WEBVTT

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It's a mean poem, I know.

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Maybe about three more.

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This one-- is it a mean poem?

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No.

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This poem is called
"Sam and Morris."

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These are more relatives.

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And in the '20s and '30s and
the '10s in the East Coast,

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there was a strong Jewish
proletarian or proletariat.

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And many of my relatives--

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because my father and
mother were the youngest

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in their immigrant families--

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were housepainters and
bakers and electricians

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and stuff like that.

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This water is good.

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I'm sorry for drinking
in front of you.

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And this is a poem about
Ezra Pound, who, as you know,

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was unkind to Jews, as well
as women, African-Americans,

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and other decent people,
or any decent people.

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The poem is called
"Sam and Morris."

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And the only thing you're
going to have to know

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is that the word yidden
is the plural of yid,

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which is Yiddish for Jew.

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And yidden means it's a plural.

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So two Jews are yidden
or three are also.

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And there's a word
here called kreplach.

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There's several jokes
about kreplach I know.

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If I had time,
I'd tell you them.

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A kreplach is merely
a little food.

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It's a dough on the
outside, either meat

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or cheese on the inside, or
something like that, hot.

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"I had two uncles who are
proletarians, and one of them

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was a housepainter.

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And one of them was a carpenter.

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They beat their wives
regularly, and they

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had 19 children between them.

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Once a month or so, my father
would go to one of their houses

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to intervene.

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And once I remember a
police car with a dog.

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When I was home on
a short furlough,

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I went with my mother and
father to a Jewish restaurant.

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And there sitting in the
back were my two uncles,

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in their 70s by then,
and eating together

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chicken, chopped liver,
God knows what, the pickles

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and coleslaw.

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There always were
pickles and coleslaw.

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And they were almost conspiring,
it seemed to me then,

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so young I was.

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And I was reading my
Ezra Pound already,

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and I was ashamed of
what he said about Jews.

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Of usury those two unshaven
yidden, one of them

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red-eyed already from whiskey.

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They knew nothing.

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They'd never heard
of Rothschild.

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Their hands were huge and stiff.

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They hardly could
eat their kreplach.

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Pound, you bastard."

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