Yiddishland

The people who sang to their children in Yiddish and worked in Yiddish

and made love in Yiddish are nearly all gone. Phantasmic. Heym.

Der may kumt shoyn on. The month of May has arrived. At the cemetery

my aunt has already draped my grandmother's half of the tombstone

with a white sheet. The fabric is tacked to the polished granite

by gray and brown rocks lifted from my grandfather's side of the plot.

He's been gone over twenty-five years. We are in Beth Israel Cemetery,

Block 50, Woodbridge, New Jersey for the unveiling and the sky is like lead.

We are in my grandmother's shtetl in Poland, but everyone is dead.

The Fraternal Order of Bendin-Sosnowicer Sick & Benevolent Society

has kept these plots faithfully next to their Holocaust memorial—

gray stone archway topped with a menorah and a curse: Pour out Thy wrath

upon the Nazis and the wicked Germans for they have destroyed the seed of Jacob.

May the almighty avenge their blood. Great is our sorrow, and no consolation is to be found!

My sister, in her cardboard kippah, opens her prayer book—a special edition

she borrowed from rabbinical school—and begins to read in Aramaic.

Not one of us can bring ourselves to add anything to the fixed liturgy.

My son is squatting at the next grave over, collecting decorative stones

from the Glickstei