vimeswillgospare:

It’s 1944. My grandmother is a short women with dark hair and a big nose. She works as a cook in an inn somewhere deep in the Third Reich. She tells the innkeeper the little girl who helps in the kitchen is her daughter. In the dining room men with red armbands drink to the war, calling the little girl to bring them more beer. 

Its 2004. I read a storybook about the Golem of Prague in the public library. I wonder what words could have the power to make clay come alive, to make a shield that can move on its own. That week I notice for the first time the security guards outside my synagogue. 

its 1961. My father is thirteen years old, an adult of the community now, so when they come down the Jewish street again with bricks and torches he helps my grandfather sweep up the broken glass. 

It’s 1941. Two boys from an immigrant neighborhood get their art published and spread to the whole country. It shows a man wearing red white and blue, punching the leader of a country we were not at war with in the face. They get threats. The Golem they’ve made isn’t enough to protect their families, dying across the sea. Captain America is only made out of words.

It’s 2016. I am drinking with people I suppose are my friends. One draws a swastika on my arm. He apologizes almost immediately but my head is full of the sound of breaking glass. There is no holy word in my skull to give me strength. 

It’s 1944. My grandmother and the girl are arrested. The officer who turned them in asks that they be sent to a labour camp together, not to the death camps. Every Nazi had one good Jew. 

Its 2011 and my english class is reading ‘A Diary of Anne Frank’. A classmate tells me America saved the Jews. I tell him my grandfather fought in the war, I tell him about the Warsaw Uprising, the resistance in Vichy France, I tell him that the United States sent children back to Germany to die. He shrugs. “Jews can’t protect themselves.” I think about Golems again.

It’s 1945. My aunt is dead. My aunt was not the little girl with my grandmother. The little girl lived to her nineties. My aunt was four. My grandmother could not protect her daughter but she could try to protect this one life. But my grandmother was not a golem. Any holy words in her head were wiped away by the time the camp gates opened. 

It’s 2016 and Captain America has been declared a Nazi by the company founded on an image of Adolf Hitler being punched in the face. I think about the Golem of Prague. In the stories after the worst of the pogroms ended the rabbis wiped the holy words off his forehead, took the scroll out of his mouth and put him to sleep wrapped in knowledge and the words of G-d. I wonder if after having the power inside of him, that clay vessel can ever again just be clay.