Here's a little bit more about Spain.
This begins with some information about Jewish eating
customs, something I'm sure you were all dying to know tonight.
You'll hear too a little bit about the Spanish Inquisition.
And if you'll forgive me, I did have the audacity
to put in some of my own troubles in this poem.
God, forgive me.
OK.
"The generally tender cuts of meat in the back of the animal
are forbidden by Jewish law.
Such law also forbids the consumption
of the sciatic nerve giving rise to long-stewed pot
roasts of the forequarter and that other classic forcemeat,
gefilte fish.
Such humble meals as meatballs could be prepared ahead
and served cold on the Sabbath.
During the trials of the Inquisition,
the preparation of albondigas was
presented as evidence of secret Jewish practice,
the vast majority having long since fled.
Only Jews who remained in Spain and converted to Catholicism
were put to trial.
Rank justice, if you will, that the reader may be more justly
occasioned to make inquisition of the truth.
On the operating table, before the membrane between waking
and sleeping is cut by drugs, the surgeon's fine,
straight teeth appear like distant white cliffs
where I'm to be welcomed as someone
who can finally walk to safety.
Notwithstanding I'm not one of the ones
who has chosen to leave.
Nor am I willing to stay behind as conditions worsen.
Naturally, there is every difference
in the world now versus then.
With the divine intervention of science as a way out,
rather than take what is coming.
And I make no case whatever for bravery.
It actually became all about my mother and country
in the sense of what one inherits when there is
no choice what one can choose.
As a cripple for months, I became obsessed
lest I judge those who converted rather than flee.
Feeling sorry for myself, despite what I understood,
must be real torture.
The pain of persecution for no reason.
I knew my circumstance to be fundamentally different,
yet I remained woefully who I was having
no practice, no agency, no law.
I thought of truth as accessible with my nerves.
Make as speedy and Inquisition as thou canst
into thy own fate.
O, my master, I get lucky.
The white cliffs fade.
The room feels positively medieval.
Do I observe on the white bloodied apron
the butcher wipe his knife?
Determinedly, I hang from the meat hook.
Where is my mother shouting from,
telling me to bring the hose to do some watering
with everything so dry?
I hear them hosing down the charnel house.
When I awake, I walked out of the hospital.
The Prodigal Jew.
On quivering bones, it makes a ringing of bells."