To Research or Not to Research
     by Shulamith  Surnamer

To research or not to research -- that's not a question!
Whether 'tis more vital to e-publish
The sum GEDCOM total of all my ancestral genealogy
Or to hide the true lineage lore and dates behind a wall of privacy,
And, by filing away the data dossiers, effectively end them. To search, to investigate --
No more -- and by not sharing nor publishing the results, to say farewell to
The unearthing and the locating of distant mishpacha
That I might otherwise be able to find, ‘tis a consequence
Greatly to be avoided. To research, to seek--
To pursue, perchance to unearth. Ay, there's the true Up, Roots! quest.
For in hot pursuit of family history, what ancestral tidbits of unnerving truth surface
When we have to the Archives gone just for this reason
Must give us pause. There's the nexus
That makes a calamity out of the simple family history-lineage quest.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of minor bureaucrats, foreign and domestic;
Th’ various archives' slow response time; the mayven's disdain for the newbie;
The endlessly incorrect, conflicting dates needing verification;
When she herself might conclude her family quest
Just by shutting off the FTM program on the PC? Why else would genealogists bear
To travel to archives and cemeteries in foreign lands --a weary life --
But that the dread of not learning one's tenth great grandparent's name
That self-directed lineage labor, from which assignment
No one can else can ever free us,
Makes us ever more key in the new data we just found
Than switch to the other things we should actually be doing?
Thus, genealogy does make compulsive addicts of us all,
And thus, the full story of the Langer-Surinamer-Van Coerland-Weber-Backer-
            Balinky-Lepar-Klompus-Caplan Clan
Will finally be related along with documentary proof of certified birth, marriage, death, and naturalization.
But can the tales of great ancestors and their living descendants ever be told
Even via computerized GEDCOM or handpainted tree, as their stories turn, shift,
Unfolding o'er various times and climes, in Litvakia and America?
But, here it, inevitably, comes now,
The genuine genealogist's unbiased, documented account!
O, Root Seeker, in thy true reportage
May all thy relatives be accounted for.

My Litvak Ancestor
  by Barbara F. Lefcowitz

Pardon
  by Judy Baston

ITEM: "Lithuania’s new government has begun issuing certificates of exoneration for thousands of people who had been condemned as Nazi war criminals by Soviet courts…" New York Times, 1991

So you want to change history,
Prosecutor Vaicekauskas?

In a Soviet trial, you say,
they had no right
to a legal defense…

You know, Esteemed Prosecutor,
you may be right.

Let’s give them
a different justice,

The same kind that was given
to my grandfather,
my grandmother,
my aunts,
uncles,
cousins.

No false witnesses
no coerced confessions
no corrupt trials.

In fact,
no questions at all:
only a long walk
to a stoneless grave.

If you want to change history,
Esteemed Prosecutor,
I’ll make you a deal:

You can let
a certificate of exoneration
slip through
and come to rest
at the grave of our Police Chief,

for you must surely know
where Ostravakas lies
after ending a long life
in the comfort of his own bed.

And in exchange,
you return the children
of Eishishok
whose blood
even a half-century
cannot wash from his hands.

Not an even trade, you say?
Dozens of lives
for only one piece of paper.

All right, Esteemed Prosecutor,
if you want,
we’ll go one-for-one.

You issue a certificate,
and I’ll go next Shabbas
to have dinner
with my Cousin Sorke.

One more thing, though:
that little matter
of the nightmare
she took to her grave.

Or is that worth a second certificate?

One for her murderer

and another
for the man who raped her
on the road to the pit.

Do we have a deal,
Esteemed Prosecutor?

No?

I didn’t think we would.       

             --September, 1991

Poems Across The Generations

   The first poem in this pair,"Das Feurerherz In Deiner Brust" (The Fiery Heart in Your Breast), is a translation of a recently unearthed poem written by Kurt Dreifuss Offenburg, As he died young, in his forties, he never got the chance to know his only grandchild, Judith Hamilton, who writes the second poem,"Family Album."  

Das Feurerherz in Deiner Brust
(The Fiery Heart in Your Breast)
    by Kurt Dreifuss Offenburg
     translated by LeeKersten

It is the old song, all too oft experienced:
what you have neglected and not achieved,
what has not rung out victoriously in your day,
what you dully neglected to do in the rich years
of your life, hesitating and full of doubts --
the grandchild will achieve it only with double the effort.
It is up to you to prepare the path!
If you rise up like a Cyclops:
life will be formed as you will it to be!

It is the old song, the eternal old melody:
time runs on, drips from the strike of hour to hour,
and where you are and are breathing - everywhere
you are conscious. What your father gave you
and what the remote ancestor passed on, in darkness not knowing,
it doesn't belong to you! You are only a link to the future
and your days are only a word in the eternal song
of freedom. so that the grandchild will not
suffer hardship in chains as the ancestor once did!
Let you be aware with every breath:
the heat of fire in your breast
is there to rescue you from the yoke of slavery!

Family Album
by Judith Hamilton

Ask now
About those unnamed sepia faces,
How proud they sat to watch the birdie,
Stiff collars, hair piled high - all strangers
Presented and fixed with corner mounts.
The indifference of our early years
Shrugs and dismisses - to gnaw away
Middle-age with anger and regret.
Knowledge lost for ever in the grave,
Or in such forgetful safe-keeping
It becomes a hidden city with no map,
May haunt us with its fading gazes.
No heritage, just empty spaces.

As I Explained To Rodger Kamenetz
   by Shulamith  Surnamer  

Family Trees are supplanting my poetry
Now I hunt for hidden histories
        I forage for forgotten fact
        Continually, perpetually solving
        my genealogy puzzles
        my mishpachology mysteries

I even name my pet papier mâché parrot
        Feige Yankel Shalom
        after my paternal
        second great grandmother
        in Zagare aka Þagarë, Ðiauliai uyezd

But when do I get my AncesTREE prize????

Ellis Island Villanelloid

by Shulamith Surnamer

It’s just so hard trying to log on to Ellis Island
and this web site’s tantalizing NYC passenger arrivals’ database
into the Goldine Medina, the immigrants’ much desired new US strand.

Whether from Alsace-Lorraine, Russia, Surinam, or the ancient Holy Land
the huddled masses trudged up the herringboned hall’s grand staircase.
‘Twas as hard in 1892 to gain admittance through Ellis Island

as in the Spring of 2001 to penetrate this genealogical treasure land
while vying with 27,000 others a second for my place in cyberspace.
Will I ever reach my genealogical candyland in this delicious new digitized strand?

As I impatiently sit and tap away at my computer stand
I’m a nervous right-clicking URL-reloading-and-refreshing basketcase.
It’s hard at first to log on to www.ellisislandrecords.org for Ellis Island.

Wait! Hurrah! Quick! Strike up the band!!
I briefly got on, registered, even made it to the passenger search screen place.
I was this close to finding my grandma’s arrival on America’s Atlantic strand

before overloaded network servers bumped me off my long awaited research e-band
“Due to the overwhelming number of visitors” in Internet space.
It’s just so hard right now to log on to Ellis Island.

Boards of Special Inquiry once refused passengers admittance to the US mainland.
Trachoma, lack of money, lameness -- each a coup de grâce --
made it hard for immigrants, especially steerage, to land at Lady Liberty’s strand.

Twelve million or more left motherland, fatherland, native homeland
forever, some in disgrace, some after one last parting familial embrace,
to try as best they could to land safely through Ellis Island.

Whether from Russland, Ireland, Litvakland, or Internetland,
all of us want to get to our magic goal’s first base;
all of us want to be able to reach our destination, our desired new strand.

Many who wish to enter are in desperate need of a helping hand --
a translator, a la Fiorello La Guardia -- to decipher the e-maze.
Otherwise, it’s just so hard trying to navigate through Ellis Island

amidst the polyglot babble of languages and indecipherable scribbled longhand
while diligently searching millions of databased surnames for a faint misspelled trace
of our mishpacha’s entrance to this Goldine Medina, the fabled golden strand.

At times it feels like I’m in some Never-Never-Land
trying to ferret out ancestral arrivals from their passenger manifest hiding place.
It’s just that it’s excruciatingly hard for all to ever land at Ellis Island:
both immigrant’s New World strand and immigrant’s descendants’ New Web e-Strand

by Shulamith Surnamer             

         In a message dated 02/16/2002, chayesh@pop3.rcom.ru wrote:
    << I have found for you the following data on this surname:
Additional revizskaja skazka 1818 of Zheimel contains surname LEPAR among patients and beggars:
Nb.25. Noeh Mortheliovich LIPAR, 55. His wife Reize 45. Their sons Lejba 25, Berel' 16, daughters Baske 12, Meriem 6.
Revizskaja skazka of Zheimel 1834 contains surname LEPAR in such form:
Nb.64. Noah Morthelovich LIPPAR (55) has died in 1826. His son Lejb (25) was missing in 1829. The son of Noeh - Ber (16) 32. His wife Sora 30. >>

Traveling far across time and space
were these women possibly attempting
to welcome her, the littlest Litvak,
as they magically surfaced on my PC?

Were these ancestral mothers truly attempting
to make their ancient lost names reknown
magically surfacing and appearing on my PC
at the very moment their newest descendant is being born?

For their first names to now become known
via an unexpected e-mail from Anatolij
even as she, their newest descendant, is being born
takes on a special dimension all it own

Via an unexpected e-mail from Anatolij
Cheyesh, researching in St. Petersburg,
in a synchronous serendipity all its own
come these names from an old Revizskaja Skazka

Chayesh, researching in St. Petersburg
unearthed these ancestral names from Zeimelis
long-lost feminine names retrieved from a Revizskaja Skazka 
from the 1818 and 1834 counting of the family Lepar

These ancestral female names, from Zeimelis ~
Reize, wife of Noach, and Sora, wife of Ber ~
in 1818 and 1834 recorded as mothers of the family Lepar
are now reseen just as their newest gggggggg-grandchild is seen

Reize, wife of Noach, and Sora, wife of Ber
joyfully join Emahot Gisa, Breine, Miriam, Chaya Mattel, and Esther
in the magical moment when the newest anekel is seen
so all the extended mishpacha can welcome her

Come Litvaks, Galitzianers, Jewish Mothers all
across time and space and all divides
so all the extended mishpacha can welcome her
the newest descendant, Esther Malka

Across time and space and all divides
we feel your warm embrace welcoming the littlest one
as the newest descendant, Esther Malka
takes her place on the Jewish Family Tree

Still Life: Mother and Daughter
  by Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld

It's not their turn yet.
The camera
captures their flesh
in a flash of light. Apt
the black
and white
of the film. Still,
the picture lies,
as pictures do:
You cannot see them quaver.
This is autumn, 1941,
a chill in the air.

In this field, the mother
has brushed the hair
of the child
smooth,
tied a floppy bow,
as was the fashion then.
The child,
a girl of
ten, I would guess,
leans against her mother,
dressed in only a shift,
head down.
The mother, too,
wears undergarments,
pantaloons,
a sleeveless linen shirt,
but stands
stiff as a ramrod,
shoulders back,
head up, eyes front, as if
someone had shouted
Achtung!

It's not their turn, though.
As for the undergarments,
they will remove those too,
later. I think it is autumn from
the look
of the woods
behind them.
If it were spring
or even summer,
what might the daughter,
eyes to the ground,
fasten on?
Seed attached
to a tiny puff
that touches down
in summer grass
and catches?
A pebble or,
from a pile of pebbles,
larger one
touching a smaller one
beside it? After the final flash
of powder and light,
earth will hold them.

Child, I have no stone
to lay on your grave
only the weight of words.

      "Still Life: Mother and Daughter" was inspired by a photo the poet saw on the Internet which resides at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as Photo #19121. It is a photo of half-clad Jewish women and a young girl about to be executed on a beach forced to pose for a final photograph during a mid-December murder spree that took the lives of at least 2700 Jews. {To view the photo go to http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/search/ph_catalog.php, the photo archive search page, and enter 19121 into the first search window there, or go to http://www.liepajajews.org/shkedeexecutions15121941_web/index.html where it is the fifth photo on the left.}
      Although the event the photo depicts took place at Skede, Latvia, where most of the remaining Jewish citizens of Liepaja, Latvia, (some of whom were born in neighboring Lithuania) were slaughtered over two days in mid-December 1941 by Latvians and Germans acting in conjunction with Einsatzkommando 2 under SS Commander Fritz Dietrich, the poem is universal in that it describes the scene of the impending massacre of Jews of the sort that took place under the Nazis all over Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.
      The author has now learned the name of the child shown in this photo: Sorella Epstein. Thus, the poem is now dedicated to her and to all the murdered children of Europe.
      {Originally published in Babi Yar: A Jewish Catastrophe by Patrick Dempsey (P.A. Draigh, Measham, Derbyshire, UK, 2005), republished with author's permission.}