At 15–16
I am obsessed these days with relatives:
On New Year's Day Ramsey and I make a grand cleaning up,
We go all over New York to aunts and uncles, and great-aunts and great-uncles, and cousins and step-cousins,
And feel that the city is a cobweb of our Jewish tribe …
Relatives are always showing up:
And the minute they meet you they act as if they had grown up with you and had the same parents:
They suddenly emerge from Grand Rapids or St. Louis or St. Paul or Chicago or San Francisco,
Or Baltimore or Pittsburgh or Mackinaw or Portland,
And mother must have a kaffee-klatsch and there is a terrible jabber as two or three autobiographies clash together …
There is something hot about Jewish life: dark rooms full of fat motherly women:
Children that are as important as their elders and talk continuously:
Great worrying sharp-voiced conversations on sickness and money,
And the doings of this relative and that,
And all close-knit in the warm communion of eating and drinking together …
Something tragic about it all: coarse, worldly, but streaked with mystery …
A sharp pride, a tremendous pride in bright offspring …
And I, flung so early among other peoples,
Breathing a freer air, feeling apart and curiously unlike them,
Stifle and smother in the days of enforced Jewry …
How did I happen to get mixed up with this?
My mother is not that way: she is refined, quiet, aristocratic,
Cultivated and intellectual, and has taken us about among farmers and doctors and teachers and other simple people …
Am I proud, or am I different?
I go down to Baltimore to my darling Aunt,
And lo, she has married into a veritable city …
One meets that family on street-car, in shop and park,
And on every street …
I detest it all:
I am faint with the fragrance and glamour of the stir of girls in summer dresses,
And I forget everything, but a summer night in Electric Park with my Aunt and Uncle
And my heart throbbing with desire, and the long breezy ride home in the open trolley car,
My Aunt close beside me, and I loving her and loving the touch of her …
On New Year's Day Ramsey and I make a grand cleaning up,
We go all over New York to aunts and uncles, and great-aunts and great-uncles, and cousins and step-cousins,
And feel that the city is a cobweb of our Jewish tribe …
Relatives are always showing up:
And the minute they meet you they act as if they had grown up with you and had the same parents:
They suddenly emerge from Grand Rapids or St. Louis or St. Paul or Chicago or San Francisco,
Or Baltimore or Pittsburgh or Mackinaw or Portland,
And mother must have a kaffee-klatsch and there is a terrible jabber as two or three autobiographies clash together …
There is something hot about Jewish life: dark rooms full of fat motherly women:
Children that are as important as their elders and talk continuously:
Great worrying sharp-voiced conversations on sickness and money,
And the doings of this relative and that,
And all close-knit in the warm communion of eating and drinking together …
Something tragic about it all: coarse, worldly, but streaked with mystery …
A sharp pride, a tremendous pride in bright offspring …
And I, flung so early among other peoples,
Breathing a freer air, feeling apart and curiously unlike them,
Stifle and smother in the days of enforced Jewry …
How did I happen to get mixed up with this?
My mother is not that way: she is refined, quiet, aristocratic,
Cultivated and intellectual, and has taken us about among farmers and doctors and teachers and other simple people …
Am I proud, or am I different?
I go down to Baltimore to my darling Aunt,
And lo, she has married into a veritable city …
One meets that family on street-car, in shop and park,
And on every street …
I detest it all:
I am faint with the fragrance and glamour of the stir of girls in summer dresses,
And I forget everything, but a summer night in Electric Park with my Aunt and Uncle
And my heart throbbing with desire, and the long breezy ride home in the open trolley car,
My Aunt close beside me, and I loving her and loving the touch of her …
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