Poem for Wednesday

A Little History
By David Lehman

Some people find out they are Jews.
They can't believe it.
They had always hated Jews.
As children they had roamed in gangs on winter nights in the old
    neighborhood, looking for Jews.
They were not Jewish, they were Irish.
They brandished broken bottles, tough guys with blood on their
    lips, looking for Jews.
They intercepted Jewish boys walking alone and beat them up.
Sometimes they were content to chase a Jew and he could elude
    them by running away. They were happy just to see him run
    away. The coward! All Jews were yellow.
They spelled Jew with a small j jew.
And now they find out they are Jews themselves.
It happened at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
To escape persecution, they pretended to convert to Christianity.
They came to this country and settled in the Southwest.
At some point oral tradition failed the family, and their
    secret faith died.
No one would ever have known if not for the bones that turned up
    on the dig.
A disaster. How could it have happened to them?
They are in a state of panic--at first.
Then they realize that it is the answer to their prayers.
They hasten to the synagogue or build new ones.
They are Jews at last!
They are free to marry other Jews, and divorce them, and intermarry
    with Gentiles, God forbid.
They are model citizens, clever and thrifty.
They debate the issues.
They fire off earnest letters to the editor.
They vote.
They are resented for being clever and thrifty.
They buy houses in the suburbs and agree not to talk so loud.
They look like everyone else, drive the same cars as everyone else,
    yet in their hearts they know they're different.
In every minyan there are always two or three, hated by
    the others, who give life to one ugly stereotype or another:
The grasping Jew with the hooked nose or the Ivy League Bolshevik
    who thinks he is the agent of world history.
But most of them are neither ostentatiously pious nor
    excessively avaricious.
How I envy them! They believe.
How I envy them their annual family reunion on Passover,
    anniversary of the Exodus, when all the uncles and aunts and
    cousins get together.
They wonder about the heritage of Judaism they are passing along
    to their children.
Have they done as much as they could to keep the old embers
    burning?
Others lead more dramatic lives.
A few go to Israel.
One of them calls Israel "the ultimate concentration camp."
He tells Jewish jokes.
On the plane he gets tipsy, tries to seduce the stewardess.
People in the Midwest keep telling him reminds them of Woody
    Allen.
He wonders what that means. I'm funny? A sort of nervous
    intellectual type from New York? A Jew?
Around this time somebody accuses him of not being Jewish enough.
It is said by resentful colleagues that his parents changed their
    name from something that sounded more Jewish.
Everything he publishes is scrutinized with reference to "the
    Jewish question."
It is no longer clear what is meant by that phrase.
He has already forgotten all the Yiddish he used to know, and
    the people of that era are dying out one after another.
The number of witnesses keeps diminishing.
Soon there will be no one left to remind the others and their
    children.
That is why he came to this dry place where the bones have come
    to life.
To live in a state of perpetual war puts a tremendous burden on the
    population. As a visitor he felt he had to share that burden.
With his gift for codes and ciphers, he joined the counter-
    terrorism unit of army intelligence.
Contrary to what the spook novels say, he found it possible to
    avoid betraying either his country or his lover.
This was the life: strange bedrooms, the perfume of other men's
    wives.
As a spy he has a unique mission: to get his name on the front
    page of the nation's newspaper of record. Only by doing that
    would he get the message through to his immediate superior.
If he goes to jail, he will do so proudly; if they're going to
    hang him anyway, he'll do something worth hanging for.
In time he may get used to being the center of attention, but
    this was incredible:
To talk his way into being the chief suspect in the most
    flamboyant murder case in years!
And he was innocent!
He could prove it!
And what a book he would write when they free him from this prison:
A novel, obliquely autobiographical, set in Vienna in the twilight
    of the Hapsburg Empire, in the year that his mother was born.

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Snicked with the greatest of glee from : Dog Toy Or Marital Aid? I did very well on the first round, but very poorly on the difficult round, and am not allowed to play with the quizzer's dog. In my own defense, I have not had a dog in years, so I don't immediately recognize the packaging on those newfangled dog toys. Also, I am very creative with household objects and I've been writing Remus/Sirius fic so just about anything looks like it could be used for Er, go see, it's very amusing.

My point in bitching about LJ yesterday was not to bitch at the people who run LJ, who do a pretty good job most of the time and appear to take that job quite seriously, nor at the majority of people who use LJ...my point was to say that I'm very sorry if you've left me a comment and I never responded, which I try to do eventually with everything longer than "Cool!" or whatever, and if you said anything important that I might never have seen in an older post while comments weren't being delivered, I do hope you will post it again! (Consider this post a free-for-all; comment on anything I've said within the past several months here!)

I really do feel compelled to reiterate, however, that I am tired of people lecturing me on why it is annoying of me not to use a cut tag for anything longer than a single sentence, whereas I find it annoying when people use a cut tag for anything shorter than a 500-word fic. I can load my friends page and scroll through it far more quickly than I can get individual pages to load, even on good LJ days. I would be happy to agree to disagree -- to keep doing things my way and not say anything when other people do things their way -- but apparently those who believe that I should be cutting even this paragraph behind a cryptic "Whining" label feel that it's fine to leave me angry comments about it; at the same time, it is apparently NOT fine if I need to explain to someone, "I really wanted to reply to what you had to say, but I couldn't get your page to load forever and then didn't have time to wait around for my own comment to post, so I must say I wish you hadn't cut something that was only two non-spoiler sentences in the first place."

Today and I have a meeting with our son's orthodontist to talk about the lengthy and expensive teeth-straightening in store for all of us. His front teeth cross like they're being braided, and on the x-rays you can see that the incisors are coming in sideways. I feel so sorry for the little guy.

Thanks so much for the England recs -- please keep them coming if you have more!