doubt my ability to love and decry the love that seems to evaporate, I want to believe in the power of love and in my ability to love:
I have had no great test to endure
As Abraham
prevailed The fire and the wrath.
Only the silent binding to the altar
The resoluteness of his sacrifice
Despite my quiet tears.
I am deemed to be symbol
allowed no pain.
So I remain in the field
Distant, apart
Until Rebecca leads me to the tent
And lays my head upon her breast
and I sleep
And also come to connect myself to the peculiarities of our survivor parents’ love:
I went to say goodbye to my parents
when they left the country
my mother was busy the whole visit
packing up the leftovers
so I hardly had a chance to say goodbye.
Hurry home before the dairy products spoil
was the last thing she said as she closed the door.
I stood in the parking lot
laden with Tupperware
feeling alone.
The next day I sat hunched over her reheated soup,
my hands on both sides of the bowl,
my fingers warmed by the porcelain.
The steam rose about my face.
as I waited for the soup to cool.
It has taken too much of a lifetime to learn
to live in a family
where you eat soup
instead of saying goodbye.
Thus giving hope to the 3g generation:
Asleep in my arms yet not at peace, claws the air
and stirs calling my name but does not wake.
I wonder what demons has he to threaten his sleep,
to evoke this helpless plaint.
I wish I could banish those who wound his soul
To clasp him near and force them into the night forever.
But tomorrow he will wrestle his demon again
As did his namesake Jacob long ago
A disquietude visited upon the generations.
I had wished him to be a charmed being
His life untarnished by bitterness, his laugh unblemished by anguish
But now I fear that he has not been spared,
That I have bestowed not only my features but my fears and passions as well
So now I wish him a child with lustrous eyes.
And in summation start to break through the boundaries even as I ask for your patience for occasional regressions :
When I get older
I will start to try to remember
What my mother has forgotten.
But in the meantime
Leave me to glean fragments of words and glances
And set them aside.
When I get older
I will start to build a legacy
Out of the grey mists of the past.
But in the meantime
Leave me the museums and commemorations
And the nod to my son, amid,
As if to say - That is us also.
When I get older
I will start to embrace my wife
With all the words that end with-inity or -ence
From DSM - 3
But in the meantime
Leave me to cling to her desperately
even as I wish to run away.
When I get older
I will buy a new diary with gold leaf
(And put away the loose-leaf binders of errant pages)
To write long and straight upon the ivory colored page
But in the meantime
Leave me to scribble in jagged sentences
That bend around stains and prints,
the story of my life.
When I get older,
I can start to imagine being someone
I hadn’t imagined before
But in the meantime
Leave me to sit on the park bench
between my parents
Eating sandwiches out of waxed paper bags.
Thank you
Martin Herskovitz