bom. she had long ago learned that the memories of men, in
whatever form, were not to be trusted, generations of men had
passed as scribes, rabbis, and storytellers and yet, bertha knew, the
real story had never been told, this was not mysterious to bertha,
since she knew that men avoided life, not respecting it, never daring
to look it squarely in the face, treasuring only their sons and their
own self-importance, this bertha might lament but she could not
change it. for those generations of scribes and rabbis and storytellers
life had been an abstract canvas full of abstract ideas—they had
obscured the actual shape of things and the actual facts of the case,
they had passed their avoidance of lines and proportions and direct
commitment on to each other over so many generations that now it
had soaked into the very marrow of their bones, and so they had invented Law and W ar and Philosophical Arguments and with all their arsenals of Culture and Learning and Civilization they had
stopped all dissent, even as their children were starving they could
ignore life and argue the philosophical ramifications of death, in
particular the men of whom bertha was thinking had worshiped
their dreadful god, Mighty Jehovah, they had argued with hard
hearts and stony arrogance His Laws to the nth degree as others who
cared only for life had washed and cooked and sewn and cleaned
and given birth and served and scrubbed and died around them, this
especially they would not look in the face.
these others, the mothers and the daughters and the mothers of
the mothers and the sisters and the aunts, had never written a word,
their arguments had no capital letters or commentaries, these others
had worked with their hands and hearts scrubbing and cooking and
enduring and though each separate life was due to them and
depended on them still they were required to be silent, not invited to
argue on the nature of existence about which they knew very much,
even as their legs were spread open in blood and pain, muscles
stretched as the head or feet came through, flesh tom from this, the
very mud of life, 8 times, 9 times, 13 times before they died, still their
views were not solicited, there the sadness was bom, over and over
again, as each new bloody head emerged and with it their insides
dislodged and gone from them and still no one asked their opinion,
this was no genteel sadness, small, pitiful, indulgent, weak, this was
a howl into the bowels of the earth, urgent, bellowing, expressed only
in the eye that cut like a knife, the mouth tangled trying to escape
the face.
this sadness grew as they saw these children flesh of their flesh live
and grow and die. this sadness grew as their children became sick,
hungry, afraid, this sadness grew during pogroms and on regular
days when there was just the family life, this sadness especially grew
as they saw their sons go off to the hard wooden benches where the
rabbis would teach them, the sons, how to read and write and
discourse on the Law and Life itself, this sadness especially grew as
