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Prague
I
My
parents were born during the Warsaw Uprising, where a handful of Jews held
off the Nazi armies. But
the real rebellion was
really against the Jewish elders, who had coddled and acquiesced
and assimilated and finally walked their people to their
deaths. How could they?
I
always meant to ask my grandmothers about this. What must it
have been like, being pregnant, knowing you were safe, knowing
other people are being erased. First go walks in the park, bicycles.
Then go university classes, bank accounts, jobs, homes. Then
your hair becomes a wig, the gold from your teeth goes into bank
vaults.
It would have been useless of course, my grandmothers
were assimilated people also, and with assimilated people you
don´t get
opinions, you get government isued reports and you get silence.
All I have is the silence.
II
Here, out of the silence is one little part of my family that
was erased:
Here is my Uncle who slaps me on the back and
pronounces America the Russian way,with a hard K. He smokes
horrible cigars. Here
is his first wife who complained , here is his second wife, who
doesn´t.
Here is his son, who used to be handsome and now has too many
children: the clever one, the thuggish one, the one who is good
at fixing things, the others who who are too young to tell.
And there they go, back into the silence.
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