24 - It is not my fault

  

It is not my fault.

I am not like my momma or poppa who wanted nothing to stay in the shtetl, seeing no one, speaking to no one other than our own.

They wanted no more than what they had, to go to temple, to recite and to go home again, needing no other path but the one our ancestors paved for them between birth and god.

I like being in the world, to walk down a busy street filled with children and traffic, to wave and smile at people I know and have them wave and smile back at me.

I like to think I am part of something larger than my religion, mean something to the place where I grew up and live, and have the respect of Goyim and Gentile.

And for a long time I thought I did.

I am a proud man.

These fingers learned long ago how to work fabric in ways even poppa could not.

I can make a suit with my eyes closed, hem a gown, tuck a cuff or sew a stitch as quickly as anybody.

I do fine work.

Even the worst of THEM say that.

Then all this changed.

I walk down the street one day and people insult me, felling me I am diseased or worse. They make me wear a badge because I have become too much like them and they need for me to stand out so they can hate me.

It is not my fault.

I try to fit in but they won’t let me.

I try to do good work, but a good man, yet this is not enough.
They do not want me or anyone that is different around them.

But I am not different – really, and they hate me more for wanting what they want, and I don’t know why.



email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20 - Shoemaker

Image
  I am a shoemaker, but not so good a shoemaker as my father was, or his father before him. I learned from my father’s hand, yet have only a dim memory of him from those hazy times in the old country when he ran a small shop near Berlin . My father was a good shoe maker, not a wealthy one. Since he was a Jew he mostly sold to other Jews, and in Germany in those days, few Jews had wealth to spare. None the less my father earned a living, as well as the enmity of Hans, the German shoemaker who hoped not only to sell his shoes to Germans but to us Jews, too. Hans hated my father long before any of us heard about the Nazis or understood fully who and what they were. I think now Hans envied my father’s ability, fingers that could mold leather in a way few other men could then or since. Hans often called my father “a dirty Jew” in the market place just to keep others from doing business with us. This being Germany, many already blamed us for losing the Great War, so th...
Read more

12- We turn to dust

Image
   If I have so much, why do I feel so poor? We live in this place because they do not let us live anywhere else – and then blame us for living as we do. They call us greedy, and say we earn our livelihood in dirty professions, as if we could earn our keep in any other way. I count coins at night because I have so few to count, and must squeeze what I can out of each, knowing I will be blamed for being cheap. They hate us not merely for what we are, but also for our ability to survive. Each time they take something from us, we manage, and so they take more until we have nothing left for them to take except what we cannot give up, and then they take that, too. When they put us in ghettos, they thought we would act like rats and devour each other in such a small place. But we survived. So then they put us in an even smaller place, and even smaller after that, and a place finally so small, we turn to dust. Holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan
Read more

3 - I won’t let them take God from me

Image
    I won’t let them take God from me, although I am not a God-fearing man the way my father was, and my brother. I did what I did to honor God the way all boys my age did. But I was a boy with my eye on the world, someone who truly believed I could become whatever I wanted regardless of the blood others said ran through my veins. Others, of course, made it clear I could become only what they said I could become, and so I became that, learning to accept what I could not change, learning to thrive on less so that I might thrive at all. And then that took even that, calling me greedy for clinging to only what I was told I could have, and this, too, I accepted, and did still with even less. When they told me we had to live here, I even accepted my shrinking world as inevitable, until I found it had shrunk to a bunk six of us must share. But by that time, I had shrunk, too, my rattling bones fitting into half the space I thought once as necessary. Even this was too m...
Read more