A Memory (I)
Once on erev Yom Kippur,
when I was around ten years old,
I went to my grandmother Reyzl
to receive her blessing.
A small, thin widow in her seventies,
a baker with shoulders sunken from work,
she suddenly said to me,
‘Here my child is a real kosher strap,
like the one on tephillin; *
take it and, as the law says,
give me thirty-nine lashes.’
Surprised, frightened, I stared at her,
because I knew that lashings
were given in shul and only to a man.
A slight smile appeared on her lips,
as if to say, ‘Don’t be surprised, my child,
I’ve sinned and deserve to be whipped,
I’m steeped in sins.
What do you expect?
I mean, someone over seventy, how
could he not be steeped in sin?
Look, I’m up to my eyes in sin,
so, my dear child, take the strap
and give me thirty-nine lashes,
and when you’ve finished counting them off
I’ll be able to give you my blessing
with a pure heart and, in addition
to the blessing, you’ll have done a good deed.’
And before I knew it, my grandmother
got down on her knees, hunched up her shoulders,
and once again earnestly said to me, ‘Go to it,
and give me thirty-nine lashes. I’m asking you.’
I did what my grandmother asked,
lifted the strap with my right hand
and brought it down on her back,
her small, bent and thin back, the strap
lightly hitting her, barely touching her clothes.
But my grandmother was annoyed, and grumbled,
‘Don’t spare me, whip me, the way a sinful Jew should be whipped.’
I felt my grandmother’s wish
and whipped harder, and my grandmother began counting
with great pleasure, until she counted out
the full thirty-nine lashes.
Picking herself up from the ground,
filled with gratitude,
beaming, ‘Ah, I feel better now’,
she pressed me to her, caressed me,
and then placed her hands
on my head, spreading her fingers,
and each finger began to drip a warm prayer;
and sweet words, pure as olive oil,
tender words, like newly sprouted grass,
embraced both of my temples –
and as she went on, her prayer,
my shaking, and the flutter of my heart,
became calm, and calmer, and calmer.
* phylacteries
Richard Fein has published a Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, and his translations from the Yiddish of other poets have appeared in anthologies and in the four collections of his own poems, one of which, Kafka’s Ear, won the Maurice English Award. His latest collection, I Think of Our Lives: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming in 2001. Fein’s memoir of Yiddish, The Dance of Leah, was published in New York and London (Cornwall Books).
Translated by Richard Fein
Page(s) 80-81
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