Forgetting the Holocaust

In the words of Mr. Bandler,
janitor of our parochial school.
as our learned, portly principal,
Rabbi Théodore Gorlick, strode by,
half-crescent glasses on a cord,
“It’s eezy to forget Da Holocaust
if you’re a Yeuro-peean intee-lektual
who’s never been beat up!”

And Gorlick, raised in Paris after the War,
master of the art of showing no sign of having heard,
ignored his proletarian critic, now paused in mid-sentence
to let the “Da Learn’d Rabbit” pass.

Bandler smacked a bristling fist
into his bear-trap of a hand
and whispered invectives
into the ear of his beloved German shepherd, Blackie,
who sniffed the schoolyard for
anti-Semites and self-contented Jews.

What could I know of Mr. Bandler’s Lager,
his run-ins with the horrors
recounted by poets—Levi, Améry, or Celan
—learned suicides all!—and other Jewish writers who struggled
their names into anagrams of their old identities
to fit among a people who don’t
have pogroms and The Shoah behind them.

This night brings a vision of Mother,
alevah hashalom, truncated by depression,
half alive/half dead—horrified
at her slipping grip on life,
with a ‘doctor-for-a-son’
unable to save her.

As she vanishes, I consider
my thinning thighs.
Forty years from Rabbi Gorlick and Blackie,
I’ve become a stick person,
the kind of “bahn-deet intee-lektual”
that Bandler despised,
my muscles, like my arguments,
caught in a fatal dissolve.

From other Lagers there emerged many witnesses
more damaged than Mr. Bandler,
who quietly swore that reality
would never again be the same.

We were kids. Mr. Bandler’s
unbridled rage echoed our own
at the life-sucking boredom
of eight-thirty-to-five-o’clock Hebrew School.
How we loved it when he mocked:
“ Rabbi Gorlick. . . Rabbi Gorlick. . . Rabbi Gorlick! . . .
You know vat iz da troble wit Rabbi Gorlick?
Never been beat up! ”

But what did Mr. Bandler gain by being beat up?
He, who eluded Nazi fire and left behind
“da vine-tasting Yeuro-peean bon vivants,”
the ones who ignored the arbitrary arrests
and vast disappearances, an entire continent
who disregarded the long nightmare
of The Others, Les Autres,
Les Juifs,
and kept on savouring the aroma
of pungent cheeses and butter-crusted bread
that smelled so much sweeter than the foot
of a sleepless, hidden child.

This is what he gained: he could tell you which of all
the possible sad ends of any story
would be the one to come true:
“ Viet Nam, Viet Nam, Viet Nam . . . ”
Mr. Bandler growled, rising above the local
and the personal history,
“ You know how Yoonited States vill come back from Viet Nam?

Vithout da pants! Vithout da pants! ”