A singular lightbulb illuminates his hands, like a ner tamid,
stitching perfection, a livelihood. The artist considers him
an obsession, a relic to carve, “The Past,” Woodcuts, 1928.
The lightbulb, like a ner tamid, illuminates the shoemaker’s hands
that continue his skill; he yearned to be like his father,
an obsession. A relic of a man, in 1928, carved by the past,
by the pogroms. The shoemaker has not seen a customer for weeks.
Trade school molded skilled boys into the image of their fathers.
Sit here on this small stool in front of the table of tools
despite the pogroms and not seeing customers for weeks.
Darkness descends before nightfall, like the black of his modest vest.
Sit here on this small stool and imagine a pious man –
shoes strewn around him on a dusty clay floor when men were eager
for his goods and company, before darkness descended like a black vest.
The shoemaker smiles with pride, knows his people well.
With shoes strewn across the dusty clay floor, the artist
steadies his camera on the shoemaker labored over leather.
He knows his people well. Before turning a man into a woodcut, the artist
directs the lens, perfects a photograph, considers the shoemaker his livelihood.
Light and Dark
Rabbi’s family, Ostrog. 1912. Photograph by Solomon Iudovin.
I can keep still, my flat hands, my eyes direct, the fringe of my blouse unyielding. I did not pay that photographer to convert me into a lamppost, radiant mother of six out-of-focus striped hems, pressed sashes, shined leather shoes. Sly grin to the side, eyes upturned, my coy daughter, my rib. White cheeks of the sun turn the female half of us upward. Sure, I will inhabit a title of attachment, of the amorphous man whose shadowed body chokes the room into submerged eyeballs of masculinity. With my sons. Their blending fog. A threat reverses the pattern of a genre portrait, blurring tradition as light escapes from my crisscrossed feet under the chair, disturbs this stiff formality, and I will not bend his will. This man’s ethnographic body of art floats in a layer of clean water, catching the darkest light in the smallest room before extermination.
JAMIE WENDT is the author of the poetry collection Fruit of the Earth, which won the 2019 National Federation of Press Women Book Award in Poetry. Her poems, essays, and book reviews have been published in various literary journals and anthologies, including Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility, Lilith, Literary Mama, the Forward, Third Wednesday, and Saranac Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska Omaha and teaches and lives in Chicago with her husband and two children. Website: https://jamiewendt.wordpress.com/
