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The
Smell of Stones
My grandmother’s
dream foretells
her mother’s death
in Auschwitz.
The
house shines, a dim Shabbos
glow and I smell stones
in my mother’s black iron oven
as they whiten to dust.
My mother calls me.
As I walk through her house,
a salty odor of smoking meat sticks
to the air, kitchen counters clean and wet.
Outside, grapes cluster on vines.
I reach through the window,
gather handfuls and purple my mouth,
juice dripping down my chin.
My mother’s voice grows fainter.
Out front ripe vegetables dress
her grocery store in yellows, greens,
reds. Bottles of milk lie wrapped in ice.
She sits on broken steps and reads
her Hungarian bible, black dress covering
the length of her, black babushka
winding her head like a chain.
My four-year-old daughter listens
at her side, waves me over, and I run
toward them, see my mother’s hair
burning, skin peeling.
When I reach
through the barbed wire fence
to touch her hands, they melt.
She disappears.
As I chase her voice, it fades
into the smoke. The dream vanishes
and there is only the smell
of stones.
from The Common Fire (Red Hen Press)
first published in Work: A Literary Magazine (1995)
Imagining Feige
for my cousin, Feige Frutcher, whose life was not
remembered, whose fate remains unknown, so I
imagine what might have been.
I
A dancer, like her name,
Feige, little bird, skin like peach flesh,
not the seasoned olive of her younger sisters,
and legs strong for spinning.
When the summer breeze died in Seiget
sun settled on her tongue,
like sand, and her breasts began to bud.
She dressed behind the coat rack in a room
three families shared, made up stories
to keep her sisters quiet, liked a red-haired boy.
Her papa had a produce stand
before the war, built from forest wood,
sold apples, lemons, oranges, beets,
jars of pickled fruit and jam.
Her mama cleaned counters, grandma arranged bins.
Now, no room to dance, just waiting.
II
Feige turned twelve two days before
they boarded trains, lips burned,
feet swelled, but standing tall,
held her sisters' hands until the train stopped.
They were cargo shoved into the snow.
She sewed uniforms - sisters weren't selected -
uniforms for Nazis. Sisters' curly hair
swept across the ground before they marched,
tiny feet trailing to the gas.
III
When soldiers freed the camps,
a boy, hardly a boy,
thin as a branch, yet old enough
for Bar Mitzvah, grabbed her hand and ran.
They slept in fields and stole crops.
Her hair grew like a shadow, and at Seiget
Feige found her house, a field of ash,
but no one else returned.
Six years, then she married that boy,
sailed to America, belly swelling
like rising waves. And she remembered a girl
who danced on a stage after Shabbos
in her red-orange dress her grandma sewed,
peach skin glowing like a flame.
She was a bird, swaying, and now
at night she missed trees.
Stars swarmed like branches
stretching the sky toward a new world.
published in The Santa Clara Review
(2008)
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