[Edited Message Follows] Though a secular Ashkenazi, I am a lover of Yiddish. I found a place that preserves ( https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/ ) Yiddish literature but I don't see anything from political presses. One of the few books in Yiddish I still have is a bit of Red literature called "Sidney Garve and Sons from Morgen Freiheit press. I hesitate to send it to them. Most Jews, taken in by zionsm and too much success, seem to have forgotten our heritage; that most of us were Reds a few generations ago. I'm a throwback but, through have published a few related collections via Partisan Press ( https://angelfire.com/va/bcr/ptsn.html ) --in English.One is a profound collection called "A Possible Explanation" by Peggy Saffire and another called "Dedication" by Benjamin Balthaser which is about his family -- both deal with familial communist immigrants but the latter's into gets into our left history which have struggle to continue and preserve.
One of my favorite poems in "A Possible Explanaton" -- *The Art Of Making An Omelette* At the moment his Liederkranz cheese reached consummate ripeness on our kitchen counter, almost liquid with two weeks’ pungency, my immigrant father, no stranger to making do, searched the ice box for omelette ingredients. Liederkranz was a landsmann bearing accent, a handshake and tears to his eyes, was brazen with stink only to those who did not know better. So…yes…the ice box. There he found a solitary green pepper, an abandoned onion, two serviceable potatoes and four fine eggs. As the Teuton he was, my father diced the potatoes into one-quarter inch cubes with the same surgery he applied to his weekly wages, then cut similarly sized squares of onion and pepper. He sautéed all and began coaxing the edges of the four beaten eggs as they bubbled in butter in the cast iron skillet. Bach or Beethoven or Brahms gave grace to our little feast. We dined at the table I set, he and I, giant golden omelette halves for each, the Liederkranz centered on a saucer between us its tin-foiled paper peeled back like petals. We slathered it on, I as apprentice learning to smear it across my slices of rye, to take big bites. He poured the wine. Red. Talk began. The politics of war and money, union organizing, Franco, Jew haters, the KKK and dead friends. “Now I can tell you why I ran,” he said. “I ran for my life, my working man’s life, my immigrant life, my learning English life, my ‘brother can you spare a dime’ life, my loving Paul Robeson life, my Free The Rosenbergs life. Now I can tell you how I sang the anthems of Pete Seeger, The Weavers and Josh White.” “Is that why we moved, each time without warning, in the dawning hours, headlights on the two-laner North, our car loaded like a truck bed? Is that why I was taught the sleight of sliding The Daily Worker inside The Herald Tribune, sent so lonely to do that chore each morning? Is that why you left us, finally, when the sub-committee found our front door and pounded day and night? Is that why you told me trust no one tell no one we’re like no one no one will understand?” Holy WQXR News On The Hour silenced us with its signal. Five minutes of reverence for world affairs, the world of the Red Menace, Blacklists, White Supremacy, Coloreds at the back of the bus. A world in which my father found no safe way home from the old country to the new, no way back to the grandfather I would never meet, whose lessons of Flight and Survival, of Auschwitz and smoke stacks were passed along as legacy, with the art of making an omelette. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3858): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3858 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78476244/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
