fake [submission]

I feel like a fake

I don’t feel jewish enough

I feel like I want to hurt the people that made my great grandma and great grandpa and great great uncle feel so ashamed and scared

That they forced their children to stop practicing. And they stopped.

And they left behind G-d because they said She had turned Her eyes from them

And I want to cry because when my grandma tried to be jewish her husbands

One after the other

Every failed marriage

They beat her down over and over and over

And when my mom taught me about Passover

Passover

Not Pesach

Passover

Because my goyische father

And his goyische family

And all of the goyim in my life

Made it bad to do anything that wasn’t christianized

And when I wanted to be jewish and I wanted to learn my great grandma took that internalized HATRED and called me

Shiksa Goddess

and she hit me

(a small eight year old with big watery blue eyes and the longest tangle of blonde hair to be found for miles)

(no one on my mothers side has hair like mine)

until I cried the bitter tears that she could never let herself cry

Because she had to be Strong.

And I want to scream and cry and hurt them like they’ve hurt me

And I want to hate my great grandma but

Sarah just did what she had to do

So aptly named

She took life in stride and looked for other solutions and I want to be Sarah but I am not that strong

And I am not strong

I am not strong

And I just want to cry.

• damnatians.tumblr.com

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jewitch

i would tell u what it means to be a jewish witch but my history has been massacred and all our stories have died.

diaspora quote

Being part of a diaspora is the feeling of never wanting to forget, but being incapable of remembering.

• fireofashk.tumblr.com

mi ani? ma ani?

like my people, my

thoughts
poems
head
love
history

all are scattered.

and now that my matriarch is dead,

what
where
who

am i?

why did you leave me like this?
i don’t feel ready.

nu, what is it like?

being Jewish is having the breath suddenly ripped from your chest upon remembering the pain and suffering of your people’s past, a memory that rips open the barely-healed scabs of the pain of your people’s present.

being Jewish is to live with wounds our tormentors will not allow to heal.

ahava

from now on, whenever a hebrew or yiddish word bubbles up into my heart, I will not allow myself to suppress it like I shamefully do my tears

I will let my lost languages, mame loshn, the tongues that put me in the skin of my ancestors, I will let those words burst out of my chest like fire

I will let them burn the skin of anyone who shames me for speaking a language i hold on to

languages too heavy for me to carry, the diaspora has made my arms weak but I will not let go.

i want to talk to g-d

i want to talk to g-d but loshn kodesh – the language that g-d speaks – hits my heart without passing through my ears.

i want to talk to my ancestors but mame loshn draws more laughs in this place than smiles of recognition.

i ache to speak the languages of my people, languages that taste like the desert and ghettoes, sand and glass, fire and resilience, but instead i speak common tongues like english and french and latin – i feel like crying because they are familiar in a way that my own languages may never be.

what does diasporic sorrow feel like?

what does diasporic sorrow feel like?

it feels like my chest tightening with tears i’m not sure i’ll shed. my throat hurts, a lump is trying to escape from it.

it feels like my body tensing up in wait. i still don’t know what i’m waiting for.

it feels like a constant buzz of anxiety. like the kind i get when i don’t know if i’ve locked my front door, except there’s no home to go to at the end of the day to check.

it feels like the desert. hot. dry. my eyes sting like when sand gets in them.

it feels like confusion. like in the cartoons i used to watch, with a question mark flitting around my head. i can’t even express what i’m confused about, half the time.

it feels like the burst of sadness when i realize that the language my mother spoke to me as a child isn’t a made-up language after all. it’s the language of my people. it’s a language we all used to speak.

it feels like the frustration when my siblings and friends and i share pieces of our histories with each other, trying to make pieces of different puzzles fit together as one. none of us were born complete.

it feels like i am constantly justifying why i am, where i am, who i am, what i am. to the point where i question my own truth.

it feels like it will never get better. i will never know anything.

it feels like i will feel this way forever.

most of us always have, anyway.

passover [submission]

passover (poem) [submission from hamletrash.tumblr.com]

remember when your skin first felt like a

disease, like every pore if you squeezed it

would spit cold cyanide

remember when you were a slave in the house of bondage

remember the blood on your thighs. remember

the plague of boils, the plague of blood,

the plague of cattle disease

(you used to have a toy a

cow with a button on its foot

push the button and its joints buckled

and collapsed)

pretending as you

scrubbed your sheets

that this was the blood of a man you’d killed

remember that spring when god peeled your skin off and ate it like bread

the terror of how your zipped coat

looked when you sat down

the waves and bubbles the zipper made.

like eve under trees

the sudden alien weight of her body

this is the bread of affliction

god spits blood in the river, god

whispers into your bed

kisses your neck full of boils

god in a breath of lice that squirm through

your firstborn’s hair

god bound between your eyes and

upon the doorposts of your houses

god’s blood in the nile

lamb’s blood on the door

cows’ blood in the fields

your blood in the sink

stick your smallest finger in the wine

anonymous submission

“diaspora poem?” [anonymous submission]

some nights when i’m alone, my thoughts run strange:

that my heart is a homeland,

pumping culture and language and identity

through rivers, over mountains.

nearer to my heart are the organs that are strong:

my lungs are my ancestors, receiving the most blood,

next my digestive system is my parents—

not as rich, yet not as poor as me—

because i am housed within my hands and feet.

i am choked by the circulation problems i’ve had since i was born,

and my hands and feet are cold and weak

like my sense of identity

like my connection with eretz yisrael

like my understanding of those other jews.

at which point can the dysfunctional body flourish,

when the heart is a homeland that cannot reach over distances,

when there are far more important places

for that blood to reach?

i want to reach out in the dark for answers,

but my feeble hands clutch at nothing

nothing but the drowning call of diaspora.

what the world has stolen from us

i honestly don’t know if i will get over the fact that i know nothing, and most likely will never know anything, about my history past the last 3 generations.

where did they live? where did they come from? who were they? what did they do? what were their names? how many of them were there?

i will never be able to answer any of those questions

u murdered my history and u expect me to be complacent when u further try to degrade me and force me to give up the only thing i have left of my ancestry?

remember where you came from

they say “remember where you came from” –

that’s hard to do when the only memories of your home are of broken glass and fire.

i call myself a diasporan

and i am…

but how do i explain that the places i come from

don’t exist anymore?

that the plurality of my heritage doesn’t equal home?

i say that i belong to the desert.

it’s the only answer that makes sense

because nothing really fits.

would u still make jokes?

would u still make jokes if I told u that

for years,

I had nightmares of giant ovens,

showers that choked the life out of me,

lying down next to dirty, sickly, emaciated bodies, some dead, some barely alive, of people I once knew,

digging my own grave: one of millions,

science experiments performed on my body,

tell me:

why is any of this funny to u?

diaspora quote

The diaspora took so much from us, our perception on how we view the world around us is perhaps the worst one.

— lonewandererofficial.tumblr.com

 

history

JEWISH HISTORY IS SO UNBELIEVABLY VAST

AND SO UNBELIEVABLY DIFFICULT TO UNCOVER

diasporic sorrow

i have a meaningless name, void of story, without a destiny. i speak an empty language, one that does not speak to me. my country is not mine. my countrymen are not my people. they will forever see me as “other”, they let me know in small ways that i do not belong. there is a constant ache in my belly and it tastes like watery borsht and it smells like onions and it sparkles like silenced brown eyes that never die and it sounds like tentative whispers of old languages on thick clumsy tongues.

those whispers seem to tell me that i have no home, but i can’t be sure because i don’t speak the language.

breathing

i want to be smothered in jewishness.

i want to breathe it, i want jewishness in my skin.

when my hair stands on end i want it to exude jewishness,

i want to swallow jewishness when my throat is dry,

i want it to mix with the salt in my tears when i allow myself to cry

and stain my cheeks because i refuse to wipe them.

i want to feel all of it, all the things that come with existing in jewishness

i want to be able to breathe in and feel like my lungs aren’t half-deflated.

i want to suffocate in jewishness, and in suffocating, finally feel the sweet taste of air.

old country

because of old country, Ts taste like Ss on my tongue.

i switch between “yid” and “yehudit”

when i am looking for a home.

english is a prison I

learning languages only takes time

but my accent

my mouth will always betray me

english has enslaved me.

for the little Jewish child who learns of her inherited wretchedness through YouTube comments and the snide remarks of her goyische friends

mein kinder,

 

if no one prepares you

for the hatred that will come your way for daring to be born what you are,

 

there will be two ways you might react.

 

one is to internalise their hatred

to believe in your wretchedness

to learn to despise your otherness

and to use it:

to wear it like David’s shield

 

another is to attribute their hatred

to the grand injustice and wrongness of the world:

to believe their abuse is part of the natural order of things

and to accept it.

 

when you see the comments on YouTube

about your evil conspiratory plot to enslave the world,

do not wonder why you were left out of it.

do not consider yourself lesser than because you were not found good enough to be recruited into a resistance movement…

neshema sheli, there is none.

 

i know it will be tempting to laugh awkwardly

when your (goyische of course) best friend asks you,

“how many jews can fit in an ashtray?”

do not give him the satisfaction.

do not mistake his sadistic grin for a sign of his acceptance.

do not allow him to corner you into the role of “good jew.”

for if you do, you will not sleep that night.

instead you will spend hours looking at images

of inconceivably large piles of stolen shoes,

wedding rings,

skeletal bodies,

you will look at your father’s ashtray

and you will think: my grandma could fit inside.

 

and when your (goyische of course) lover tells you

there must be a reason why your people have been so viciously hated throughout history,

do not stay up all night considering your apparent wretchedness, and that of your ancestors.

do not wonder why your lover was lucky enough to be born to a more noble people,

do not let them make you forget your own wondrous nobility.

 

bubbeleh, do not let their hatred convince you of your wretchedness.

do not accept their own wretchedness as par for the course.

do not let them get away with it.

fight them, little one, fight until you can’t anymore.

your body was made to endure.

on your back is piled four thousand years’ worth of broken glass.

use it, and love it.

you are a warrior mosaic of pain and beauty and love and hardness and tenderness

and you deserve the world.