Poetica Magazine Contemporary Jewish Writing

Terri Paul writes about the Jewish immigrant experience. Her award-winning novel GLASS HEARTS is a fictional account of how her mother's family came to America after the Great War. This poem is based on a childhood memory. Please visit her website: https://terri-paul.

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The Other Side of The Wall
Terri Paul

My three-year-old mind craves the Russian

family living beyond the brick

and mortar separating my house

from the wooded lot next door.

No one there speaks English, just

Hebrew blessings over Sabbath candles

in heavy brass sticks on the kitchen table.

I hear those distant voices on winter mornings,

after my sister yells at me to stop talking

to myself in garbled Yiddish and slams

the back door on her way to school.

Or my mother sends me to bed

because I don’t eat my lunch, while

her people starve in the old country.

Upstairs, I pretend to nap with

my eyes wide open and my mouth full

of “Baruch A-tah Ado-nai,” while a woman

in a heavy apron, the grandmother I know only

through pictures on our mantle, cups her hands

over the flames and rocks back and forth.

“Bobbe!” I cry. She doesn’t hear me.

But her younger daughter, my Aunt Rose,

who cheats at gin rummy and wears a green

wool sweater like mine, kicks off her shoes

and smiles at me, ready to trade the soft

quiet of her early days across the ocean

for the unruly chatter and endless questions

on my side of the unyielding wall.

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