Cradling Time

Rikki Santer

*Content Warning

My grandparents from the old country I never met or learned of those from further back, but I’m fond of one aunt’s story that my young Russian grandmother whose name I carry, skated on the family pond and rode bareback across fields with her longhair undone and flowing. Did my first breath travel to tether and curl around each letter in some ancient Hebrew manuscript to claim a broken, unredeemed world? Is my DNA haunted by someone who perished in pogrom or gulag [or] whose timid hand reaching for a beer on a wooden table in a Berlin cafe was pierced and pinned by the knife of a storm trooper [or] who frail and toothless, refused to leave a cramped and drafty room in an abandoned synagogue, yearning for just one more serving of herring in oil with black bread warm from the bakery in her radiant town now pillaged [or] who brilliant in Yiddish theater and the poetry of King Lear couldn’t escape the bloody jaws of Soviet execution [or] who to survive, pulled apart then burned naked bodies, flames flickering from their Jude eye holes and buried journal in his barrack to tell us so [or] who nervously hid yarmulke under a newsboy cap to run errands outside the ghetto for ailing Bubbie [or] who altered her name’s “cumbersome” consonants and vowels to play piano in the lobby of an American hotel with signage: no dogs or Jews allowed? Today I may bristle at the thin spit of a colleague’s jew him down, the swastika scrawled inside a turnpike bathroom, the antisemitic tweets of celebrities or weep again and again for violent murders impelled by domestic hate inside my own country, but I stand guilty of a spectator’s distance from the timeless and insidious dusks aimed at my persistent tribe.