glatstein - 1.11.26
Even though I spent a few happy hours examining the underbelly of shopping malls in Dizengoff Center, my mind was on Jacob Glatstein’s poem that Michael sent me and was burning my phone. Unlike Glatstein’s other poems, “Good night, world” is written in the kind of street Yiddish I haven’t heard for ages. It was like the gangsters whose hair my father cut in the fifties. April, 1938 – he was mad at the whole western world that had pretended to absorb Jews into the culture, devastating Jewish culture and all the while the holocaust was brewing…