Parable of the Jew without a Name

^{“With our despised immigrant clothing, we shed also our impossible Hebrew names.” —Mary Antin, The Promised Land  (1912)}

My great-uncle Vincent, son of the Milk Street tailor, 
threw some fairy dust into the air and changed, 
making it easy for me to go to the prom, 
to grow up in Indiana and bite my tongue 
when a hick would cuss at the bastard who tried 
to Jew me down on the price for home-grown pot. 
Like wool pants for blue jeans, Moshe, Shmuel and Lazar 
traded in their names, and in exchange were changed 
from cabbage-eaters into Americans, and why not? 
“I never was a pumpkin!,” cries the carriage. 
“I never was a pauper!,” shouts the prince.
In this fairy tale all the steins turn into stones, straw turns 
to gold, stars warp into crosses, and the pauper trades up 
and leaves the trades to the star-crossed Jews. 

I’m a lousy Jew, ignorant of nearly everything 
except that in another time the Klan would lynch me, 
the Nazis flay me into yellow lampshades. 
My white hide hides me, my baseball cap keeps greasy ash 
out of my hair, and I’m glad for my nice name. 
Who needs a life so grim? In the shtetl, the old Jews 
would change their names so the Angel of Death 
flying on black crape wings above the town, 
fatal list in hand, would pass over them
—but not the ones who stayed behind 
and kept their names, the Adelsteins, Eisensteins 
or the one I’ll never know, some cousin twice removed 
born in Poland, some Maurice Bernstein. No way to gather 
smoke out of the sky and give him flesh again. 

I imagine him, with eyes like mine, intent 
and studious, staring at the rusted cattle-car wall 
in the rattling stink of packed bodies, trying not to breathe. 
He’ll get that wish soon enough. 
Slender, bookish children aren’t good workers 
and it’s too much trouble to take away their names 
and write numbers in their skin. 
They’re gassed like fleas. 
I’m a lousy Jew, but I’d like to disturb the grass, 
unearth him from the crowded grave, and let his damp fingers 
write this story, while his eyes like clouded marble roll. 
I’d like to roll the story back to the dead boy 
swaying in the train, to see him there imagining the sky 
he hasn’t seen for days, the white winter sky, like a page 
he could write on again and again, practicing his name.