Red Cavalry

Pashka’s hatred reached me through woods and rivers

And I—barely able to contain the tempests of my imagination inside my ancient body—I received my brother’s final breath

and the margins of communist leaflets were crammed with the crooked lines of Ancient Hebrew verse.

And monstrous Russia, as improbable as a flock of clothing lice, went stamping in bast shoes along both sides of the carriages

In his short Red life, Comrade Kustov worried no end about treason, and there it is, winking at us from the window, there it is, sneering at the crude proletariat, but comrades, the proletariat himself knows he’s crude, and it pains us, our soul burns and rends with fire the prison of our body and the jail of our hateful ribs…

we just cried in our hospital gowns out in the square amid the free population, Jews by nationality

Jew’s guilty in everyone’s eyes,” he said, “yourn and ourn. There’ll be mighty few of ’em left after the war. How many Jews are there in the world, anyway?”

We retreated, incredulous, in the face of horror; horror overtook us and probed our hearts with dead fingers. I saw that the man in the orange kontusz was being pursued by hatred and overtaken by the chase. He had bent his arm to ward off an impending blow, and blood spilt from the arm in a purple current. The little Cossack standing next to me cried out and, lowering his head, ran off, though there was nothing to run from, because the figure in the niche was merely Jesus Christ—the most extraordinary image of God that I have ever seen in my life

Driven mad by the memory of my desire, the memory of Apolek, I didn’t notice the traces of destruction in the church, or they seemed insignificant to me.

sovereign silence ascended her shtetl throne