Three Poems for Alert Level 3

The Dream Unnoticed

The flanneur would walk the streets observing and

Unobserved, a spectator who was unseen,

A silent presence in conversations, on scene

Yet never noticed, so that when writing on the sand,

The tide washed everything away, except

His messages, his voice inside the shell

We later placed against our ear—the spell

It cast through pulsing blood—the sound that leapt

Into our dreams to tell us who we were

At the very moment that we thought our secret thought

Was quite exempt from scrutiny, the scar

That forms from such an insult—and we are caught

Inside the curly passageway between

The ear and brain where silences are seen

Projected on imagination’s screen.

Like Arrogant Little Elves

The black birds have started to scratch and peck away

the grass, no longer satisfied with bread

shredded on the lawn, and sliced apples now

and then, while sparrows fuss and flutter, day

by day more desperate as the long dry spell goes on;

they carry fragments larger than themselves,

like arrogant little elves. The leaves are dead

and fall too soon for the season. We have no snow

to hide the devastation. Huge roots heave

under the concrete path, showing themselves

like behemoths of the deep we dread will slay

our apprehension and embrace of life

or cosmic order: the steel-grey sky is rife

with invisible depradations spawned the day

we first forgot we were formed of clay.

Go Back To Athens Where You Belong

At the centre of the labyrinth by clue

And wit we found and slew the Minotaur

But coming out was not so pleasant, few

Expected such a hostile welcome, a jaw

Was dropped, a brow was raised—but you,

And all the crowd that jeered, my craw

Was blocked, I croaked: you glowered, yellow-red

Those eyes. “Go back where you belong,” you said,

“And take your crew of trouble-makers.” My soul

Contracted and my heart exploded. Dead

I would have been, no hero, martyr, goal-

Accomplished athlete of the fleet—but troll

And gremlin cast adrift to sail alone,

Black sails unfurled, monster turned to stone.

Four Further Poems in March

An Aura of Gracefulness

Upend the cornucopia, my dearest Flora,

Now that we all are confined for weeks on end,

Here in Italy and other peninsula

Or on islands of sequestration, the blend

Of fresh vegetation and preserved

Exotic fruits are more than we deserve;

Yet still shower us with mercies, an aura

Of gracefulness in a world of grief, the curved

Magnanimity of your breasts, the great restorer

Of our optimism, embrace our souls, and serve

To warm the iciness of dying blood that flows

Forever from the melting glaciers of the north,

And we absorb your blessing—free to sally forth

Again, as living beings do when they awaken

From the endless winter and the drought-worn bracken

Of our brains, they seek to hongi nose to nose.

A Winter Evening By My Window

There was always sadness in her eyes,

The woman who walked her dog at night through slush,

In dreams I could not understand. Snow flies

Against the window in my room, all lush

With books my father bought for me. The pages

Turn themselves, and then the words grow still

Inside my mind, whose meanings still outrage

All sense, as in a dream, where the snow ever will

Fall to silence inquiries outside. She never speaks

As she passes in the street with her dog, and never

Watches where she goes, though I hold on for weeks,

Then months and years, wondering why the weather

Stays the same, a blizzard under yellow lights,

A dog who trudges through the slush, a darkness

Yet to be untold, a woman’s voice, a wind that bites

Through the window, the unread books of sadness.

A Calm Delusion in the Eye of a Storm

You cure, you go, you disappear, and I

Will perish, too, if not this year, then soon

Enough. The winds that blow into the eye

Of the coronal storm, the calm delusion—moon

Floating on a perfect ocean, sky

Debilitated like a child’s disease,

More frightened than in pain: they swoon

Who fear the punctuated hum, the squeeze

So gentle on the heart that will not ease, the hymn

That lingers on the slow horizon, the seas

That heave against lost harmonies, a rune

Without decipherment or borealis,

A prayer unuttered in a blood-soaked tallis:

You lie unmourned until the end of time,

Heaven’s eternal eye too blurred by shame.

The Shower of Toxic Waters

We stood there, all of us, swaying on the precipice,

Looking into eternity, not like some vast saturnine

Ring or clunky whirligig, for this

Was something infinitely darker.  Ice

Crystals in the endless cavern, no nine

Man’s Morris danced out of mind, no slice

Of history’s overcooked apple pies,

Not even patchwork organisms in their prime.

We stood and swayed, made dizzier by the hour,

All waiting to die but afraid to make the leap

Of lemmings, for we have been unschooled and cower

In the ignorance of our modernity, so sleep-

Walked towards the great abyss, where the shower

Of toxic waters waits for us. We keep

Our peace but never harvest what we reap.

Some Newfangled Verses for Mid-March Madness

The Enigmatic Smile

That smile that’s so enigmatic, grin

that takes us in to ambiguous places, La

Gionconda, Lisa, you are mine,

and every statue we find in Greece fa-

ces with its mystery. Democrates,

the father of comedians, incline

to us with justice in jocundity,

so that we hold our clowns in jeopardy

until they laugh or grimace, like a flea

harnessed to a chariot. All the time

we have is yours to entertain, with quips

under Witzenschaft’s domain, the crime

of simulation met with  wistful whips,

and sweet enigmas where the sunset dips.

In a Circus of Continuities

In a circus of continuities noth –

ing  holds; there is no centre or periphery,

as in Timaeus’s time. The solemn oath

of solemnity collapses, like the apses

of sacred places, those of square or sphery

shape, and thus the unwanted growth

should be excised; so laugh or cry, like apes

or lemurs, hyenas or parrots, oh I am weary

of your jocularities and your wrath,

dear deity—all is grief and dreary!

Your wit is flat, your wisdom falters. The nose

of ribald Pinnochios extend themselves,

and Socratic irony is bent like a fakir’s toes

left dangling  from the invisible sky, or elves

and dwarves and civil warts sing old hi-hoes

in the heart of the deepest, darkest forest: crones

inside their gingerbread fortresses and wolves

salivating for the blood of children and the bones

of innocent ridinghoods. So sense dissolves

in puddles of northern witches, while Kansas

splatters on the inartistic canvases

so fatuous we wish we were formless stones.

Where Axmen Roam

Calliope in cellophane and Muses

Undertaking major mysteries,

Resulting in obscurity, such uses

Of deception can be such that bees

In search of nectar will need excuses

Not to be entrapped: a fall confuses

Us with needless guiltiness—and trees

With forests where axmen roam

Are rarer now than ever, so when the hatchet

Has grown silent and yet a mighty groan

Is heard, we know the riddle’s answer: it

Is that epic poems and spirits’s gloam-

ing are illusions for which we never cease to moan,

and gods are lies unworthy of a poet’s latchet.

Surviving the Plague

We sat around, and talked about the plague,

The coming doom’s day and apocalypse,

The chances of demise, and took two sips

Of cinnamon-scented tea, until the sky

Was deep in purple clouds. If I should die

 Before the darkness fell and your sweet lips

Parted with a final word, at least a sigh,

Then nevertheless we would hear the dry

Bones rattle, and the icy blood that drips

Into eternity would turn to silence the quips

We used to share—better we should league

Against the coronation enhanced virus,

As we did against Haman and his boss Cyrus,

then all who survive the battle will admire us.

But crushed garlic is no antidote to micro-

scopic enemies, nor turmeric to protect us

like shields with embossed insignia—we throw

our lancets at the sickening body. The others intrigue

in cabals whose intensity is secret, like aspersions

where the sparrowgrass grows wild, and vulture-like

generations vanish into exhausted suns.

Review of Holocaust Book: Helga Schneider

The Dancing Goblin

Helga Schneider, The Bonfire of Berlin: A Lost Childhood in Wartime Germany, trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Vintage Books, 2006. Originally Il Rogo de Berlino, 1995.  220 pp.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

We read through the Italian translation to the German-conceived history of a little girl trapped in a doomed Berlin, where around her surviving family and neighbours speak in the local dialect, and the narrative voice of a mature adult many years later tries both to reproduce the feelings of the frightened child and the retrospective understanding of the cruelties and distortions of the Nazi regime on the lives of ordinary people. Born in 1937, Helga provides the primary point out of which perspectives are drawn and into which fear, anxiety and desperate rage pour in as the years go by, culminating in the bombing and eventual surrender of Berlin, and concluding when the war is finally over, after the return of her father from the Eastern Front in his departure for Vienna, the place where the daughter is taken by her step-mother to recreate a supposedly normal family in 1947.  First abandoned by her biological mother who goes off to join the SS, putting her Nazi zeal before love of husband and children, Helga’s life is further marked by all the classical disruptions of a neglected child. When Stephan remarries, the little girl finds that her step-mother, Irena, has hardly any patience for her and sends her off to various institutions for troubled children, only to be sent home again as incorrigible, and thus to find her baby brother, Peter, whose infantile egotism plagues everyone, and draws whatever attention that given be turned away from the relentless search for food, water and shelter to his bratty rebellion against everything. Peter also serves as a foil to his big sister’s sensitivity and search for meaning in life. Her one guardian angel, as it were, is her grandfather, Opa, though he is too old and sickly to cushion the blows of external degradation. As the Allied aerial bombardment and later Russian artillery attacks on Berlin grow stronger, what is left of Helga’s family is forced to live in a basement shelter along with other occupants of their apartment block. Collectively, this group of neighbours attempt to save each other, with most expressing increasingly negative views towards Hitler and his gang of ruthless thugs. While they receive some news through a secret radio from the BBC on the real course of the warm contradicting the propaganda broadcast through the national broadcasts, what they want more than anything, is not just that the Russian troops—Bolsheviks, Mongol hordes, drunken rapists—will murder and pillage indiscriminately upon arrival, but that the war will end as quickly as possible.

Translated from Italian, where the author has lived after self-exile from her land of birth and childhood, Germany, the title was originally Il Rogo de Berlino, with rogo a pyre or a stake, a place of execution and torment, whereas bonfire calls to mind Tom Wolfe’s satirical and futuristic novel Bonfire of the Vanities and the film adaptation. Rather than in New York City, however, Schneider sets her childhood recollections in Nazi Berlin, and its scenes of poverty and dinginess recall the Netflix series Babylon Berlin itself based on Volker Kutscher’s police-crime novels about Weimar Germany in the late 1920s.

This personal history is a child’s view of life in Germany during World War Two, and the child narrator is a little girl whose mother abandons her to join the SS, leaving her with a rather incompetent step-mother, and other characters who people a very grubby down-and-out section of Berlin, and the Nazis are nasty people (like the girl’s mother, sometimes known as the “Nazi whore’) who seem to be crude, rough and incompetent for the most part. For the first part of the autobiography, the war consists of missing men, food shortages and noises off on the horizon. And there is an occasional glimpse of the National Socialist leaders who seem to make everyone’s life a misery. The child herself is naïve and rebellious, long-suffering and lonely, sent out to institutions where she is starved, beaten and unable to adjust, so much so that she is sent home to her step-mother as a hopeless case. Unlike the story of Ursula Mahlendorf in The Shame of Survival: Working through a Nazi Childhood (2009), where the experience is of a girl born in 1929 and thus coming into consciousness precisely at the time of the Third Reich’s advent to power,  Helga grows up seven years later—a crucial difference in age for a very young child—and suffers personal abandonment and neglect first and then the ordeal of life under wartime conditions.  Ursula is old enough to be susceptible to the propaganda fed to German children and adolescents and thus to grow to maturity, afterwards, with a sense of guilt for her participation in the regime responsible for the Shoah. What he see in Helga’s life is both a child’s perspective on terror and horror, yet informed as we shall discuss, by an incipient awareness of wrong the adult world is.

At first, the cruelties of National Socialism are peripheral to her life. But once Helga’s narrative travels past the first sixty pages of her family’s life, the Nazis are there in full force, even to the point where the narrator and her little brother Peter spend a week in the bunker next to the chancellery and Hitler comes to visit the children. While Peter is in awe of the Fűhrer, who seems to represent the missing father-figure in his childhood, Helga notes his flaws in character as well as in appearance, and is able to pick up the wrongs being committed by the National Socialist leader which cause suffering to all the German people—and even, something she at first, does not quite understand, to the Jews. But as journalist Sebastien Heffner sees it in his psycho-political exposée of  Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (1940), the true essence of the Nazi personality is an all-absorbing hatred of Jews, just as the strategic plans for the battles of World War Two gave way by 1942 to counter-strategic actions: the capture, concentration and extermination of Jews. So it is not for little Helga to experience any more than the inveterate anti-Semitism of her biological mother and a few other characters’ harsh words to distinguish  real Nazis from those who merely played along, who compromised their integrity and pretended to be members of the Party in order to keep alive. Yet somehow she does know more.

To present a literate memoir though through the eyes, feelings and vocabulary of a child between the ages of three or four up to eight or nine presents a special difficulty to anyone seeking to use the text as a first-hand piece of evidence in the study of the war years—or even of the Holocaust. Moments of reflection, formal conceptualization and moral evaluation of Helga’s experiences and those of her not very educated relatives and neighbours requires special sensitivity to language. Since no Jewish persons appear in the scenes represented (except the ambiguous Herr Schact who protests too much when accused of being a Jew, p.  113) and news of what happens to those who have been “disappeared,” particularly the genocidal murders carried out in the East, what young Helga says cannot be taken at face value. Sometimes she credits her knowledge to teachers in one of the educational institutes she is sent to between 1942 and 1944, sometimes to conversations among grown-ups whispering within her hearing particularly when living in the crowded basement shelter during 1944 and 1945 (pp. 83-84), quite often to what she dreams or imagines, and now and then as simple statements of fact that she could know through hindsight and later reading. Her prime source is the headmistress at the Eden Boarding School:

We had an open, devoted relationship with the headmistress, who was a passionate anti-Nazi and made no secret of the fact. She despised Hitler for his fanaticism, his racial hatred, his crazed anti-Semitism. (p. 39)

It is hard to tell if this is a genuine memory or an idealized reconstruction. After all, Helga is not only very young and impressionable, but also in a state of confusion and anxiety—as children are who are abandoned by one parent, neglected by another, moved out of their familiar surroundings and placed in conditions of danger. She will say “I became frightened” in many instances, and then “I imagined I was surrounded by goblins that were spying on me…” Terror or horror and their adjectival forms terrible and horrible form the usual texture of her remarks.

But she comes back to the lessons inculcated at Eden through the headmistress’s words and example, and which  I suspect is largely recollected later in a much doctored form to fit with Helga’s eventual adult understanding of the Holocaust:

The headmistress said that Hitler was persecuting the Jews even outside of Germany, that he was having the Gestapo arrest them along with their children before taking them to concentration camps. The same thing had happened to her sister. A widow, she had been arrested with her two daughters, twins barely three years old, and deported to a concentration camp in Poland, accused of polluting the Aryan race by marrying a Jew. (p. 57)

It is unlikely that anyone in Berlin before the very last months of the war would have been able to assemble and analyse information sufficiently to create such an accurate account of the Final Solution, and such a person is unlikely to be running a school for troubled children under the Nazi regime and articulating such subversive ideas to immature and agitated boys and girls in her care, or that one of those children could have absorbed these attitudes, ideas and historical understanding in such a dispassionate way. Nevertheless, such statements appearing periodically through this autobiography provide a moral context to the experiences of Helga and the others. Yet no one in the main narrative, let alone the narrator herself, raises the question of whether or not there is commensurability between what the Jews underwent during the Shoah and the suffering the German brought upon themselves by their tacit support of Hitler, not until a single brief sentence we shall discuss at the end of this review. The closest the book comes towards framing such a discussion occurs during May 1945 when there is a sort of Socratic dialogue between Helga and her grandfather. First the nine-year-old asks: “So who’s worse, the Russians or the Germans”, to which her Opa then replies “benignly”:

      “Every nation has its good and its bad people; perhaps there is a tendency in the German nation that seems less pronounced among the Russians. You might call it fanaticism.”

     “What is fanaticism?”

     “Fanaticism is when you do things with such exaggerated that you become blind and dead and uncritical.”

     “What’s uncritical?”

     “That’s when you give up judging, interpreting or evaluating the results of your work or your activities, or even other people’s attitudes…” (p. 182)

And so on and on it goes, with Helga contributing her perceptive own views and cogent quotations from her former headmistress. Again, it is hard to accept that such a conversation actually took part or that either the old man or the young girl framed their comments in such logical terms. This sounds more like something the author as a grown-up woman in Italy and writing in a language not her own wishes had been said in her childhood. Yet, after all, perhaps she as a child did have an understanding beyond her years. In 1945 she says: “I feel an urgent and irrepressible need to understand what has been happening elsewhere. But what I see horrifies me” (p. 70). Later she asks herself, “What sort of a world am I living in?” (p. 71). She spends a week in the chancellery bunker and gets to see and speak with Hitler himself, and she notes the contradiction in his appearance of charismatic power and his wrinkled, weak and insecure posture. If she sees that emperor has no clothes, she is already too sensible to shout out the truth.

     Adolf Hitler holds out his hand to me and stares into my eyes. He has a penetrating gaze that makes me very uneasy. His pupils gleam strangely, as through there is a goblin dancing inside them.

     The Fűherer’s grip is weak, and I am perplexed. Can this really be the hand of the man guiding the fate of Germany? …. (p. 79)

Nevertheless, what this narrative of a young German girl’s growing up in the midst of brutality and cruelty does show—however farfetched the validity of the personal reminiscences stand up to strict historical analysis—is that there is no way ordinary people in Berlin and elsewhere in the Reich could then or now say they “didn’t know” what was happening or what the fighting was about. Although set sometime in the autumn of 1944, the following paragraph stands out as the underlying truth and organizing motif of The Bonfire of Berlin:

Our childhood was haunted by brutal anti-Jewish propaganda, and we witnessed expressions of anti-Semitism every day. Even as very small children, we had seen the shattered windows of Jewish shops, the shutters scrawled with the word Jude. People uttered this word cautiously, timidly, with embarrassment or fear, as though it referred to a contagious disease; sometimes they said it with contempt, the product of a propaganda campaign which maintained that “the poisoner of all nations is international Jewry.” We all knew that the Jews are forced to wear a star pinned to their chests, that Hitler has had the synagogues burned down, that Jews had been forbidden to grow their beards. Everyone is vaguely aware that the Gestapo seeks out Jews wherever they may be, to arrest them and deport them to concentration camps, and everyone has been given ample warning that those who hide Jews will be shot, while denouncing them may bring great benefits…. (p. 62)

What she actually experiences and is able to understand are two different things. One instance stands out, when some Russian soldiers rape an adolescent girl in the crowded basement while Helga is present.

I tried to take my eyes off the horrible spectacle, but I couldn’t. What I saw was unimaginable, cruel, unjust. When I was able to cry, I buried my face in Opa’s jacket. (p.  162)

Soon after, when no medical help comes to treat Erika, the raped girl, Helga begins to internalize and store up the traumatic moment of such stark brutality and injustice. Not just that the pain, humiliation and death of Erika has happened before her very eyes, but that the unimaginable has given strength to her imagination to work out an understanding many years later, while the inconceivable horror also returns in Helga’s maturity to provide an intellectual ability to put together the scattered sensations and the incoherent ideas she took into her immature mind:

      Someone went upstairs to find out whether there was any kind of first-aid service for rape victims, but there wasn’t. No such thing existed. Nothing existed now. Nothing but horror. The mood in the cellar was one of impotent fury and important compassion.

     On Erika’s mattress was a patch of blood the size of an apple. I stared at it in astonishment; it was as though what had happened somehow involved me, too. I decided that no man would ever touch me; men were nothing but ferocious beasts, apart from the ones in our cellar. (p. 163)

This is a particularly intense moment for Helga and its memory is long-lasting and traumatic. Through what Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, the process by which subsequent traumas recreate and develop the implications of earlier moments of unendurable pain and humiliation, she eventually frames her thoughts to a more historical awareness of her life as a German child—and why she not only had to leave Vienna, after being taken there by her stepmother to re-unite with her long missing father, but then, as an independent woman, to emigrate from the German-speaking lands (Germany and Austria) where Nazi hatred still lingers. The question is who constitutes the “we” and “our” of this statement and when this later understanding became possible, perhaps only in Italy and after being able to cut her emotional ties with her biological mother still wedded to Nazi racist and nationalist fanaticism, her hostile and non-comprehending step-mother and her indifferent father.

Yet we were to learn that our suffering was nothing compared with what had happened to the Jews in the concentration camps. (p. 175)

Publications in 2019 Norman Simms

1. “Two Book Reviews on Nazi Looted Art”: Susan Roland.  Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand  Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures.  New York: St Martin’s Press, 2015 and Catherine Hickley. The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler’s Dealer and his Secret Legacy. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016. Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (17 October 2019)

            East European Jewish History  (18 October 2019) eejh@yahoog roups.com          

2. Review of Hunting the Truth, Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klausfeld in Mentalities/Mentalitiés 39:1 (2019).
3. with Thomas Klikauer, “20th Century’s new fascism” Online Opinion: Australia’s Online Journal  (3 December 2019)
4. with Thomas Klikauer, Review of Werner Patzelt. CDU, AFD, und die Politische Torheit [CDU, AfD—A Political Folly] in Sciendo: Polish Political Science Review. Polski Przegląd Politologiczny 7:2 (2019) 108-114.
5. with Thomas Klikauer, “Eastern Germans voting for the Alternative for Germany” Z-Net (December 20, 2019).
6. With Thomas Klikauer, “Pretend language of democracy” Weekly Worker (UK), no, 1278, 6th December 2019. Online at https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1278/pretend-language-of-democracy
7. Review of Renia Spiegel, Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust on my Blog Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (22 December 2019)
8. Review of Jeremy Dronfield. The Boy who Followed his Father into Auschwitz: A True Story in  Retrievals, Preservations and Speculations (16 August 2019) East European Jewish History  (18 August 2019) eejh@yahoog roups.com
9. “Thomas Hardy’s Textual Choreography: Tangles, Knots, Braids, Textures and String Games” Literature & Aesthetics 29:2 (2019) 67-98.       
10. “Marcel Schwob and Léon Daudet: Exploring Jewish Jokes and Murder in Tibet” Mentalities/ Mentalités 31:1 (2019).

12 Traditional Make-Believe Tales from Boro Park

Yom Kippur:

A Kid’s Point of View plus Commentary

On Yom Kippur if you are old enough and healthy you fast: you eat nothing and drink nothing from sundown on one day to sundown on the next. You don’t have a bite to eat or even a tiny little sip of water. If your stomach rumbles, it is a good sign of how religious you are. If you feel a little weak, then even more so.  But if you feel sick and it hurts, then you can eat a little and taste a sip of water or maybe a spoon of chicken soup. The Law was made for man and not man for the Law. Here man means also a little kid, female or male. Grown-ups, as a general rule, are strong enough to withstand the pangs of hunger and the gasps of thirst. Boys who have just been bar mitzvahed within the last two or three years can be excused a momentary weakness. At heart, they are still children.

So in comes a big theological question: Why do people fast on Yom Kippur? They want to purify themselves and let God know that they are sorry for any bad things they may have done during the year. They chant this in special songs, sometimes with a cantor who wears a very big black hat, not like a yarmulke. This is what grown-ups (that is, my parents) tell me. I am not sure I understand what this means.

When I ask why, my father pats me on the head and tells me, “It is a custom, a tradition.”

I look puzzled and he says, “It is the Law.”

My mother says: “Do what your father says. No questions.”

“But we don’t do everything in the Law and all year we don’t bother with God or religion or with being Jews.”

I don’t really say this but only something like this that nobody understands or at least feels is worthy of an answer, because I am too little to know big words—or big ideas. Maybe many years later, not at this time that is in the narrative I making up for your behalf.

“Well, once a year we do, one of my parents says or maybe both; who can remember?—and that is why we need to fast as long as we can, so He knows.”

You have to guess which grown-up said that, including myself many years later when I became a parent. It is, after all, a traditional thing to say.

But in my story I am telling you, this must be important because my father is putting on his special voice which he uses when he wants to be like a teacher or a rabbi and explain everything. Usually he tells me jokes, or, as he calls them, “amusing anecdotes”.

Later, when my mother puts me to bed, I ask her if she fasts on Yom Kippur.

“I try as much as I can,” she answers, “but I am not well so I only do a little, a symbolic show.”

I have no idea what she means. What are symbols, parables and signs? What do they show?

“Is that because you fall down in the street?” I ask, for I think that I am very wise.

Wise Commentary Number 1: If you take away the k then what you know happens now. Moreover k is silent though you see it and think maybe it is important: maybe it points to kinship and reminds you that what you know is not yours alone but belongs to and comes from your ancestors. And if you take away the n it becomes ow! There is, then, always a pain that strikes you when know who you are and where you come from. And still hurts inside me. O! The o is pronounced oy!’

What happened.

She cries and says, “Oy, you shouldn’t know my troubles.”

Inner Thoughts.  Nobody should know I know, but her troubles got worse and worse as she grew older. If I think about it now—but I can’t. It was too much then, more so now. But from the distance of fifty years since she died, I still cannot imagine how much she suffered and raged inwardly—but not always quietly—against what her life had become. The rest of us went on living, as best we could, because we could not stop our lives and make hers better. Too many decisions had been taken, moves made from one end of the world to the other, children born whom we had to look after.

So back to the Yom Kippur story.

No, not quite yet.

Wise Commentary No. 2. The Day of Atonement, penitence and prayer. The acknowledgement of sin and the confession of guilt. When we stand together, kneel together, and wait to learn our fate. We are not alone in the moment, but together in the flow of history. Will the good deeds of our ancestors outweigh the forgetfulness and indifference of the present? I stand in awe next to my father and do not understand.

I go home from the synagogue and speak to my mother.

Wise Commentary No. 3. Would it have been better if she fasted, tried to live a religious life, believed in things that she never could? How can you believe in something when so many times the impossible happens and each time the impossible is not pleasant or comforting, like a miracle that you get better from an illness, from having a stroke when you are so young, when nobody really cares what you are feeling deep inside yourself? If you are written down in the Book of Life, that doesn’t mean your years will make you reconcile yourself to wars that make brothers disappear, families over there you will never hear from again and so are probably murdered. How can whole families be murdered, communities be destroyed—and nobody in the whole universe cares?

Inner Thoughts. You cannot listen to music any more—not when your fingers have stopped working and most of your body has become twisted. Listen to the shofar and your sins will be drowned out as an evil spirit from the Other Side wants to turn you in: but nobody listens and the world simply spins madly on, crushes you like the Juggernaut under the Wheels of Fate. You try to tell stories or jokes and the words don’t come out and people try not to laugh at you when they can’t laugh with you.

Almost the end of the story many years later.

“Don’t come to my operation,” she said on the telephone.  “Wait until I wake up.”

But she never spoke again.

“They send people to the moon now,” she tried to laugh; “me, too,” she said, “I am going to the moon.”

She never woke again.

Her silence is beyond pain now.

Wise Commentary No. 3. It is now my job to tell the stories and the jokes, to make up the believes that sound like they might be true, because deep down inside there is always something true that you can never say aloud in the words, feelings, images and tones that are there. You have to make believe, create masks out of words and jokes. You might as well say that the sound of the shofar is unreal, that the long, short and mixed tootles blown in synagogue by the rabbi are just empty symbols, and nothing drowns out the names that shouldn’t be noted down for bad things in the new year.

Inner Thoughts. As for music, no one can listen any more. Not because it would make you cry, but because it would remind us of you. The whole idea of becoming a musician, a trumpet player in a grown-up orchestra, with a proper conductor who isn’t just a teacher dressed up, that is thrown into the wind, into the air.  Melodies and rhythms are painful, and tones creep into the inner places of hurt and guilt.

The End of the Story.

The baby grand piano in the living-room was shrouded in a heavy green mantle that hung down to the floor. The large folio piano music books, with all the classical composers of the nineteenth century, they are put into the attic, hidden under all the other memories that no one could face again. Everything is gone now. Silent. Empty. Invisible.

Wise Commentary No. 4. They say that on the moon, amid all the craters and rocks, there are hidden places where the voices of people who cry out in pain, frustration and rage lie buried for thousands of years. If anyone went to the moon and put an ear to the lunar surface and heard the wailing and the shrieking and the yelling, I think they would go crazy.

Wise Commentary No. 5. They also say that the dust on the surface of the moon is made of shadows that have broken apart after the ghostly voices have fallen into the centre of the lunar craters millions of miles down. The dust muffles the horrible sounds.

Inner Thoughts. No one should ever walk on the moon or they will die of shame.

Commentary No. 6. Better that it were all a hoax.