Adam Tritt

My Grandmothers came from The Ukraine.

This is a poem I wrote for my daughter. I am a second generation Jew. My wife’s family, and this is the first time I write these words, She of blessed memory, and my family, all lived in Kiev. Both due to the cossacks, mine chased from the country, hers from Kazakhstan. Our grandmothers came over on the Blue Star Line, from Kiev to Buenos Aires. Then to the Canada and then the US.

Her grandfather was a deserter from the Russian Army.

My grandfather came from England (through Wales through The Netherlands from Portugal), where his father was Lord Mayor of Hereford. I have pictures of him with King George VI and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, surveying the bomb damage done by the Germans. My grandfather came to the US through the Canadian Air Force.

My father’s family came to the US from Austria.

My writing, through the years, has been informed by, often driven by, a search for solid ground. Where most people have a landscape of space, we Jews have, really, a landscape of time. I have written through my search for a place to belong and a way to fit in without losing my identity. That, and a wish for my children, grown now, and my granddaughter, three as I write this,(http://adamtritt.com/2011/02/07/a-letter-to-sadie/) to know from where they came.

My grandmothers came from the Ukraine.
Each one
Pushed, pushed
By swelling Cossack waves,
Night pogroms, burning homes and hoof-print graveyards.
Scattered, scattered.
One to Vienna, the other, Buenos Aires, Boston.

My grandmother in Vienna met my grandfather
And became my father’s parents,
Pushed, pushed
By the waves of Hitler’s Reich
In the Holy war against the Jews, Gypsies, Whathaveyou.
Galacia, Gdansk, London, New York, Israel, Florida.
Scattered, scattered.

My grandfather removed himself from Lisbon
At the Catholic’s strong suggestion
And ended up in Amsterdam, London, Buenos Aires,
Boston.

And I am Boston, New Jersey, South Carolina,
New Mexico, North Carolina, Minneapolis, Seattle and Canada.
Israel, England, Germany, Philadelphia, Florida.
And in no place do I belong,
Each place I needed to move from,
Pushed, pushed-
Economics, education,
culture bade me leave,

Browning pastures left for green and I
Unhappy in the next as the last
Moved on again, unattached
Unrooted, uncommitted and still,
In the back of my mind I’m planning where next,
Wherever I am inferior to where I might be.
I’m sure it will be better.
Scattered, Scattered.

Yom HaShoah.
Day of Remembrance.
It should be enough to remember,
But it blows through my hollow bones
Like a winter bird in flight,
I scatter like a dried dandelion.
A personal Diaspora,
I shatter like crystal, dispersing light.