Our flat was in the first elevator house in the Bronx, a once luxurious building that had been dissected into long narrow railroad flats. We were not well off but our refrigerator was always full of food. As a small child I would often wish that I could be allowed to sleep through the night without being constantly lifted and moved from chair to couch and on and on. My bed was in a room that opened up into the living-dining area where the many guests congregated.
My childhood was peopled with the faces and voices of the many friends and relatives who constantly visited our small apartment. There were my father's Chassidic Ultra-Orthodox family, my mother's Israeli relatives, her "landzleit" - those who had survived the concentration camps and managed to enter the US or Canada. My mother's family left their small Polish town, Ilje, for Palestine - the Land of Israel - after the First World War. My grandfather who was an active Zionist predicted that disaster was imminent for the Jews of Europe.
Our home was also frequented by the "Hebraists" working with Eliezer Ben Yehuda to create a modern spoken Hebrew, the Yiddish theatre crowd and chazanim [cantors] who were often well known opera singers.
My mother was constantly in the kitchen, preparing meals for the many guests and for the Sabbath and the sound and fragrance of fish being chopped in a great wooden bowl with a curved cleaver remains in my memory. When I was five, my father bought home matching mother-daughter aprons and a low stepladder for me to stand at the sink and help Mama - a task I loved.
Mama was a "beautiful dreamer" who, although she deeply loved my father and her children, had been deprived of her childhood dream of joining the Yiddish stage. Hers was an immortal beauty or as my father recalled their young years, "Who could look directly into her eyes?" He forever loved and saw her in that way.
Her eyes were the key - their far-away gaze set her apart, seeking a vision beyond the horizon of her everyday life. Her night-dreams were filled with herself as a bird soaring. She taught me to love and care for her beloved birds and this defined my inspiration when I began writing poetry.
Her prophetic dreams predicted who of her childhood friends had survived the concentration camps and very soon after each dream that very man or woman rang us on the phone or shouted up from the corner of Valentine and Webster Avenue, "Pnina, Pinchas ! We are here !" My father ran down to bring them up in the creaky elevator to our flat which became their second homes.
Below is one of my poems about Mama which appeared in The Deronda Review published by Esther Camaroon.
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TO MY MOTHER: Bird Yearning by Shira Twersky-Cassel
"For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee." [Isaiah 54, 7]
Above time's prism where waits the city's perfect soul
suspended and concealed,
at this moment, hearts and wing,
you and I will capture the autumn wind.
To fly with you Lark-Mother
living as a bird, wing to wing,
for one short moment to learn, to soar
to hunger for our temporal bodies.
As the light lives within the light
the soul lives in our bones and blood,
the illuminated soul sent forth
to occupy the burning flesh.
And I will call this light "To Yearn"
and your name was "Bird Yearning."
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