The Russia of my Jewish Heart
(Written after reading E.L. Doctorow’s “The Book of Daniel,” a majestic lament for the family of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)
By
David Gottfried
The English translation begins at around 3:35. I can’t read Russian so I don’t know how faithful this is to the Russian text.
I am as Jewish as a foreskin in the Warsaw Ghetto
I scream in silence
I am the horse in Picasso’s Guernica
When I was seven years old
I felt that the term Christmas Eve
Was short for Christmas Evil
I am as radical as a bomb-maker in the slums of Paris
My Father was Karl Marx
My Mother was Broken Brooklyn
Brooklyn comes from the Dutch for Broken Land
Did those cousins of the Germans know
How broken-hearted we’ve became
In every rich Jewish suburb in America
In every raucous Bar Mitzvah party
There are waterfalls of tears
Or there should be
From Barbarosa to the Christian crosses of the European Klan
From all the gold and silver of Vaticans radiant with wrath
From the glittering Empress and the glowering Pope
From the European Courts built by a Dominion of Death
From Vienna, it’s V’s spreading like viruses
Making wistful W’s hard with embittered victory
From the Goliaths and the Goyim of Golgotha
There should be Molotovs, Making Starry, Starry Nights
Revolution is engrained in my DNA
I drink Russian borscht the way Catholics drink blood
I bend to the banner that is bloody, stark and red
I dream of Ruby Russia
The Onion Spires spicing kugel
Making a savory, Shabbos supper.
I sup on the sweet and sour cynicism of the Bolshevik creed
On Marx’s biting prose, as briny as white fish or herring
An exhilarating fillip after the mashed potatoes pablum of Locke and Burke and Smith
Russia was my revenge
The long names
Slippery and sly
As snakes ensnaring Eve
The Z’s used with abandon,
Reminding me of Zion
And so many words ending in ski,
Like half the people in my synagogue.
The Jewish neo cons think I am a commie fool and a faggot
But the Red Army did more for the Jews than all the Hasids in Brooklyn