How They Killed My Grandmother

How did they kill my grandmother?
This is how they killed my grandmother:
In the morning a tank
Rolled up to the city bank.

One hundred and fifty Jews of the town.
Weightless
from a whole year's starvation.
Pale,
with the pangs of death upon them.
Came there, carrying bundles.
Polizei and young German soldiers
Cheerfully herded the old men and old women,
And led them, clanking with pots and pans.
Led them
far out of town.

But my diminutive grandmother, Lilliputian,
My seventy-year-old grandmother,
Swore at the Germans,
Cursed like a trooper,

Yelled at them where I was.
She cried: “My grandson's at the front.
Just you dare Lay hands on me.
Those are our guns
that you hear, Bochel!”

Grandmother wept and shouted
And walked.
And then started
Shouting again.
From every window rose a din.
Ivanovs and Andreyevnas leant down,
Sidorovnas and Petrovnas wept:

“Keep it up, Polina Matveyevna!
You just show them. Give it them straight!”
They clamoured:
“What's there to be so scared
About this German enemy!”
And so they decided to kill my grandmother,
While they were still passing through the town.

A bullet kicked up her hair.
A grey lock floated down.
And my grandmother fell to the ground.
That's how they did it to her.

--- Boris Slutsky
(Translated by Daniel Weissbort)

“Yet to die. Unalone still.”

Yet to die. Unalone still.
For now your pauper-friend is with you.
Together you delight in the grandeur of the plains,
And the dark, the cold, the storms of snow.

Live quiet and consoled
In gaudy poverty, in powerful destitution.
Blessed are those days and nights.
The work of this sweet voice is without sin.

Misery is he whom, like a shadow,
A dog’s barking frightens, the wind cuts down.
Poor is he who, half-alive himself
Begs his shade for pittance.

--- Osip Mandelstam (Translated by John High and Matvei Yankelevich)

1 January 1965

The Wise Men will unlearn your name. 

Above your head no star will flame. 

One weary sound will be the same— 

the hoarse roar of the gale. 

The shadows fall from your tired eyes

 as your lone bedside candle dies, 

for here the calendar breeds nights 

till stores of candles fail. 

 What prompts this melancholy key? 

A long familiar melody. 

It sounds again. 

So let it be. 

Let it sound from this night. 

Let it sound in my hour of death— 

as gratefulness of eyes and lips for that 

which sometimes makes us lift our gaze to the far sky. 

You glare in silence at the wall. 

Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.

It's clear that you are now too old to trust in good Saint Nick; 

that it's too late for miracles. —

But suddenly, 

lifting your eyes to heaven's light,

 you realize: your life is a sheer gift. 

 --- JOSEPH BRODSKY (TRANSLATED BY GEORGE L. KLINE)

I am happy living simply

I am happy living simply:
like a clock, or a calendar.
Worldly pilgrim, thin,
wise—as any creature. To know

the spirit is my beloved. To come to things—swift
as a ray of light, or a look.
To live as I write: spare—the way
God asks me—and friends do not.

--- Marina Tsvetaeva

Stalin Epigram

We live, not sensing our own country beneath us,
Ten steps away they dissolve, our speeches,
But where enough meet for half-conversation,
The Kremlin hillbilly is our preoccupation.
They’re like slimy worms, his fat fingers,
His words, as solid as weights of measure.

In his cockroach moustaches there’s a hint
Of laughter, while below his top boots gleam.
Round him a mob of thin-necked henchmen,
He pursues the enslavement of the half-men.

One whimpers, another warbles,
A third miaows, but he alone prods and probes.
He forges decree after decree, like horseshoes –
In groins, foreheads, in eyes, and eyebrows.

Wherever an execution’s happening though –
there’s raspberry, and the Ossetian’s giant torso.

--- Osip Mandelstam

BABI YAR

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself. *1*
The Philistines betrayed me – and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok *2*
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of “Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!”
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed – very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

-“They come!”

-“No, fear not – those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!”

-“They break the door!”

-“No, river ice is breaking…”

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May “Internationale” thunder and ring *3*
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

--- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Translated by Benjamin Okopnik

**************************************************

NOTES
—–1 – Alfred Dreyfus was a French officer, unfairly dismissed from service in 1894 due to trumped-up charges prompted by anti- Semitism.

2 – Belostok: the site of the first and most violent pogroms, the Russian version of KristallNacht.

3 – “Internationale”: The Soviet national anthem.

Farewell

It’s the last time, when I dare
To cradle your image in my mind,
To wake a dream by my heart, bare,
With exultation, shy and air,
To cue your love that's left behind.
The years run promptly; their fire
Changes the world, and me, and you.
For me, you now are attired
In dark of vaults o’er them who died,
For you -- your friend extinguished too.
My dear friend, so sweet and distant,
Take farewell from all my heart,
As takes a wid in a somber instant,
As takes a friend before a prison
Will split those dear friends apart.

--- Aleksandr Pushkin

I am Goya

I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief

I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger

I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya

O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky – like nails
I am Goya

---Andrey Voznesensky
(translated from the Russian by Stanley Kunitz)

Wait for me

Wait for me and I’ll return, only wait very hard.
Wait when you are filled with sorrow as you watch the yellow rain.
Wait when the wind sweeps the snowdrifts.
Wait in the sweltering heat.
Wait when others have stopped waiting, forgetting their yesterdays.
Wait even when from afar no letters come for you.
Wait even when others are tired of waiting.

Wait for me and I’ll return, but wait patiently.
Wait even when you are told that you should forget.
Wait even when my mother and son think I am no more.
And when friends sit around the fire drinking to my memory
Wait and do not hurry to drink to my memory too.

Wait for me and I’ll return, defying every death.
And let those who do not wait say that I was lucky.
They will never understand that in the midst of death
You with your waiting saved me.
Only you and I will know how I survived:
It was because you waited as no one else did.

- Konstantin Simonov

Russian Folk Song

1-
In the islands, the hunter
Roams all day long
But no luck for him
And the courses himself
What's he going to do
How is he to serve
He cannot be cheerful
So what
He'll try to aim better
So the hunter goes to warmer waters
Where the fish were frolicking in the beautiful weather
There on the shore.....

2-
You, my eagle with blue-black wings
Where have you been flying
for so Long
I was flying there over the mountains
Where it all was silence.

This song was taken from the movie Dersu Uzala directed by Akira Kurosawa.