Issue 30: The Immigrant Issue

Fiction/Memoir
Diana Anhalt | Rita Ariyoshi | Sonia Pressman Fuentes | Leona Gustaff Lalita Noronha | Rita Plush | Frances Saunders

Poetry
Phyllis Berman | Tillie Friedenberg | Danuta Kosk-Kosicka | Irene Orgel Ronald Vossler

Photography/Memorabilia
Laurie Snyder

Cover Art
Laurie Snyder, from her work The Book of Letters, Das Buch der Briefe, a series of collages of family letters, documents and photographs

Editors for Issue 30
Mary Azrael
Rebecca Childers
Kendra Kopelke
Kathleen Fantom Shemer

Graphic Design
Mary Clark

Sarah Ruth's Story, 1939
for the refugees on the ship St. Louis who were turned away

When the century and I were young
I sat beside my father as he read
the odd calligraphy written on fragile
yellow pages of his prayer book.

His rich voice floated to the sooty
temple dome and amplified the porous
winter light. Each day my father labored
in a shop with darkened windows. At dusk

he stepped into a crowded city neighborhood
of pushcarts with challah bread, pickles
in wooden kegs, vendors' cries, and the embrace
of men who called him landsman. Every day

my mother scrubbed the halls of tall, decaying
tenements and dreamed of open fields with cows
she knew by name and chickens roosting
where they wished. We moved to a small town,

a house with room for caged tomato plants,
an arbor for grapes, some flowers for remembrance.
No one here could imagine our life in the city.
Still, on Saturdays men in prayer shawls

gathered in our living room to read
from ancient texts, but the pages loosened
from their bindings and the words
were less familiar on the tongue. At the edges

of our town I could hear the raucous songs
of bulldozers and electric saws. Workmen
hauled trees away and brought steel beams.
Today, a ship waits in our coastal waters.

Children on the deck call to us
in the old language, but they are not allowed
to come ashore. On Sabbath days the old ones
who are left still sing their songs
though few can understand.

Phyllis Berman

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Naturalization Papers

When I became a citizen
(it was in Washington)
The Daughters of the American Revolution
gave me a flag
and told me I was as American
as they were.

I took an examination.
They asked me
who becomes President
when somebody
assassinates the President,
and who becomes Vice President.
I answered every question
to their satisfaction.

Among our group
(we swore in unison)
there was a countess
who divested herself

of countless titles
one by one
like removing heavy rings
from one finger after another,
like unpeeling a kidskin glove
from one finger after another.
As a last dainty gesture
she removed the "s"
from the middle of her name
(elisabeth)
and replaced it with a "z."

Irene Orgel

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continue to Issue 29: 1998 Poetry Contest