My Father Didn’t Talk About The War

by Paula Friedman

Wakened by my father’s pacing,
I saw the strangest thing: 
layers of him had loosened 
like a lizard shedding skin.

Those shadowy slips of him
were looking for their home, but
he could not claim them, nor grasp 
that they belonged to him.

The house brimmed with orphaned
memories. Once, we kids saw, or thought   
we did, a giant cockroach on the pantry floor; 
we poked at it to see if it was real. 

When a sudden hunger distracted me,
I stuffed my pockets with saltines,
spilled some water in to make a stew
and soon the others wanted some.

After all, we were having our own war.  
Even hide and seek seemed a deadly game;
the door held shut as one of us sank back,  
voiceless, into a dark and airless room.

We’d heard occasional whisperings: one 
morning at Auschwitz, my father was late 
for roll call, so a guard bashed his teeth  
with a gun butt. The ones in front are fake.  

Violence often broke out among us:
Usually, the biggest got the most licks in,
the others cowering away, but time flicked
roles round and round. Eventually, we came

to despise one another. More ruinous still, 
we came to despise ourselves. What better defense 
was possible against that awful whispering—
about an infant daggered to a tree?

---

“This poem was inspired by my family history in conjunction with an article written by psychologist Irit Felsen, who writes about second and third-generation Shoah survivors. She looks at the epigenetic changes affecting family health and dynamics. While the outcomes Felsen finds are by no means guaranteed, she does find repeated patterns of destroyed family bonds by the time the second generation begins aging, thus extending the devastating reach of genocide. The family is once again destroyed.” —Paul Friedman

Paula Friedman has taught a variety of literature and writing courses at UC Davis, California College of the Arts, and Saint Mary’s College of Moraga. While completing her doctoral program, she received the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Columbia Poetry Journal, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The New Criterion, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. Her chapbook, Undreaming Landscapes, was published in 2015. Currently, she lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills and teaches poetry on Zoom.