14. No ‘new world’ for them—no, they remained
Ensconced beneath the ocean’s depths,
Unaware of passing time, sifting sediments
Of ages past, not knowing of the deluge overhead
Nor of a world where things can be erased;
They dive beneath the depths, exploring
Things cast off so long ago
By those who thought they were destroying
What they wanted none to know.

15. No, Yehudah, God does not ‘cleanse’ the world,
Nor erase his images from off the earth.

16. Things are preserved, somewhere, somehow,
And this is not disproved by your ignorance of how.

17. You strive to keep alive all pasts except your own—
You revive the dead of fiction, but not of fact;
You memorize the myths, but cast your history in the sea!

18. My slides preserved a world that could be lost,
And now those slides themselves have disappeared,
Wrenched from me by the arm of God,
Whose work of preservation I had hoped to do.

19. No, Yehudah, your God of verse might do this, but not mine—
Not the God of earth whose storehouses we can find!”

VIII.

1. And then Leah the Austro-Hungarianite spoke, saying:

2. “Please, dear grandson, hold your tongue;
Your whining makes me sick at heart!

3. Does a wise man answer with windy knowledge,
And fill his belly with the eastern wind?

4. You wail over pictures as if a city were destroyed,
Yet I ask a harder question:
Why wail over anything at all?

5. For tears are wasted, and wailing sucked away
By the screaming of the winds.

6. I wandered the world all the years of my youth—
Wandered and wandered, and found no solace in it.

7. I looked to the stars and they were denied me;
I looked to the rivers and they were sucked dry;
I traveled from a land of woods to one of iron canyons;
Cliffs of steel and iron, streets paved with broken dreams.

8. Books tormented me; words gave me no comfort;
Their letters stuck their serifs out at me
Like tongues, each speaking evil.

9. I stretched out my hands for someone to catch me
And they were grabbed and bound together,
Stitched one finger to another, callused and numbed.

10. I clawed the floor in mourning, I tore my skirt in tears,

11. And when I rose up again, I wandered off once more,
And cast my past behind me, down to the ocean floor.

12. I wandered farther, farther, farther, across mountains and valleys,
Until I found an open door and collapsed beside it.

13. Once, I wailed; long ago, I used to rail at heaven,
But there, in the wilderness, I found my last resort:
When God does not answer you, stop asking!

14. Were you the first man born?
Were you created before the hills?

15. I knew, when no more answers came,
That I should cease to ask, and so should you.”

IX.

1. To this William Landsmann turned red and roared, bellowing before her:

2. “European complacency! Words of worn-out continents!
Useless, faithless, helpless, hopeless,
Language of one happy to be buried in the earth!