Grandfather Prayer
by Bethann Mangel Pflugeisen
I dream my grandfather
thirty eight years before my birth,
stealing
through a crisp autumn Austrian night.
My Grandfather the Thief dying
in North Carolina as I grow
to the age he held in parting
sixty years past.
He is not staying alive for me.
is it the memories that keep him
or does he live
simply for the sake of survival?
I call at mid-morning
before the prism crack sunlight to rainbows
to tell My Grandfather the Thief
I dreamed us back to Austria.
I do not say I
dreamed to discover your
pre-war photos and orphaned memories
shoved into a closet.
I tell my Grandfather the Thief I
love him,
the first of
our twenty two years together.
I do not say I
doubt we will speak again
before you gather your memories
and leave once more.
I search his stroke-broken words,
seeking stories,
memories,
guarded now for too long.
Quietly I tally –
My Grandfather the Thief
versus
History:
his language – stolen.
his country – stolen.
his family – stolen.
his name – stolen.
Quietly
my grandfather
stole from the Reich
his life:
one jew.
his children – three jews
his grandchildren – seven jews.
eleven (lives)(jews) in all.
My father, grandpa’s son,
Says to me, rabbinical,
“The Torah teaches all things
live and die in cycles of four:
“four seaons
“four directions
“four questions
“four decades of exile”.
Four generations
until the memories are gone
echo sister and I. We are the third.
The next will meet no survivors.
My Grandfather the Thief
won’t inherit me his memories
and the next generation
will complete the forgetting.
Except that I can play thief, too,
a game no longer dangerous,
steal back grandpa’s dream name
white refugee memories
shaping each scribed letter.
I steal with quiet
from my grandfather
I thank him for our lives.
Quietly I steal
for my grandfather
the memories, like waking dreams
disintegrating with his passing.
Bethann wrote this poem in June 1999, about eight months after my father had a stroke. For complicated reasons (see the Family History page) he entered the US with the surname Pflugeisen (his grandmother’s surname) which he changed to Mangel (his grandfather’s surname) in 1947. She changed her surname of Pflugeisen shortly thereafter. When her second son was born in 2014, she named him Isaac Pflugeisen, which I learned in July 2016 – through my family history research – was the name of her great-great-great-grandfather .