{"id":12082,"date":"2011-05-02T08:02:29","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T15:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=12082"},"modified":"2011-05-07T23:07:11","modified_gmt":"2011-05-08T06:07:11","slug":"from-the-one-who-knows-hebrew-%e2%80%93-a-poem-by-hannah-alexander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=12082","title":{"rendered":"From The One Who Knows Hebrew \u2013 a Poem by Hannah Alexander"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Hannah Alexander<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hannah Alexander, a student in the Young Judaea Year Course, a one year program of studies in Israel, shared this poem with Midnight East \u2013 a moving and eloquent reflection on the Holocaust and the relationship between first and third generation:<\/p>\n

From The One Who Knows Hebrew \u2013 a Poem by Hannah Alexander<\/strong><\/p>\n

Savta,
\nI know you see me sitting next to you and I can taste some of your world in my mouth.
\nYou speak with a Yiddish accent and replace every \u2018w\u2019 with a \u2018v\u2019
\n\u201cChallo Challo. Vere are you?\u201d
\nYou beckon me to your perch on the couch in my father\u2019s living room.
\nHe built you an alcove from office wall dividers and a curtain,
\nI ask if it reminds you of a barrack.
\nYou look at me like I am crazy,
\nThey don\u2019t have beds in barracks.<\/p>\n

I wheel you to the doorway of our bathroom
\nAnd watch your shrunken hips lower themselves
\nYour magenta pant bottoms fall to your knees, as your ankles dangle
\nI think of your naked skeleton in a pin striped suit.
\nI try to imagine the number 54238 branded onto your chest and I watch you
\nRip toilet paper along the dotted line and count four satisfying squares.
\nYou make me want to understand
\nWhy you lick the collar of your shirts to see if they are clean
\nA hint of salt reveals you have worn them
\nWhy you eat the strawberry leaf and all.
\nI will never know the pain of your hunger
\nI will never know the stench of human flesh marinating on the ground and
\nI don\u2019t know the terror of a death march in January.
\nI bundle up with my layers, a winter coat, and smart wool socks just to run to my car
\nAnd still, you worry I might be cold.<\/p>\n

Cold like trembling bones huddled in freezing snow digging their own graves
\nOr frosted hearts inside rhetorical uniforms taunting you to flirt with death
\nTo be the target of that next bullet round
\nSo you too may know the warmth of human piled ditches.
\nForget the massacre of parents, brothers, husband and child,
\nBlink twice and erase sisters fallen dead in tracks across your frostbitten feet.
\nI look into your wrinkled eyes, eyes which endured screaming children ripped from clutching mother\u2019s breast bone,
\nEyes that cringe at deniers who don\u2019t believe those experiments at Auschwitz really happened.
\nWho could look back into your sunken cheek bones and feel nothing?
\nYour survivor blood runs through my veins and when you touch my hand I can feel your suffering in the crevasses of my skin.<\/p>\n

You ask me why I have a ring in my nose and how it got there.
\nYou don\u2019t like the ripped jeans and oversized sweatshirts.
\nYou are shriveled and your ears stick out but
\nI want to be your person.
\nYou spend your days drifting in and out of consciousness waiting for the five o\u2019clock news.
\nI record you with my phone as you sit next to me so I won\u2019t forget what peace looks like.
\nYou sat in arms reach until I moved you,
\nYou were getting weak and I was sick.
\nYou offered me your blanket and tried to give me your purple slippers
\nMy skin was swimming with maggots and my organs were eating themselves
\nWe had heart tests the same day and my father was overwhelmed
\nI moved to my mothers the first time I woke up without my eyes
\nDoctor said I would never see again.
\nMy mother sobbed as she squeezed my hand and I felt my way to the parking lot
\nGravel crunched beneath the feet I would have to rely on to find pavement.
\nI listened to the cars zoom past and I could feel the vibrations.
\nI would never drive again.
\nIt would take me an hour to lace my shoes
\nAnd perhaps what I would miss most would be colors
\nI hoped I wouldn\u2019t forget what yellow looks like and I hoped I wouldn\u2019t forget your smile.<\/p>\n

I am scared to live without sight
\nTo never see myself age.
\nThere was a time when I wanted to leave this dimension
\nBut now I don\u2019t want to dance with spirits,
\nI want to dance with sisters and strangers, with a man I haven\u2019t met yet
\nI want to dance with you Savta,
\nI want to liberate you from the chains of diapers and a wheelchair
\nI want to smash your oxygen tank into oblivion.
\nYou danced with death and you survived
\nYou breathed incinerator air and kept inhaling
\nYou knew thirst like licking between earth\u2019s toes as the water seeps through the cracks.<\/p>\n

I promise, even without my eyes
\nI won\u2019t forget the way you mimic the sound of your hearing aid losing its battery,
\nI won\u2019t forget the way you pick at your teeth with plastic toothpicks after dinner
\nAnd how you show me the treasure you find as you dig
\nAnd how you forget you already showed me 4 times.
\nYou are making up for the years you didn\u2019t have a toothbrush.<\/p>\n

The years you stood emaciated and wore your wedding ring inside yourself so you could save it for me.
\nHow you pressed it inside the shaving of soap they gave you to wash yourself … you already had lice.<\/p>\n

I will find this ring among your lost things and I will squeeze my stubby finger into its metal
\nI will lift you onto the couch like I used to and I will stare at what I hope will be your eyes…
\nI am blind and you can\u2019t hear but we are both alive.<\/p>\n

I told you I would heal myself
\nAnd four months later I have.
\nI am a medical mystery.
\nI sit with you and watch the news and you squeeze my hand
\nYou tell me my new glasses are pretty.
\nYou don\u2019t know I only see with one eye.<\/p>\n

I know one day your cubicle will be empty
\nAnd I won\u2019t forget that high five and fist bump I taught you
\nI will wear your clothes even if they don\u2019t fit
\nAnd I will sit in your wheelchair just because I can.<\/p>\n

You know Hebrew and survival
\nI know Hebrew and blindness.
\nWe both know it\u2019s more than a language
\nI call you Savta
\nYou call for the one who knows Hebrew
\nThat\u2019s me.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom The One Who Knows Hebrew\u201d is a performance poem written by Hannah Alexander, a student in the Year Course of the Young Judaea movement. The program, supported by Hadassah, brings high school graduates to Israel for a year of studies. Year Course students may choose to participate in Kuma, the Dr. Marcia Robbins-Wilf Hadassah\/Young Judaea Holocaust Studies Program, an optional one-week journey to Poland that explores the heritage of 1000 years of Jewish history in Poland and studies the events of the Holocaust through a Zionist prism, bearing witness to the destruction of Polish Jewry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hannah Alexander, a student in the Young Judaea Year Course, a one year program of studies in Israel, shared this poem with Midnight East \u2013 a moving and eloquent reflection on the Holocaust and the relationship between first and third generation: From The One Who Knows Hebrew \u2013 a Poem by Hannah Alexander Savta, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12082\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}