{"id":2422,"date":"2016-07-19T01:04:45","date_gmt":"2016-07-19T01:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcmangel.net\/?page_id=2422"},"modified":"2016-07-19T01:04:45","modified_gmt":"2016-07-19T01:04:45","slug":"grandfather-prayer-bethann-mangel-pflugeisen-1999","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/?page_id=2422","title":{"rendered":"Grandfather Prayer (Bethann Mangel Pflugeisen, 1999)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grandfather Prayer<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>by Bethann Mangel Pflugeisen<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I dream my grandfather<\/p>\n

thirty eight years before my birth,<\/p>\n

stealing<\/p>\n

through a crisp autumn Austrian night.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My Grandfather the Thief dying<\/p>\n

in North Carolina as I grow<\/p>\n

to the age he held in parting<\/p>\n

sixty years past.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He is not staying alive for me.<\/p>\n

is it the memories that keep him<\/p>\n

or does he live<\/p>\n

simply for the sake of survival?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I call at mid-morning<\/p>\n

before the prism crack sunlight to rainbows<\/p>\n

to tell My Grandfather the Thief<\/p>\n

I dreamed us back to Austria.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I do not say I<\/p>\n

dreamed to discover your<\/p>\n

pre-war photos and orphaned memories<\/p>\n

shoved into a closet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I tell my Grandfather the Thief I<\/p>\n

love him,<\/p>\n

the first of<\/p>\n

our twenty two years together.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I do not say I<\/p>\n

doubt we will speak again<\/p>\n

before you gather your memories<\/p>\n

and leave once more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I search his stroke-broken words,<\/p>\n

seeking stories,<\/p>\n

memories,<\/p>\n

guarded now for too long.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Quietly I tally \u2013<\/p>\n

My Grandfather the Thief<\/p>\n

versus<\/p>\n

History:<\/p>\n

his language \u2013 stolen.<\/p>\n

his country \u2013 stolen.<\/p>\n

his family \u2013 stolen.<\/p>\n

his name \u2013 stolen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Quietly<\/p>\n

my grandfather<\/p>\n

stole from the Reich<\/p>\n

his life:<\/p>\n

one jew.<\/p>\n

his children \u2013 three jews<\/p>\n

his grandchildren \u2013 seven jews.<\/p>\n

eleven (lives)(jews) in all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My father, grandpa\u2019s son,<\/p>\n

Says to me, rabbinical,<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Torah teaches all things<\/p>\n

live and die in cycles of four:<\/p>\n

\u201cfour seaons<\/p>\n

\u201cfour directions<\/p>\n

\u201cfour questions<\/p>\n

\u201cfour decades of exile\u201d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Four generations<\/p>\n

until the memories are gone<\/p>\n

echo sister and I. We are the third.<\/p>\n

The next will meet no survivors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My Grandfather the Thief<\/p>\n

won\u2019t inherit me his memories<\/p>\n

and the next generation<\/p>\n

will complete the forgetting.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Except that I can play thief, too,<\/p>\n

a game no longer dangerous,<\/p>\n

steal back grandpa\u2019s dream name<\/p>\n

white refugee memories<\/p>\n

shaping each scribed letter.<\/p>\n

I steal with quiet<\/p>\n

from my grandfather<\/p>\n

I thank him for our lives.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Quietly I steal<\/p>\n

for my grandfather<\/p>\n

the memories, like waking dreams<\/p>\n

disintegrating with his passing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\u2019s surname) which he changed to Mangel (his grandfather\u2019s 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 \u2013 through my family history research \u2013 was the name of her great-great-great-grandfather .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grandfather Prayer \u00a0by 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":11,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2422","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2423,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2422\/revisions\/2423"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcmangel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}