Fifteen years after the war:
Dad sends my mother’s cousin packing back to Germany
for trying to teach three-year-old me to say Heil Hitler,
because screw that noise,
they surrendered and he came home alive.
Nine years later:
We visit Germany and in a packed Bavarian biergarten
some drunk too young to have lived through it asks Dad
who he thinks got to Berlin first — the Americans or the Russians?
when a gnarled cane slams onto a wooden table,
shaking dishes and silencing the room,
and this bearded geezer
who must have lived through both world wars
glares at the younger man and declares:
There will be no talk of the war.
Nine years after that:
My friends and I are driving past a park in Englewood, New Jersey, when
we spot some Aryan types in
brown shirts, swastika armbands, and jackboots so
I lean halfway out the passenger window screaming
fuck off, the paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch only had one ball,
go find a bunker somewhere and follow his final example
when the car jerks to a halt and
two cops pull me though the window and
frisk me against a storefront and
a third cop takes me aside and asks if I’m Jewish so
I say You have to be Jewish to hate Nazis? and
he says They’re not real Nazis — it’s a Woody Allen movie and
I say I love Woody Allen and
he says shut up and get out of town; now
Forty-seven years later:
Take that goddamn mask off your face and
take your goddamn hands off my neighbor.
Bill Merklee 