In my childhood, I prayed as a Jew every night
That life would turn out all right the next day,
That I’d hit a homerun
And pitch hitless innings
In my protected universe
On Newark’s Untermann Field.

Even now in my older years,
The prayers are still with me,
Given voice by my mother’s promise in the camps to raise Jewish children,
Given shape by the sinuous, arcane Hebrew letters on the page,
Each telling a story of human destiny and how the world began.

Winding their way through the pages of the worn, cloth-covered Siddur.
Its cracked spine held together by brittle glue.
The stringy cloth that sounded like a garment being ripped in lamentation,
When as children we irreverently pulled the frayed threads,
Trying to make the time pass at Shabbat services.

The tattered canon of praises and petitions rests now on my bookcase,
Next to the poems of Halevi
And the children’s artwork of Terezín,
Pleading plaintively
To be whispered again
In secret, innocent longing.

Baruch Ata Adonai.
The words are yet of me.
My blood, my veins, my body,
That circumcised myth of who I am in this world,
Marked to whom I belong forever and ever.

Blessed art Thou, O Lord our G-d, Ruler of the universe,
Who has delivered us this day,
Who has kept us in life,
Forgiven us our transgressions,
And sanctified our death.

Those all-but-petrified vessels still hold and carry the lot of us,
Like a great boat,
A Mahayana for life in the world among Christians,
A cruise ship loaded with the plunder of Egypt,
As we “set off to sea in a sigh in a boat of beautiful things.” *

This contentious, stiff-necked lot that we are,
Has always shared the same fate.
Blessed and cursed together,
Exiled and liberated as one,
When not exterminated en masse
In the pyres of Aragon,
The pits of Babi Yar,
The pizzerias of Jerusalem.
We are laid to rest in our collective burial societies—
The Knights of Pythias and Daughters of Israel—
In the tranquil cemeteries off Exit 147
Of the Garden State Parkway.

With a vestige of my childhood’s unbridled faith and hope
That our lives will never again be dark and sad,
I have blessed my reluctant sons on Friday nights
And said Kaddish for my once devout father,
Who took his grief to the grave for his martyred mother,
But for his having recited an obligatory Sh’ma Yisroel
Hours before he died,
For his wife and children’s sake,
If not his own,
Though I’m still not certain.

I am my father’s son,
Infusing antiquated prayers
With a forever secret scintilla of longing,
For the face of who I really am,
And to learn the reason for why we have come to this—
Such an inhospitable place.

*From “Old Lady’s Winter Words,” by Theodore Roethke

Eugene L. Pogany is a retired psychologist, the son of Holocaust survivors and descendant of others who did not survive. He is the author of the 2000 National Jewish Book Award Finalist, In My Brother’s Image: Twin Brother’s Separated by Faith After the Holocaust (Penguin Random House, 2000/01). His essays have appeared as chapters in books and in numerous journals and periodicals, including “Cross Currents,” “Sh’ma,” “JewishFamily.com,” “(Boston) Jewish Advocate,” “Jbooks.com,” and “Interfaithfamily.com.” He dedicates this current selection to his much-revered teacher, Paul Mendes-Flohr z’l.