What moved my father, I think,
was discomfort.
In 1961
he broke down hard
Outside his father’s home on Marchettigasse
when he had to learn Vienna again.
Having left his parents at the Bahnhof 1939
Never to see them or his sister again
Haunting him to that day.
Painful, he said.
Or perhaps he did not say it.
Perhaps I only learned
to hear the word
inside his silence.
Vienna remained behind—
the streets, the language, the Kultur,
the rooms whose doors
had closed.
But something else remained:
the Ostjuden- (פֿאַרכנאָקט),
After the First World War
they had poured into Vienna
from Galicia, Bukovina,
places farther east—
men in black coats,
beards, payot,
strange vowels,
stranger gestures,
carrying into elegant Vienna
the shtetl
Vienna wished to forget.
Maybe more subtle, his parents, der Oberlander yid
A need to blend without compromising values
Inside the home not on the streets of Europe.
Hitler proved
we were all Jews.
It did not matter
how carefully one spoke Oesterreicher German,
how well one knew Goethe, Lessing or Schiller,
how straight the tie,
how polished the shoes.
Still—
my father had learned
the distinctions.
Them.
Us.
The embarrassing (פֿאַרכנאָקט),
from the East.
The Jew who was
too Jewish.
I came to America
and forgot these distinctions
Its multiculturalism was too tolerant too soft on me,
Baseball cap.
Soft shirt.
The anonymous uniform
of belonging.
And now
I have come back.
Vienna again.
And again
there is discomfort.
Only now it is mine.
On these same streets
I see them:
black hats,
black coats,
beards,
payot,
children moving beside them,
families carrying
some stubborn fragment
of Galicia
through the twenty-first century.
And something in me recoils.
Something inherited.
A reflex whose origin
I know too well.
My father’s discomfort
has survived my father.
It crossed the Atlantic.
Changed clothes.
And waited.
Until Vienna
called it home.
I look at them
and suddenly wonder:
Who is the Ostjude now?
The man in the black coat?
My father
trying desperately
not to be him?
Or me—
standing on a Viennese street,
a generation later,
still deciding
which Jew
I am willing
to recognize
as myself.
