Mr. Berger’s dead, her mother said

Wrinkling her brow and saying

She was sorry without giving

The girl the sense she

Really cared. And the girl just sighed,

As much saddened that the man had died

As her mother’s arch and insincere

Sympathies.

To the girl he had

Always been a charming man, a little quiet,

A little sad, whose biography she

Gleaned in its totality

The day she saw

The fading numbers

Etched in blue on his willowy arm.

And that had aggrieved the breech already there,

Between woman Old and woman New,

Like dormant volcanoes

Half-a –world away, smoldering

At their core while letting life proceed

In its humdrum day-to-day

He was in a camp somewhere,

Her mother used to say, as if he

Had merely been on vacation all those

Many years before, but until the girl

Read books her mother wished she’d never would

The girl had never understood

Young and fiery, the girl

Often wondered if Rebellion

At a mother’s stony obstinacy,

Not Truth revealed

Had opened up the wound. And she pondered,

Between the two of them, who was more responsible

For the liberal applications of the salt

They both poured on the other’s ulcerated heart.

The girl only knew that one day

She took to the old man’s bosom

Knowing it enraged her mother most

And nurtured him when her own siblings

Often begged for affections from either/or

That neither, in their struggle, would accord

Hitler did not get enough of them, her

Mother used to say, and added: he’s already dead,

This zombie, who floats around the neighborhood

And looks as tattered as the rags he picks

From garbage cans. And the girl, enflamed,

At such casual dismissal of a broken man

Sought him out and walked with him the summer

Days, and discovered he had indeed been dead

Nearly half-a century, but it was not always so

Sometimes, for her,

He cradled in his withered hand

The photograph of a raven-haired

And smiling woman of some means

And on either side of her ruffled blouse,

Two cherubs of each sex that

Happily lay heads to their mother’s breasts.

And ruefully, with stuttering tongue,

He noted in his dry ironic way

How she could not heft a shovel, while two so young

Seemed incapable of working in the mines

And how, for that frailty,

And the consequence of heritage

They were turned to ash

In a wintry Polish wind

He had gotten to these shores somehow

In the following years

For some purpose of Continuation he never quite

Grasped

Except, he mused, (perhaps) to bear witness

To a Catholic girl who bled rather than letting

Him see her bite her lip every time

He told his tale in the third person

As if he had not been there as anything

But a flyspeck clinging to the bloody walls

And her mother, not getting it at all

Showered her with glib aphorisms

And pious mouthings fraught

With fractured history and the wild,

Eviscerated  philosophies

Of the Made-Up Mind.

Under which assault,

For a time, the girl stood teetering on

The precipice of love and honor

For a flawed parent

Before the earth heaved up

And tossed her on the other side

Where now they lived, together,

On opposite shores of the same divide

Mr. Berger’s dead, her mother said

To which the girl replied,

Tossing her scarf over her shoulders as she

Stomped back out into the wintry night,

Another one bites the dust, right ma?

05/24/2005

Author's Note: A reflection on the all-too common casual anti-semitism I see around me and grew up with.

Posted on 05/24/2005
Copyright © 2025 Ken Harnisch