Funny, You Don't Look Jewish

About eighteen months after my post about DNA testing, my life took an unexpected turn. I was contacted by a cousin in Canada, who revealed to me that my maternal grandmother was Jewish. I never knew about that part of my family‘s history because my grandmother died when my mother was still a child and my grandmother’s story went with her to the grave.

Since then and through a series of fortuitous events, I have been working with the New Voices Project, which focuses on the moral lessons of the Holocaust, and my poem “Flying African,” has become part of their PSA for a forthcoming book, New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust.

"Flying African" on YouTube

The research has been harrowing, but I’ve been using the work of Gregory H. Stanton, The 8 Stages of Genocide, as a conceptual guide. I’ve also been fortunate enough to receive a residency in “The Writer’s Room” at The Betsy Hotel, where I will be able to devote myself fully to research and writing.

Then, on October 3, 2019, as part of The Betsy Hotel’s “Meet the Artist” series, I will be reading some more of the poems that I’ve written.

So, if you’re in town, please join me at The Betsy Hotel at 5.p.m. as I embark on this new phase into my genetic history.

Here is another of the poems--which seems appropriate for today--that I've written so far.

The Shofar of Auschwitz

Rosh Hashanah, 1944

For Chaskel Tydor

It may not be a miracle like on Hanukkah,

but finding the shofar days before Rosh Hashanah,

when the Talmud teaches that Joseph was freed

from prison on the first day of the new year,

when the impossible is possible if we stay open,

made us think that maybe, this was a sign

Hashem had not abandoned us to our murderers.

So, in spite of the death, disease, and torture

that plagued the Lager, where to perform a mitzvah,

like a mishloach minot or teaching the Pirkei Avot

could be rewarded by the fascists with a bullet

to the back of my head. But I didn’t care.

The shofar on my lips, I blew as if my life depended

on it, and then, a year later, three miles off the coast

of Palestine, as if to say, "We are still here. The tribe lives on."

Source: https://www.aish.com/jw/s/The-Shofar-of-Auschwitz.html?s=mm