A Jewish Cemetery in South Brunswick
I Visited My Grandmother’s Grave Less than a Week After the Capitol Hill Assault.
A version of this will be posted to Instagram. This is it in its entirety. It is part of the Book of Plagues manuscript.
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I visited my grandmother’s grave for the first time in a decade on Tuesday. My dad asked me to go. To see if her Hebrew name was on the headstone. He wanted to give the information to his rabbi in Las Vegas so he could say a prayer. // My grandmother was born in Poland. Immigrated to the United States in the 1920s. Married my grandfather Harry, himself a recent immigrant from Poland. They had three children: Maurice. Marvin, My mother Sharon. Mom’s the only one left. She will soon turn 81. Is in a memory care facility. Is fast moving beyond our grasp. My grandmother died in 1986. She was 81. She had faded into Alzheimer’s, as well. //
It was chilly Tuesday, but tolerable. Washington Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery. Home to multiple congregations. I wandered from section to section, unsure where her grave might be. Wandered among headstones dating back decades. Strangers. Family friends. // Several sections were reserved for those who served in the American military. American flags pockmarked the grounds. Symbols of connection. // Six days earlier, in Washington D.C., American flags were employed in violence. Mixed among the symbols of racism, of Antisemitism. Of hate. Carried by insurrectionists. Used as weapons to beat police. // The mob spilled from the Ellipse, a park to the south of the White House, into the streets. Swarmed east to the Capitol Building. Breached the perimeter. Surged into the seat of American government. Smashed windows and furniture. Chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and “Where’s Pelosi.” // A man captured in a photo wears “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt. On the back: “Staff.” A few weeks earlier, Proud Boys marched the streets of D.C. wearing shirts that said “6MWE.” “Six Million Were Not Enough.” They scuffled with counter protesters. Tore down a Black Lives Matter banner. Burned it. //
My grandmother’s grave sits alone amid the others. Empty plots on both sides. My grandfather died 10 years before her. Buried in Florida. // A backhoe digs a fresh grave in the distance. Two workmen tend the trees. I can see the semis passing by on the main road. Leaving the warehouse. Heading for the Turnpike. // There are names I recognize and many I don’t. Parents of childhood friends. People whom I’ve interviewed. Whose stories I’ve told. Avins. Thorner. Yaros. Schiff. Cohen. Leon Bibel, the artist. // Suze Rosenstock fled Germany on the Kindertransport. One of 10,000 to take refuge in Great Britain. She lost much of her family. Came to the states. Began anew. Helped found the temple. // Rosloff. Paley. Turchin. Schwartz. Newman. Rosen. Feldman. Katz. // “How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,” Longfellow wrote (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44634/the-jewish-cemetery-at-newport). Wandered Touro in Newport, 1852. A Christian in a strange place. Astonished at the strange names “Of foreign accent, and of different climes.” A people, the Jews, viewed in the past tense. // Longfellow’s speaker essentializes. Sees the Jewish dead in Touro as symbolic. A stand-in for a dead people. “(W)hat once has been shall be no more!” he writes. “And the dead nations never rise again.” // Praise for the dead. For the Hebrews. Conceptual. Distant. Remnants of a past giving way to Christianity. // Supersessionism. Conversion. Religious evolution. This was the theory. Longfellow. Browning. Judaism was fading. Was being superseded. Replaced. // The dates on the headstones say otherwise. The pebbles left as witness say more. The dead speak to us. Exist on a continuum. Link the past to the present. // I pick up a handful of pebbles. Place one on my grandmother’s headstone. Place the others on the stones of those I knew. I was here. We were here. We still are. //