In the Ukraine, one town is still there,
visited by a cousin who took pictures.
So small, it always must be located:
Ostropol, on the road
from Berditchev to Zhitomer.
Some prescience led my great-grandfather,
Moses, the egg merchant,
to leave,
one step ahead of trouble.
Candling eggs one night,
in place of opaque yolk,
he saw a glint of the goldine medina,
or heard hoof beats of Cossacks
echoed on the ovoid wall.
No one has searched for Koretz,
the village of my other great-grandfathers,
who did not leave.
Typhus orphaned my father,
and saved his life
through a strange philanthropy,
deposited him with far away strangers
who loved him indifferently.
The ones who stayed behind are
not in their great grandchildren,
repairing watches in their front windows,
standing in the doorway
with their butchers’ aprons
red with the days’ work.
Not inscribed on a bronze plaque
on the synagogue wall,
light bulb glowing softly
on the day of their Yartzeit.
Not in the overgrown cemetery,
where the headstones
are weathered beyond reading.
Not on a monument
signed by all the heads of state,
Saying, “These fields are salted
with the ashes of a generation
of Jews.”
In Poland there is now
a festival of Jewishness:
Krakow’s old quarter has
new shops filled with figurines
of dancing rabbis, miniature menorahs.
Sephardic drumming, mournful melodies
move the crowds to newfound ecstasy,
sad nostalgia for an unwanted history.
The festival grows every year,
although
there are no Jews left in Poland.
I will go the Ukraine,
to the old shtetls of my family.
I will write Hebrew calligraphy
on my forehead.
I will wait for my ancestral ghosts
to take my hands and
dance with me
along the river
through the poppy-red fields.
