The Conductor from Zion Square
by Maxim D. Shrayer
A sixty-year-old smiling public man
Yeats
In the earthly city of Jerusalem I like to stay
just a couple of blocks from Kikar HaMusica
in Yo’el Moshe Salomon Street, a pathway
named after the founder of three Israeli towns
and a Hebrew newspaper, a descendant
of a messenger of the venerable Vilna Gaon,
who in the 1800s left Lithuania for the Holy Land,
and was, perhaps, my distant relative, or rather
kinsman on the side of my father’s grandfather
Rabbi Chaim-Wolf, of blessed memory, who was
peacefully murdered in the early days of the war.
Orchestras played outside my hotel at night and
I listened to the music Jews couldn’t leave in Europe,
I felt sheltered by the might of the Iron Dome
but also the roof of particolored umbrellas that
hang over the street—once the prey of tourist
photos and travel agents’ brochures, now the sky
of our small warring country. I looked up and cried
for all my cousins-in-arms but also for myself. Mostly
tears of joy and comfort. Music didn’t end suddenly,
it flowed up toward Jaffa Street and I felt someone
or something carry me, a Jewish feather, to Kikar Tsiyon.
Next morning, as I waited for my muse in uniform, I got
to observe a troop of teenage boys in woven kippot,
black and white Jews who danced in synch and looked
like pale versions of kids from an urban ghetto, vestiges
of another world, performing in support of hostages,
while girls in long skits collected donations. Jerusalemites
stood and watched, tired of having to care, unfree to let
their war fatigue spoil the mood of unity. It was then,
weaving my way through a maze of men and women
toward the imaginary proscenium that separated
the dancers from the dance, I saw a vision of the past.
Or was it a vision of the future? I still don’t know.
I can only tell you what it looked like: Head to toe,
hat to shoes, spectacles to trousers, above and below,
black kippa, black kapote, black gartel—meant to separate
heart from sexual organs—it was all there to reincarnate
what I thought my Litvak ancestors had left behind.
He was neither tall nor short, neither skinny nor rotund,
both redhead and whitehead, eyes both blue and hazel,
tousled hair, unevenly clipped beard, blackened fingers,
hands in flight, conducting the performance of the universe.
Who was he, a local shtetl fool or G-d to all his Jews?
You can read Co-Editor John Morris’s review of Kinship, Maxim Shrayer's new collection of poetry, in our current Autumn 2024 issue.
Maxim D. Shrayer, a Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College and a bilingual writer, has authored and edited almost thirty books of nonfiction, criticism, fiction, poetry, and translations. Shrayer’s newest book is Kinship, a collection of poetry.
