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Ghetto

POETRY

MERRY-GO-ROUND

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read279 views

Our hotel was a dozen or more tram stops

from Prague’s city centre. Converted

from a Soviet-era apartment block

to cater for the influx of tourists

after the Velvet Revolution,

it faced a large rectangle of open ground,

flat and bare. On the other three sides

were similar blocks, but still used for families.

In the middle was a small carousel

and, to one side, a mobile shop selling

alcohol and cigarettes – Freedom’s

enterprising dividends. The hotel

welcomed groups – like the excited party

of Israeli High School students and teachers,

with their Mossad minders, jackets bulging,

waiting in the foyer, as we arrived,

for coaches to take them to the Ghetto.

                               ***

Hitler declared that the Ghetto be preserved –

once Prague had been pronounced wholly ‘Judenrein’ –

as if an exhibit in a museum.

In the Old Jewish Cemetery,

along the horizontal edges 

of the tomb of the scholar and mystic

Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel

aka Rabbi Loew small stones rest.

According to German Jewish folklore

the Rabbi could conjure, in times of trouble,

a redemptive golem out of the mud

and clay of the wide Vlatava close by.

When the city was part of the Habsburg

Empire, because of its many gilded

cupolas, it was ‘Das Goldene Stadt’.

                                 ***

Our room overlooked the open ground.

Adults were queuing at the shop, and

children turning on the roundabout. We could hear

its generator’s wheezy chug-chug,

and the tinkling of a waltz. On its roof

were clumsy images of clowns painted

in a faded yellow. The street lamps came on.

Snow began to fall as the coaches returned,

their passengers subdued.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A BIT LATE TO THINK OF KAFKA

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read489 views

His new apartment was in a converted

eighteenth century farmhouse stranded

in a nineteenth century coastal town that,

as is the way of things by the accident

of geography, had become a prosperous port

and then declined. The back way in was along

a sloping path through an unkempt garden

then down narrow steep slate steps – slippery

that day with leaf mould. In the twilight,

two Waitrose bags-for-life in each hand,

he slipped, falling neatly on his  backpack.

However, dignity, he felt, impelled him

to rise before some neighbour found him

so he lifted himself up by twisting

his left leg as one might a tourniquet.

 

He lay on the sofa, one bag of frozen

broad beans on his ankle, another

on his calf, sipping a large Zufanek gin

with ice and lemon, studying his print

of Chirico’s ‘The Uncertainty

of the Poet’, understanding as always

the express train on the horizon,

the headless, armless, legless, twisting

female torso but puzzled as usual

by the bunches of ripening bananas.

 

The row of arches prompted him to think

of the Charles Bridge over the Vltava

in Prague; of Kafka’s married sister’s house

(where Franz wrote) in Golden Street near the Castle;

of the writer’s birthplace on the Ghetto’s edge

near the automated clock – and only then,

only then did he remember Kafka’s

Gregor Samsa: waking as some sort of

monstrous verminous insect; realising

he was late for work; lying there observing

his many legs moving like a multitude

of dysfunctional, spindly, brown bananas.

 

 

 

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POETRY

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read699 views

Curtains drawn against late October twilight,

working on verses about burgeoning flocks

of raucous, emerald Ring-necked Parakeets

in the Surrey Hills, I hear the murmur

of girls. It is Halloween. The bell rings.

There is a bevy of neighbours’ daughters –

one with a painted face, all on the cusp

of womanhood – lovely, ingenuous.

 

From habit, I watch them safely down the street

and then, before I shut the door, look up

at the night sky, craning my neck with wonder.

Cloud obscures all but Jupiter, Mars, Venus.

It would be tempting to believe not merely

in physical forces and chemical

reactions but design and purpose

through the kaleidoscope of the universe –

and in the countless stars’ unheard music.

 

After supper, I begin another piece:

about the Ghetto in Golden Prague –

with its learning, its music and its art –

which Hitler decreed should be preserved as

a raree show for ‘Judenrein Europa’.

Daily, new stones are placed on the tomb

of Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel,

Talmudic scholar and Kabbalistic mystic,

legendary creator, from Vltava mud,

of The Golem to scourge the anti-semites,

and battler with Azrael, the angel of death,

to protect his only granddaughter.

 

***

 

In the opposite corner of the room

in which I write is an Edwardian

upright piano, an inanimate

companion since my early childhood.

Our granddaughter asks to be lifted

onto the too high stool and tries the notes,

now loud, now soft,  with the flats of her hands,

hearing with wonder the unending sounds.

 

 

 

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