by Joshua Cohen
When they were dead, he was dead, and when they came for the dead, he went.
I’ll tell you what I’ll admit if you’ll just listen to me I’m Joseph ben you don’t know me from Adam the last survivor that’s it that’s who I am and that’s that I’m the last survivor of the Holocaust if you know it the Shoahshowbusiness that whole entire complete consumption of fire by fire all Greek to me it was 1939–1945 east your dates the gates of your mouth guard them have to remember to chew the last bread the last sip of water not rain melted snow October the 23rd of November the iciclelick the saltick the rockstomach swallow of stones the ghettohuddle the puddles and the westerly mounds the barbarian wastes sub Ubii and their tribal cannibal canon those redruddy blood-running brothers of Esau and the clay tit cults of Mithras and Isis our Nemesis Jesus it was us maybe two three generations of wandering Wartheland ul. Franciszkaska north up from Franzstrasse south and west through Turkey the future Crusade route in reverse the Bosporus over and up through the Balkans huddled through the mudpuddle pass the flumeRome paganpaved into Gaul home of Gomer the furthest barbarian Bałuty not what’s it been a hundred two hundred years after the Temple came crashing down in Jerusalem D.C. with Solomon dead and Herod too we came enslaved as exiled priests and as merchantraders rabbi heretics and false prophets we settled and lived and died we died European I survived Washington Holocaust Heights I’m one hundred and eight years older or nine and I’m the last living survivor of the Holocaust the last one the last of the dispersal the Exilelot the wheel-ready firetamed life made the newspaper Rozensztajn’s Getotsaytung the whosepapered Kronika the Tageschronik the Neue York Times and the radio’s announcement its songs bullets tin of ear Es geyt a yeke mit a teke a suitcase a bootchase a claptrap clumptrunk unplugged atop the television I’m the last person in the world who owns a radio I think they broadcast only for me the last person too to read the contraband newspaper clippings in Polish who knew to clothe the starved cheese flesh rot the honeypot Chanukah candles turnedover to the Einkunftstelle traded in return for worthless money scrip Rumkies two year old news the surrender of Warsaw the last surviving to read the Times the crossword catechism I used to find in the hallway or slipped under the door by Jesus Angel se hablemos the language of goats to wrap their turds in the shroud of the oldest on record survivor of Auschwitz the Holocaust Europe say the obituary headlines say the footstones he died a she and I’m it says right here now three years nine months two days older than him or her I won what did I win another ration whether the grandprize telemarkedcar or a threeyearninemonthtwoday vacation to hell though the televisionary phone died so long ago a generation to dust at the wall and the only station the radio got back when it worked was the frequency of shrill salsa A Toda Cuba Le Gusta A Toda Buna Hear Oy the government warning the flash-floodwatch hurricane threat will outlive me the last survivor the last victim dead soon enough of the other previous dire after me what fire what final testimony for our people mine Nazis live forever and are always everywhere under every eternal rock in your toilet behind every one of your refrigerator doors to the infinite freezer I’m told cold I’m freezing not for the last but for the first the very Shechyanu a virgin like Doris who never told this to anyone either she died in Birkenauschwitz survived Agnesz she gave out on the boat across the Bosporus of what I didn’t know if she was infectious or not the last one to tell it to silence the mute the wall of the wind no pasarán she used to tell me when I tried to taste her vagina the Passierschein Ressort whether Floridian or an Arizona New Mexico Heaven Olam Habla se the shovels and spades of the gravedigging snoutpigging work detail the Marysinful construction of roads the street ul. Inflancka Gärtnerstrasse to the cemetery the garden of graves paved with brick and coal cinder the legendary legionnaire stoneturning upending of rock to make a mirror dull of Lyons on the leftbank of the Rhine with the blessings of the Emperor Claudius and his clemency the favor of his wife Agrippina born Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium the home of the War Fleet the fastfooted jewelpeak of Lower Gaul all Three of them the Gallic Empire it’s called by the history that destroyed its own soldier camps that ghetto of veterans from the First World War mercenaries come home to grow fat and sons of Bałuty it’d been called a suburb a ghetto and larger absorbed assimilated into the mess the mass the Urlubbed urbhub city-central with us in from Hamburg Frankfurt am Vienna and Prague on the old burial road up from Bonn was once Bonna to Colonia not the one in New Jersey where Eva lived with the tickytacky houses amid that ghettofenced Levitt suburban insanity cramped into flaking stucco buildings a million or so of them to a room or more always they kept coming they keep coming and going the three knocks to use the latrines or the pot or the kettles the push-squat the urnpiles headown facedown a walk past the factory on Mostowski or the Masonic Lodge dodge on the Moorweidenstrasse not half as grand as the synagogue destroyed on ul. Kocuiszko or Izrael Poznaski’s the two of us me and Doris deep in Bundist conversation about the communards and the verse of Rimbaud’s love for Verlaine and the greatest poet of Polish Apollinaire was the name of that student nonsense the young enthusiasm excitement of our adolescent speech the Zionist mishegas narrisch quick as the rein of the rainsnowflakes dancing to Rabbi Fajner’s songs in honor of the Presess’ marriage to that Weinberger whore as lawyerloud as Marysin kibbutzniks their dreams hitchedup to weddingtrains leaving the Aktion behind north to Chełmno in a rush to be home by curfew what we called home the Sperre Agnesz Doris and I would kiss in the settling noise and hug in the settled warmth with our coats any tag left on the ragfloor atop the scrapfloor as our cots as our bed shared together enough room for our knees to root for trufflespace muffleplace I’d never slept with a girl before from Berlin through the whistling humming the tart farts and whispery drafts the hack and tack of the coldcoughs our beginning the foundations the altar of my religion was three floors up in the back with an unwindowed view to the cherry courtyard trash-packed Oppidum Ubiorum the Ara Ubiorum the snowastes mudhastes the wheelfling the arrowslinged from the towers the ratatat yap of the wolfdogs their gurgling hordes machined just beyond the barbedwire walls erected upon our own Egyptian shoulders the whipswish the switch and the taskmastered wish we were there before ever the goyim were the Clementine Christians the Constantine Christians and the Curia years and maybe even a lifespan a lifetime a century sinned before the Emperor even declared that inconstant cult to be the equal of all religions and so exempted its initiates its initiators its priests say from public duties the munera and the Hieri the Archisynagogi a world before Bonn before Bonna the Franks too the Saxons suckling at the teat of the sow of Rome’s warworld the moneymundi Neronian Flavian us in our Babel and Babylon robes the weeping harpy women and children in legioned liege in servitude bound and chained along the chariot-ways back in the Iscariotdays our shaming slum Germania Inferior it was wrought as Suetonius for one tells us in the name of my father at the end of Caesar’s sword at the Rhinepoint the Reintip ranked as Colonia broughtover imported to New Jersey America with all of its lawnornament idols at the ends of its looparound wraparound drives deadending unending the elms the Elmont Places the icerinkydink publicschool system in which she taught the Latin of German alongside the mall with the Indian movierental store the Pakistani carwash across the river washing the Hudson ben the ocean Atlantic just down the Turnpike just off the Garden State Parkways a bissel south past Newark and Elizabeth Woodbridge over Zgierska Street Township Middlesex County country to where Eva my cousin survived lived to die but I never visited her there amid the Metropark hospitals the Walgreens the red whites and blues of the Foodtown the foodgreen mallwall the parkingplot haze of the wireraze with its honking of sirens the L.Z.A. choir voicing the tears of the painter who’d lived he said in Paris but spoke no French Antwerp or Brussels who did portraits in charcoal he wouldn’t burn for my Mutter of me and my Oma whose head became black and swelled with the pride of disease no one could diagnose not even Berlin’s Caspari we bribed until suffused with cancer it began to resemble the week’s rot o
f that pineapple we’d buy at the market on the Severinstrasse we’d never finish because there’d always be another palm never empty her fruitface grew silver crowns gray rotted mold the money from my Onkel the gambler up late at table over his ersatz coffeemud cigarettes rolled out of the leaves of the Goethe birchoak inveighing in German auf Deutsch against the Poles their Tuwim and Słowacki all of those poems about hummingbirds and flowers how can you call those goyishers writers they’re goyim they’re illiterate roughs toughs he’d never read them from Aragon Breton or Rosenstock Tzara he used to say to us in our room be careful with your horseplay your Morseneigh it’s still a bookshelf even if there aren’t any books on it just my papers my meds and my glasses their prescriptions never updated my toothbrush and teeth Marx and Nietzsche of the moment’s Göttergötzendämmerung the instant’s Good set against Evil’s Dasein designs Entosteter Entwesteter Freud he’d yell at the Poles the Yiddishist moles with their Mendel Schmendel whomever E equals MC squared like a shvartze but what about jazz and surreal Expressionism he’d spit Dadadadadada what it sounds like in Polish or Yiddish they had to yell back at him in German because though they were impoverished peasants Ostlost pissants to him they knew more languages than us they had to it’s always the poor who have to know more and work harder be quicker in whatever language in charge of the mouth department the strike of the hands the reading of palms by the Gypsy encampment the Tzigane her name toothless womanwhoremother foretelling for me but not for Guttmann Futtermann a life so long the pregnant Rom laughed at me my inheritance the Porajmos they call it the Samudaripen biboldó meaning unbaptized by liber or fire left to the gnaw the crowcaw of the Rumkowski rats arrived official in glasses hat tie and cane raised to strike the orphaned king of the roaches the guttermann muttermann his name I metup with him later with the eyes and the frothmouth gothmouth coming through Köln in search of survivors at the foot of the bridge blown all to Hohenzollern hell across the Rhine its ribs floating like drowning snakes the temptation of a woman I thought was a man walking with the branch of an aspenbeechbirchcarob tree in her hand she said she’d found in Czech stumping her way the dumky Rumkie to Paris pracuj powoli over the footbridge slowgoing woodbridge too far over the next Biebowing Aktion a last Ressort courting the paper matter of factory cuts bleeding the kiss of Doris’ lips on my fingertips and the lids of my eyes Give me your children she’d say but she couldn’t bear the work quotas lack of supply the factory hours demand strikes over wages and rations of food and word a loaf for six days for five the lessening weight of the soulbread the souldead forty grams to thirtythree the angry complaint and the rage stealing the thieving Tarnungtalk that latenight rainwatersnowatergossip the recrimination drip of the mouth-leak hate accusation and blame the bitterherbturd snuggled close before the first shifts the aching hands love between the thighs of the Kishinever circus dwarf and the banker from Prague it cost money to love and to live the plenty the fat and the lean cowlike cowering women the protekcja Thirteen the rabbi without wife their twelve bearded daughters whom Doris mothered in lieu of her own an imagined life an imaginary life nursing away at a breast dry thirst-arved wombed beyond the jurisdiction of God the King’s jurisdictation of the Gettoverwaltung with halting tongue the eyes electroshock bulged by yet another rule sensless another regulation meaningless mental meat the soup issue the watery moonless night as black as a screen blank for which I forsook my father and Marlene Dietrich Unrat fit for the Kino row K seat 2 just in time to make the news unreeled over Desutschland gedenkt der gefallenen Helden at the Staatsoper with General von Blomberg addressing in rückhaltlosem Vertrauen zum Führer sehen wir die Saat reifen einen Staat der Einigkeit der Stärke und der Ehre ein Volk in Frieden in einem befriedeten Europa in the loge alongside von Mackensen Göring Hess and Eddie Cantor it was Iskowitz in Kid Millions 1934 35 in icecreams and color after those goosestepping parade marches in gunpowder black and surrendering white all these American visions saddling you with yet another possibility of exile a widest frontier a darker Diaspora galutglut ever deepening selfimposed selfreposed as a limitation stronger than any barbedwalls or barbarous gates of being made rendered like fat stupider idiotic less informed intelligent worse just less curious being remanded to the silent and dumb only wet primordial animals just crawled scrawled themselves out of the Lebensraum they’re now trumpeting like the Levites at Jericho’s Temple selfdenial I mean the wiles of while in the worst possible way missing notes what’s worse skipping with sloppy brush-strokes and imperfect marble verses that don’t scan skim stanzas or addup understood the patience to falter before the grand equations of unread pages hated because they exist because they hate to exist as they are have no value no worth a snowedover snowedupon clearing covered in white a blank page a black & white page strewn with the cursive of corpses Rembrandtstrasse 16 or Schneidergasse Schiller and Goethe to the gas alongside Ventzki the vents and even Rumkowski’s wife the ghetto’s Venus starved far beyond the capacities of even Marienbad or Morszyn Łódź unable to sleep but thirsty for dream Łodzia reduced to the daze that is waking in its own coat torn of arms with the crowns and boat sunk to the bottom of the lowest circling rung hell frozenover the reversion of bells its last days tolled grave excavation that selfexploration self-examination the Aufräumkommando archaeology of bodies charred shot unclaimed without birthright or only that of the Poles the roaches and rats the streets overturned an upheaval the reversed spin of the globe revolting the stenchstanch of anklehigh kneeabout blood the stain of the crotch the collars of priests unto Mengele what’s my lines demarked remarked strata dug beneath the Germans beneath the Romans dug into pagan rebirth a nowhere unfounded on air in the air the smoke rivered Rhineleft Rhinelost at the edge of the barbarian west with the nit grubs lice hair tribes the rootruned ruination of mudhives thatch the love of fire and wheel and sharp fur and the cult of the clan the earthworship the Saxsexed sunlust of the Suebi the Kings of Gallæcia the Galatai descended from Gomer the grandson of Noah the other the enemyother of the westerlybrother the Cain of the holehumping tithumping rapedsisterdaughter grunt mother of the fields the three fallow stars shining upon the bodied ruin of Batavia’s shitpissfleck and maggoty corpserot corpsetrot a clump a clod as over the horizon now comes a whiteness a sheet a man a mensch arrayed in a page he’s led as a slave to his loins for its generations to die here at the north edge of the northernmost fence of the cemetery roadstreetmudfeet trod the chatter of any teeth left serving for the perching of crows on the graves their names it’s these jokes the yolkyokes I remember the hits and the missing witzs meaning not just joshing with humor but the witzs patronymic witz meaning the son of the vichs or the vychs which son of a wich wicz vits or vitz I’ve saved them up in the drawers of my nightstands two that’ll survive me and survive survival a will the humor a testimony we traded traitored hated and loved the last to live to return from last century bearing its gifts its souvenirs a suitcase of tchotchkes the trunks smokedamaged remaindered remanded looted givenup and over away that’s all I stole what’s my sin thieved what they left me with an appreciation of that whole spit image graven in laughs in these ways to get through it all I’ve savedup their jokes understand their cemeterylaughs their prats their blackandbrownstonegigglesandsmiles not their beginnings understand never them never did like them understand we’re the beginnings we’re talking about men and the angels they laugh like women Doris and Agnesz and Eva my cousin out in Colonia dead by the Turnpike the Parkway down at the deadend exit mile numbered zero of ul. Okopowa it’d been called Buchdruckergasse the binding street paging white way the road to the grave the tums of the tombs we’d gather who knows who to remember how to laugh at these punchlines to the face to the gut is the word in America shutting my eyes to the setups they’re called the blackblankness the blindness of night to tomorrow today to sharpen our knifeteeth the faculty the facility of our laughter freezing to remember those late afternoons it must’ve been Shabbos the Sabbath it felt like it at least without work getting done getting it right
unfinished laughter half done half leftover these onehundredeight of them I have punchlines they’re called kick-steplines the march through the years its remnants I have one for each year for each language of life we’d stand around talk and gawk joke and rub hands for warmth and butt heads and hearts without horns or barbs without names none of them darker than hope the thing with feathers our wan hope the butterfly stitch the wax wings of mice and the roaches of rats leaving them nothing taking nothing but our century with me overstayedandextended at day rates by night by the hour the soured expiredlongpastdue the rent third floor #3B remember the Second Commandment they owe me six months I’ll give them another loafing or idle to fill the air cold with what breath left in our bodies taking memory with us my ribs hurt to recall all these Łódźlines the bordering Babel ways of the wall gravegriping darkgropes those Linzmannstadtlaughs one hundred eight what they’re called punches and kicks to the groin betrayed by the face of the mouth that we’d trade we’d bait them bated in mud and the puddles of rainreinwater snow to salve the wounds of shitandpissandIdon’tknowhatelse pondy scars these hahas these mars funnies I’m left with I’m leaving all I’ve ever been born for and against what I’ve borne witness false for and coveted the foretold you heard it here first folks my famous last words lying swaddled a newborn Wort clothed but still cold there’s no heat here only a spoon only a candle because the electricity future I’ll tell you despite any sophistry sophistication that suit and tie business the cafédämmerung Commerz the Yecca airs I’m their heir I’m a nostalgist at heart I like the down I love the troddenupon all that spitonandovertheshoulder I’m sentimental my birthday being Christmas this Sabbath Shabbos indulgence before the three stars blink dewy weteyed not for what I’ve lost understand what I’ve never had is what’s forgotten was denied me and wasted I can’t drop it my pants the same madras pair can’t let go of my body and breathe lungs and rib to keep myself in memory like a Venetian overcoat of my father’s robbed or lost surplus let go on sale for next to nothing no more discussions no more discursions excurses exegesis eisegese didn’t one Ecclesiastic or another once gloss there’s nothing new under the sun the moon the twin Pole-poles within the fences the walls the barbed boundaryround laughlines of Łódź there’s nothing left for me Joseph ben my father you didn’t know him don’t worry or apologize to God forbid lie to believe in Him the women I’ve loved and the men who’ve made me smile as wide as a grave the gape of the void bottomed with a humorless corpse to not know from guilt is to be either guilty or dead no more the setups the buildup eternal construction of the cemeteryroad this cementerystreet flooded flumeline straight to the heart of the issue toward the soul of the mattering womb yuk it up to remember what I want to what I need to what I choose what has been chosen for me in quotation »auserwählt« marked say by Hitler I don’t even know her these punchlines these payoffandons these zingers and dingringers of bells the bleeding heart of the mouth that’s what I have that’s what I recall they come back to me now as I’m dying this whispering hiss I’m this dying moment forsaking me for a laugh these one hundred and eight of them lines but who’s counting