Last Sunday night Kate and I watched a documentary, “Inheritance,” about the relationships of individual lives during the Holocaust. Probably because both my parents were German, the story of this most tragic time in the 20th Century continues to haunt me. It was with this terrible dilemma in mind that I wrote a poem about my German father’s struggle with his love hate relationship with Germany. So here it is.
PARADOX
My German Papa
Lived with this terrible paradox.
He ran away
Some time around eighteen ninety,
Or who knows?
Always he would speak of the beauty of the Rhine.
The brilliance of Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Marx and
“Thus spake Zarathustra.”
There in my papas pantheon of gods
Lay all the answers.
On July fourth in New York Harbor
He and Bruno, a fellow believer, jumped ship.
Walked their way across Brooklyn.
Found a little Germany in Ridgewood.
I forgot to say,
Somewhere along the way
Papa found Bakunin the Anarchist.
He loved him and Anarchist August Babel.
Oh yes, all those Germans, but now he discovered
Coney Island, the Bronx Zoo,
The Metropolitan Opera and the subway too.
“All those people from all over the world.
Sitting standing quietly next to each other
In a packed subway car.
And not at war. Remarkable!,” he would say.
How he loved Wagner, The Ring,
And of course
The Blue Danube Waltz.
He cut a mean figure on the dance floor.
As the darkness of the “marching idiots,”
That’s what he called them, descended,
Papa’s mood began to darken.
There were five of us by then.
Moma, Alice, Hedda, me and Papa.
Realized much later,
In secret Moma stole away to rid herself of an unborn.
Was that to unburden papa?
Instead--she rid herself of herself.
Germany drifts to the Armageddon.
Three little kids and Papa.
He spent so much time fighting back tears.
His Germany sliding into hell and
Three little kids needed to be fed, clothed and sheltered.
How could Goethe, Schiller, Marx help now?
I often wondered.
Somehow three kids
With the help of many good christian socialists,
They grew up.
Ten days after my twelfth birthday
Came the crash of twenty nine.
What happened to Papa?
The country’s depression now joined Papa’s.
Sadness and remorse like a big old turtle
Crowded inside himself.
Often he had spoken of the coming doom.
His beloved fatherland sinking into disbelief.
Oh he tried and tried to understand it
Yet when the dam burst revealing
The charred bodies of the Holocaust
I hear him murmur Goethe, Schiller, Marx, Einstein.
Where are you when I need you most?
Where did his beloved go?
Hardest of it all, I wondered
How could he still love Richard Wagner?
Did the music portend the abyss?
Auchwitz, Bergen Belsen broke my papa’s spirit.
No, he did not die.
He lived a half life.
Painting lovely landscapes and
Silently taking long walks in the woods.
Lying there his life spent.
His voice a faint whisper.
“I don’t think of that far off land anymore.”
And “Oh yes,
I did not know what your mother was going to do that day.”
