It's a mean poem, I know.
Maybe about three more.
This one-- is it a mean poem?
No.
This poem is called "Sam and Morris."
These are more relatives.
And in the '20s and '30s and the '10s in the East Coast,
there was a strong Jewish proletarian or proletariat.
And many of my relatives--
because my father and mother were the youngest
in their immigrant families--
were housepainters and bakers and electricians
and stuff like that.
This water is good.
I'm sorry for drinking in front of you.
And this is a poem about Ezra Pound, who, as you know,
was unkind to Jews, as well as women, African-Americans,
and other decent people, or any decent people.
The poem is called "Sam and Morris."
And the only thing you're going to have to know
is that the word yidden is the plural of yid,
which is Yiddish for Jew.
And yidden means it's a plural.
So two Jews are yidden or three are also.
And there's a word here called kreplach.
There's several jokes about kreplach I know.
If I had time, I'd tell you them.
A kreplach is merely a little food.
It's a dough on the outside, either meat
or cheese on the inside, or something like that, hot.
"I had two uncles who are proletarians, and one of them
was a housepainter.
And one of them was a carpenter.
They beat their wives regularly, and they
had 19 children between them.
Once a month or so, my father would go to one of their houses
to intervene.
And once I remember a police car with a dog.
When I was home on a short furlough,
I went with my mother and father to a Jewish restaurant.
And there sitting in the back were my two uncles,
in their 70s by then, and eating together
chicken, chopped liver, God knows what, the pickles
and coleslaw.
There always were pickles and coleslaw.
And they were almost conspiring, it seemed to me then,
so young I was.
And I was reading my Ezra Pound already,
and I was ashamed of what he said about Jews.
Of usury those two unshaven yidden, one of them
red-eyed already from whiskey.
They knew nothing.
They'd never heard of Rothschild.
Their hands were huge and stiff.
They hardly could eat their kreplach.
Pound, you bastard."