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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)
Finding
Feige
for
my cousin, Feige Frutcher,
whose
fate remains unknown.
I
Her
skin was white like the flesh of a peach,
not the seasoned olive of her younger sisters,
and legs strong for spinning. A dancer,
like her name, Feige, little bird.
Her breasts began to bud that summer
when the breeze died in Seiget
and the sun settled on her tongue, like sand.
She dressed behind the coat rack in a room
three families shared and made up stories
to keep her sisters quiet, liked a boy
who lived in the basement with his grandpa.
Papa had a produce stand before the war,
built from forest wood behind their house.
They sold apples, lemons, oranges, beets, jars
of pickled fruit and jam. Mama cleaned
the counters and her grandma arranged
bins. Now, there was no room to dance.
There was just waiting.
II
In a small northeastern town near the Atlantic,
a 73-year-old woman called Fanny
will not talk about the war. Even
with her husband, even with her children.
After soldiers freed the camps, she was lost
in the forest and 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 a boarded building
where she used to dance and her house,
a field of ash, but nothing of her family,
no uncle who later searched, after Feige left
for Holland with a Christian woman
who once bought her father’s pickled beets.
Six years, then she sailed to America
with a husband, also a survivor. Waves swelled
like her belly and she missed trees. Nights
she watched stars connect like branches
stretching the sky toward a new world.
III
Feige just turned twelve two days before
they boarded the train, and her lips burned,
feet swelled, but she stood tall,
held her sisters’ hands until the train
stopped
and they were shoved into the snow.
Lines to the left. Lines to the right.
She was selected to sew uniforms
for Nazis, and she never sewed again,
though her husband was a tailor.
IV
Fanny didn't search or let herself be
found
by cousins in Israel or America. Feige
Frutcher
was a girl forgotten, a girl who danced
on a stage after Shabbos in a red-orange
dress
her grandma sewed, her peach skin
glowing like a flame. A girl who twirled,
who was a bird in a swaying tree.
published in The Santa Clara Review
(2008)
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