by Joshua Cohen
When they were born, he was born, and when they came for the born, he went.
my will a legacy my very last given over leave it all to Agnesz from Mexico I married her after Liberation January 1945 back in Cologne Paris Amsterdam London but she died on the boat over in the middle of the Atlantic without middle in the East Ending middle of HERE is London the BBC Home Service capital of Hungary or was it then Czechoslovakia where she was born you don’t know from places the graces of dates all the same to you on the ship over she died of a fever which was the war maybe Hungary or then it was Romanian thrush she said Sárospatak Potok am Bodroch she’d tell me it meant the Muddy Stream the Athens of the Bodrog she’d whisper sub rosa about the mapping of maps but now you access interfacile you mouse over whole surfaces screened as if no one down there mattered existed only for the idea the world exists larger than you and is greater than too the collective concerns of whatever your poor Body & Soul the first film I sat through in America Washington Historyless Heights where I’ll die and no one will know just go over the documentaries mockumentaries the old story here in Washington George the First Heights after every revolution went through knowing every joke and every camp there were as many camps as there were jokes every witz there ever was and we were the punchlines the cast crew editors and authors my Onkel out of work dictating his feuilletons to the floors and the roofs the streets silent no more radios either the junkfunk you couldn’t own a telephonegun no radiovisuals not the Grynszpan I knew who’d worked at my father’s factory where they manufactured no more bicycles either I had a Waffenrad until curfew or 1939 no more out late party cabaret café and cigarette nights into morning liqueur only November and Wahrheit und Truth dayeinu said out of season that Purimask last we dressedup we disguised ourselves as soldiers SA SS who took over the Aryan factory on whose floor we made our last Pesach Passover Passah with the windows closed to the candles and the machinery snuffed the Elijah haNavi who stole our best hidden silver that night of shellshattered eggs O my Kristallarms and my nachtlegs the windows lashed with boiling rocks stoneshuddered the wedding of a hammer groom to the glass at the synagogue though we’d say the Bethaus on the Roonstrasse the Runegasse Temple not a shul the Portuguese esnoga or snoge with its black chandeliers huddledstarved pews I slept in through Amsterdam smashed into shuttered London shipwrecked boatgloating London-town Fagintown bombedout blitzedout Amsterdam’s Waterlooplein the disappeared Houtgracht all of 1946 the year of resurrection I shipped over the Hudson’s Atlantic from Luftkrieged London Big Ben fallen dark the clockfaced Canadians who liberated Amsterdam under the command of General Walter Cronkite (ret.) the king of the city of Spinoza but three hundred years too late for him in a century eternally late for any moustachioed ethica anything ordine geometrico demonstrata that was the structure of Auschwitz too the system the ordering Seder a concentration camp you might’ve heard of it from camps from camp after camp after every witz there ever was crossing the border with Canada burning to Rotterdamsterdamned Antwerp the Scheveningen dunes the Netherlandish moon the seachannel changechannel the lines at the JCC headquartered at 18 Johannes Vermeerstraat the Rembrandt eyes of that hollowed rabbi that Hungarian Hasid who’d married us it was Purgatorio I memorized at the Realgymnasium one canto but a generation short of the numerus clausus e canterò di quel secondo regno dove l’umano spirito si purga e di salire al ciel diventa degno lived down a job editing the personal ads in the Aufbau was how my cousin Eva had met my searching for friends for the nuclear core the De Wallen whore who’d hailed from under the last wall in Ukraine who’d witnessed our nuptials performed by that Satmar or Munkács ben Surly Yisroel the coupling the centralization the Reichsvertretung to the Reichsvereinigung was how it began with the chuppah cloudpelts of the Polaklaan pelicans of summer November Agnesz’s niece with the Rosse Buurt on her cheeks the Jodenbreestraat red of van Rijn that had run in the streets she rubbed in for rouge to cross herself over the border canals are just fancy gutters the ash of London the wet smoke of the Dickensian chimneys the artful dodging duikers the Sobibor arrivals waiting to bathe clean with Heraclitus in the Amstel my legacy to be an orphan and step twice to question getting into a whispering argument with a neighbor asked how was he a convert this mensch you were under the impression that he was your brother to loan him the money or keep it with him how he knows how to deal and with whom to talk to these people the Alliance Quelle des Heils Hitler you walked not in the street but tight up against the buildings the walls the falling Gesetze the landlord his name was the Arisator was the term the murm rein arisches Geschäft that the NSBO Nun sind die Bonzen oben DAFka we survived in this yellow house Haarlem we had thirtysix rooms enough for my family or half the Gestapo they said I couldn’t come back to school even to return my books the Heine monograph I’d borrowed from Professor Springer im Rhein im schönen Strome da spiegelt sich in den Well’n mit seinem grossen Dome das grosse heilige Köln they call it a brownstone but its windows are black all ten windows or one blacked with nine others smashed shuttered and one door everyone mistakes for a window boardedup condemned no one knocks anymore their Aufmachen they only throw pebbles the treeplanter fishbowling gravel their asphalt and shatter shatter shatter like Ecclesiastes said in the name of Kohelet that’s all these people know how to shudder the tzedakah kids from the United Way for the Save the Chicago Bears Foundation don’t come by neither does Klemperer or the rabbi from the Roonstrasse the Goongasse shul with its three portico gables burning one for me for my father burnt and muttering Rotterdamnit even the Asian post and that Dummkopf at Piccadilly with too many names Herr Krankenbehandler no longer a doctor Herr Rechtskonsulenten no longer a lawyer though he made a fortune dealing in visas berths and aufnorden births certifying for any country not Poland he’d deliver the papers in brownshirtpaper packages and cluck with tongue at his teeth as if terrorist ticking cousin Eva bombedout blastedaway into a Wanda on the passport raft a boatperson a shipped prowperson displaced she’d been Leviathaned out early from Cologne to Colonia am New Jersey must be dead by now long buried down by the side of the Parkway alongside the Indians or Canada the goldmine quarry coal coffee and cocoa shortages Mondays home idle with the French tutor’s Polish breasts and her clitoris I thought resembled Pope Rassenschande I would’ve studied hygienic phrenology at the Law Faculty sigillum facultatum utriusque juris studii coloniensis if not for Nuremberg Nürnberg barely passed the skullshaping nosesloping eyeslanting test for Gymnasium the artfremd Abitur abattoir I had slaughtered alien friends of my own with whom I’d play tennis and girlfriend one of them her family knew the Oppenheims had a cottage at Cuxhaven the Prisengracht at Westermarkt where we’d kissed her father had a moustache as if to spite the fleck of another dictator it was such a Franz-Josef you wanted to shove a school’s ruler up his Zwaneburgwal then wipe the floor with him but they had a maid for that friends with ours was Dorota who spoke Polish parle vous how far would she let me get today the Sonder peddling his who knew if they were his sons those jewels dug from anuses you could still smell and taste the dreck the shit of the Visserplein fleas taking an afternoon nap in the Church of Moses and Aron Aharon my second name the first of my neighbor nextdoor they’d put on a Kindertransport for Leeds leaving his sister behind twisted by polio my medicine spoon my candle burntup because they’ve turned the electricity off and refused utilities assistance HUD to sell out to them 203(k) and so better to havdalah the spices the kiddush bramble burnt larger and melting length onto its end forever until the wax it’s one great huge yellow white consumptive catarrh a canker this eyesore this lipsore lifesore this house as blackbrownyellow as a tooth I own the paper’s stuffed into this pillow I stole Kissenklau Zissenklau didn’t realize I stole it from the Presbyterians Columbia Medical Center but to return it means to explain myself to the old doctors ever yarmulked Pakistani Indian younger and that won’t do must repent the week in London with Agnesz fighting the Buckingham Fuckingham tourism hordes the whore the whorewife rebbetzin those Mexican Hungarian refugees sp
eaking a Yiddish IIc I didn’t without any messages no letters or rent only welfare notices slipped under my door my windows smashattered evicted the radio off the air unplugged the telephone dead too the kilos of copper and brass to remit save your breath saving wire hold the line Operator I can’t hear I’m as deaf as a lung from the sirens the air raids the Ets Chaim Kapo I recognized on the Rapenburgerstraat at parachute dawn but there’s none anymore droppingin no photo sessions or latenite appearances with the television over too many bill summaries no credit left no more fêtes roasts of tributes might I propose a toast a savrei this prosit l’chaim to Ed McMann if he’s still alive and if so where’s my big check the gemoney the jewelgelt not here not yet will it clear drawn on today’s pants yesterday’s pants every day’s the hallway’s leg maybe the buzzer’s dead too no more innerview interview requests nothing to turn down like this bed I don’t anymore no one knew no one remembered there’s nothing at all to deny
When they were young, he was young, and when they came for the young, he went.
Liberation was the midnight middlestair hush of January 1945 it was JanI remember it better than the birth of no children my all of no kinder it’s said how the Soviets were teenagers the Red Army’s Ukrainian front their 322nd Infantry it was Agnesz couldn’t believe they had so many of them you joked what’s wrong you asked with maybe the 321st the rifles of Kursk and the Carnival birthday parade pomp Weimarhuge and grander Whymore the many happy returns of the Bug Army the 6th Corps when my cousin Franz came back from the War the first World One with medals made of laundrysoap coffee cocoa and tea a hero with the reserve divisions the Conta Corps Beskides Corps echt Germans under the command of Marshal Koniev though by then I was already summering far away from you on a march out to Loslau Agnesz if you know it outside the fence beyond the electricless chainlink they put up around the backyard lot blown through with fastfood cartons and bags will that be paper or plastic Gristedes the God of the Greeks of Homer and Pseudo-trismegistus Marx the burgerboxes and Kennedy tubs of friedchicken my brittle skin my Torahskin the parchment flaking the house the burnt corpse-brick and the hoofdrum hymn I’ll have the supersized Spanish goatloin the dogs Prinz the cheap Presbytesized meat barking the Paris radio from which we first heard wind of the Faust of Gounod with the strings and the winds and the news from the west of Berlin the static and crackle of Chancellortalk the boycott of vom Rath the secretary my father’s für Elise he had to let go with the books she kept for her son those ledgers illustrated with pictures of dragons and Ostmark dragoons atop the horses of Karl May and in the spaceships of Kurd Laßwitz those giant pigs octopi and the gigantic lesbian Teppichfresser Kraken Kranken Seuchengefahr because nu as they say assistedliving isn’t living anymore just press the button and the Russians come in on horseback with sirens the exhaustflagged ambulette driven by illegal Ukrainians and inhome help they call it is a stranger’s home you pay rent on to die in crematoria blasts through the night not torching flesh but the structures themselves lungs kidneys and liver I bought outright this building the paper’s right here the blatt the leafy daf stuffed into this pillow I stole from Columbus Marrano Medical the last time I was sick was decades ago has their postmark stamp their tattoo on its case I had croup cough pneumonia Durchfall too the stain of how the hospital saved me Blocks 20 21 28 blocked again lately but all they gave me was aspirin charcoal tablets and scabies the women who died for the gynecologist Clauberg in Block 10 20 21 shrieking the same to the ear as the boom of the tanks in bloom and the infantry howitzer mortars it’s too schädling schande embarrassing to return it to which clinic blocks away too weak to walk not enough shellstrong exoroach for the mamzer Presbyterians their doctors always Mengele younger and younger their faces Asian Indian Pakistandoffish my face falling to puddle its age on the floor on the winter earth you wanted to just kneeldown and kiss it you needed to hug them the soldiers then rip their medal hearts from their chests dripping to the floor that’s her ceiling to stain the Virgin Marryme Puerto Dominican girl’s sheets her boyfriend’s a dealer on the Appellplatz the dellplatz the hellplatz a plotzing horseflag hung over the horizon the Blutbanner burn of Oma’s Walter Scott the son of Hermann und Dorothea we traded German quotations with the officers’ moustaches red and black and laughing so much younger than me who was even younger than them more starved too diseased marching due west through the Russian Ukrainians the 322nd hour that at last was our address our heightweightnumber no more of these recreations redactions reinterpretations reinventions revisions revised and revisionary all of these storied stories untold and yet told wasted breath bombedaway tired Köln Deutz-tired traintired shiptired the haunt and stalk of the 1st Ukrainian front was tired Major General his name was Brooklyn Yashechkin Grishaev with the wineskin stomach the water we drank too fast to swell the last gram of bread drambread bloodcolored like jam the last leaven Liberationthirsty Liberation-hungry liberté égalité fratricide mounted bareback on Stalinback saddled with night if it’s night and how would Birkenau know Brzezinka Ostland lost-land cost to benefit ratio the racinate poliofairies and the gypsyrades with their reincarnated cutraterapethethroat FKL survivoresses the blokowa kurva cures wandering around offering their syphilis up to the horses the whorses the worst of them the versteppung vershtupping Ukrainians no better than the Poles save they’re saviors the Musclemen the Musclessmen the boneless chickenfingered men the Moslemen the only good Muslims that’s how bad Iran without blood without claim we brought with us our suitcases thirty fifty kilos I weighed what fifteen twenty skinwrapped skintrunked shrunken and marked chalked pulverized bone no more images imaginings no more stories tattooed on my lips in a milk that was ink the winter spent at the foot of Mont Blanc while my father did business I sat in Dorota’s lap fireside sucking the nib of a fountainpen after supper I wandered Chamonix the blank ice fields and the snowedover tenniscourts the hotel’s library with its foreign words taking their ink on my tongue like my father’s ashes the cold blue of a suckling kid the Shema O Izrael the Satmar said Hear how my son’s dead alvás in Hungarian in the arms of the Russian Ukrainians they said the Kaddish the emes mamash gevaltalk the whinnying neighs of the horses arrived they wouldn’t even approach that’s how disgusting we stank the saltlick the sugarlumps of our pimples and pocks and bubonic breasts our cysts and our boils the Tableaux Vivants set in Egypt and Palestine among the Caucuses or Carpathians that were so faraway and pretty onstage at the theater the hillhumps of the horsecamels arrived and arriving the droms flying their earflags their tailflags and the manes of the Russians whom we called The Russians but were actually Coney Island Brooklyn Ukrainians just born into the culture the Wissenschaft of it all the tums and the glooms glom the dead gathering up like a widow the sheaves of my women Dorota and Agnesz Doris the Kultur and Bildung of lading the massing my father installed on the executive board of the Rhenish-Westphalia Verband the Reichsverband onboard the trains the boats the executive planes you forget the strength of the horse the hoofhod power the gallop and trot the barrowbacked Spanish get my goat what a language I had none of that Babel the mauscheln the rabble ratalk the Yiddish Yissish the Hebrew Ivrit the High Slavimaic despite being Auschwitz and Uptown I’m a city person a Yecca a Piefke as they said in Dachau our Sabbath was Sunday with organ and Rindfleisch a German a Goyman like Berlin as much as Vienna a man of the auto not the ass or the Russian I’ve had frankfurters in Hamburg and hamburgers in Frankfurt Français and Yiddish I had to learn Hebrew here in a night class CUNY studying the desertalk also sprach the Urlock after I learned this language say Shakespeare in Kraus’ translation Queens College tutored by a kruller a Kraut with a cup of coffee served atop Chaucer then over lunch would do Talmud a bissele Wissele tick on my own later with a greenhorn in greenjeans a Pollack I bought pastrami for corned-beef with a side of pickle you get it mthafcka you understand that I knew nothing of this Appellwaiting dizzy without roll or furl of schedule the Ordnung the vertiginous Seder this grubby grubber gribnes schmaltz only refinement luxury Jesus we ow
ned a Rubens or was it a Rembrandt a Vermerely it was natural I played the violin on the roof of the piano and took Latin to Greece Kaffeeklatsches mit Kuchen a Bechstein with original bench an imitation Duiffopruggar we owned a first edition of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften kept under glass a snoglobe alongside the traintracks laced under and around the trunk of our Weihnukkabaum we had one of those tinseled too the spring day Fascism began to be spelled with an sch and our Führer won his election even among the voters of the camps as vast as the house six floors high we had dying in here locked in here I can’t don’t remember won’t whoever locked me in maybe myself serves me right Links the instructions the onlyfollowingorders the ordure only the ordersfollowingorders appeals with the lawyers young everyone’s yarmulked younger they don’t know from old workmanship Louis Quatorze was what we had over there L’État c’est moi it’s said the Empire desk a door up on new condo construction sawhorses the kit shelves and the bed just a barracks mattress a kippah on wheels hauled to my room that rents as a studio the brownstone’s black dead middle freezing no windows open only shattered hung with shutters in shards in triangles and stars over Manhattan forgotten on high I’m going going soon to be gone the ball outta the park like they do in the Bronx Uptown the B Train to 145th Street a few Blocks 7away from where I fled to get back to the ghetto never born into London Amsterdam Cologne Coloniabandoned no more of that muddyweed muster the Appell’s core barren eve of Christ’s night into morning this morning Christ’s birthday mine too Shabbos the Sabbath with the ecumenical presents the roaches and rats bowed and candled eight of them so refined so natürlich gemütlicker mein Arsch a bicycle marionette an edition of the Fables of Lessing one year then the next a little book of letters on Arab numismatics by this Reiske whose birthday I shared a luxurious exchange a pursuit of ideas of ideals the always omnilingual chatter of cultured bankers brokers the booms and blasts of their battleship wives the only men among us Mustermenn Clustermen the tumultuous crowd rankling rankless and rowless unnamed and unnumbered the fencefaced barbtoothed and bowlmouthed we owned a flush toilet all two of them one for each kissing cheek the burble of the Rhine the bubbling Rhein Vorder and Hinter the Rijn the Lake Constance summers at Basel I mean the Loregoddamnedlei I survived was in theater and the theater of politics who was the cousin who knew Brecht to survive to the end to mourn Heideggerian I knew a Marion Heidegger once for a hopeful for the Paris Opera mezzo soprano this fall into trapdoor nothingness the void through a blackhole a blankhole checked a crack in the square the Appell unmoved on Onkel D’s chessboard scattered with orangerinds the citrusblind hallways stalked a mustardseed horseradishthirst my sheetskin fittedskinflat shroudskin the moustacheguns and a tip of the cap to salute the redstar the gelb the goldbars and teethdisease the pure evil’s the word Jenseits von Gut und Böse I knew from my father’s incomplete set of the Gesammelte Werke the death of more than me you don’t have to be a prophet to know this coming Christmass mistmass perhaps a week away we hoped a Hungarian Shabbos a Szombat from New Year’s or more was the report the forecast Rotfront the eastweather the eastworn eastworm drab beastweather the uniformed horses like camels in caravan their heads as if the busts of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Tucholsky All soldiers are murderers of course save those who saved me the only thing only person left lined behind for the listing as Exhibit A on an attachment numbered numinous rollcalled the etroghand shaking St. Vitus dance the Simchat Hora on it to contract anyone’s future have D’Amato & Leib give it the onceover the twiceshy cousins their names the same as their cats Tutankhamun papyri the Oppenheim Familienleben paintings the Bilder the Bibles not the Torah or Tanach the law of the Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät I would’ve had for insurance to ingather the fees postdue rent violations lying on this feather Gesundheit this weather my father’s barometer a gift of the Baron van or von Wahrheit tarnight trutheight the treepitch waiting the wasting expectation of birthday morning with Christ the thricewise firmament of presents not for the Hasid’s dead son’s bris or circumcision but a Hollekreisch kindled anew lamp desk a bathingsuitcamera pomegranate my wishes Purimoney and books the Halt and the Inhalt of the illuminated Haggadah from which we sang the Bund or Chalutzim tunes to the music of municipal sculpture the riders of the Red Army parting the frozen Reed Sea of the Vistula painted red with our blood to scatter to pass through the fires what tribes of us left