The buried life of immigrants, obscured
from sight by Grandma Hortense's Pall Malls,
came to a stop in her, when she declined
to tell the stories her mother told her
to Dad, or when he didn't care to hear
his own voice bearing tales to me. Somewhere
in Germany—we were too proud to be
from Eastern Europe, or, may God forbid,
that Tsarist place—the Epsteins went to shul,
if given leave, and Grampy made a minyan.
It must be so. They all grew old and gnarled
and must have built portable roots, but we,
the Friends of Crockett, Boone, and Hopalong,
we weren't to know what they had heard and so
in our turn, shtum. The Indians lived once
where we had Sunday school; the Gentiles bore
no adverse rights in our town. Grandma knew
unlike that Mrs Feingold, she belonged.
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