Life Wolf
            for Chaim Zev, my newly discovered, long dead Great Grandfather
by Lana Hechtman Ayers

i.
I never imagined you, great grandfather, not once in over five decades.
You one of the many amorphous beings called Jews, called unsanctioned,
called dirty, swept away in the great Nazi cleanse of the Holocaust.
You, without a face, without a name, without a town, without a grave.
Now, thanks to cousins’ intense search, your name chimes in my ears,
an ancestral bell: Chaim Zev. Hebrew, meaning life wolf, and tears come
because you are not 6 million–you are the one who is mine, my own kin.
I am blood of your blood, bone of your bone, skin of your skin.

ii.
Chaim Zev, in your 75th year, hair silver as a wolf, beard flowing long
over your chest, back stooped from years of labor, hand knuckling around
a cane, unsteady down the gravel lanes of tiny Opatów, Poland, a river
flowing through the village where you fished to feed my grampa, his brother
and sister, my great grandmother, all who I never knew existed.
Your voice is raspy in my imagination, comes forward with a cough.
“Kindele,” you say. I see you great grandfather, face pale as milk and lined
as the riverbed, eyes that are flowing water–you are making your way
toward me and I make my way towards you.

iii.
Life Wolf, great grandpa, I embrace the possibility of you, your black
coat’s scent of tobacco, road dust, camphor, your breath rank with the fish
you caught yourself–honest, safe, alive’your warm breath easy and
exhaled into a sunny day like so many before.

But your last breath–was it by rifle, a shovel to the back of the skull?
Was it the long cattle car ride to slow extinction?
Your breath has been here nearly two centuries, dissipated over the earth.
Breath that has been my sky, though I often forgot to look up for it,
forgot that your breath has nested all this time in my own chest,
filtered through my heart.

iv.
Chaim Zev, I see your face in the broken mirror of time, and my face
gazes back at you is lit by your eyes, blue as the Opatów river.
A blue even the injustices of history could not extinguish.

v.
Dear great grandfather, I sit across the festive Chanukah table
from you as you bless the matzah, bless the bitters, and the wine,
bless all in attendance, bless G-d, bless even the impossible years
and distance across which we have traveled to be together in this
celebration of the miracle of light.

The white tablecloth is frayed as your fingers tap out the blessing
and you sing in Hebrew, your accent foreign in my ears but the melody
of your voice is the rhythm of my life, for which I am ever grateful.



 

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