By
David Gottfried
I have not given you a picture that might “go with” what I have written. If you must look at a picture, look at Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory.”
The poem refers to “The Biltmore.” If I recall correctly, that was a hotel where important Jews were supposed to gather, during World War Two, to plan a response to the Holocaust. Many grey eminences wrote grey and ponderous and impotent tracts, almost as bloodless and lifeless as the bodies of the victims of the Nazi genocide.
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The Saga of New York Jewish Liberalism
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And they are talking
Talking in the Biltmore, talking in the boardroom
Talking to the clip of the time bomb tick
Talking of the time when there's time to talk some more
Talking and weighing all the many risks of war
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Talking to their wives and making alibis
Talking like the print of the stodgy New York Times
Dressed up in Ivy foliage, so cunning in the colleges
The choir of castratos never gets the least bit shrill
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And they talk in New York where they've talked for
eighty years
About the Holocaust, the Exodus and Eretz Yisroel
About Selma, Spain and Sobibor and later still El Salvador
They talk, they deplore, and they always want some more:
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News and food, food and news, while they plan to save the
world
They order Chinese take-out while they watch some children
die
When this lecture is over there's a nice buffet waiting
Let’s munch, share our hunch, as to where Hitler strikes next
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Eat chopped liver, chop my heart, be convincing and get
tenure
Frost your hair like Susan Sontag -- you may look rather
sublime
See the Seine, write some verse, rather free and getting
worse
And dribble clunky tears about Leon Blum et al.
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Ten thousand in the Hagannah; two million in this City snide
Convinced that some petitions really gave birth to a State
The Hubris of the Humanists, the West Side polemicists
Learn to fight with a gun or please shut the fuck up
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Copyright, David Gottfried, 1999