Tag Spam @ MindSay

JEWDYSSEOS: PASSING THROUGH FIRE

by

Robert Michael



The first word was as black as black wool.
 
BEGINNING
   
1938 had been a rough year for Jeniya and Aaron Kohan of Hope, Massachusetts. They sat in their Bryant Street tenement apartment by their radio as Hitler marched into Austria, seized a chunk of Czechoslovakia, destroyed almost every synagogue in Germany, sent tens of thousands of Jews to concentration camps, as the British, French, and American governments turned away, bent over, and showed the world their big fat democratic arses. In October, Orson Welles's radio broadcast convinced the Kohans that they were under Martian attack. "Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a snake," the reporter's voice came over the radio. “That face. I can hardly force myself to look at it. The eyes, black. They gleam like a serpent's. The mouth V-shaped. Saliva dripping from rimless lips that quiver and pulsate. It's raising up. Opening it's mouth. The sound. I can't bear it. Help!" This finally did it. Jeniya Yudeos Kohan felt cramps marching into her guts, seizing her body, destroying her peace of mind. An hour later, she delivered her first child, Daniel, a month early. "No wonder he always wants to climb back into me." She told people this to explain why she pushed her child away so much.

"My Uncle Max Yudeos is the king of Jewtown." That's what six-year-old Danny Kohan scrawled into his notebook before he knew that Jewtown was an insult. He sat on the peeling painted front stairs of his four-family tenement a few buildings up from a clangorous red-brick factory that stamped blue-steel plates into truck-bodies in this industrial suburb of Boston. A city Rand-McNally called Hope. A city the residents called Hopeless.
Of all members of the extended immigrant family, Danny most resembled his mother’s only brother, Max (legal name Moyshe), with his sensitive black eyes, swarthy skin, dark curly hair, gapped front teeth, and body big as a horse and a half. Like his uncle Max (then serving in the Marines in the European Theater in part because he spoke German), Danny wanted out of town. He lined up stolen pennies on the railroad tracks at the foot of Bryant Street for the spouting steam engines to flatten into new shapes. Jealous of the redwinged blackbirds that nested alongside the tracks in a ditch where puppies with bloated tummies often drifted by, Danny imagined himself soaring into the sweet air, beating his wings emblazoned by those red chevrons that look like raw wounds, his song a rusty gate. Opening. Leaving all his cares and woe behind him. Bye-bye, Hopeless.    
Danny's family lived at the outer reaches of Hope's informal Jewish ghetto. In a block of tenements housing mostly Irish and Italians, leavened with a few working-class Jewish families. His family had to stay within walking distance of the old orthodox synagogue, Beth Shalom, with its 500-family congregation. And his mother needed to stay within walking distance of her mother, the family matriarch Sarah Yudeos, who never did more than sit in her padded wooden chair, her arms rigidly crossed over her chest like a hex sign to keep out the evils of the world. It didn't work. Only her lively blue eyes and occasional Yiddish mumble convinced Danny she wasn't a Hebrew mummy. Running from Hitler, in 1933 she arrived from Poland miraculously on America’s blessed shores with nothing besides her Jewishness, her five children, and a susceptibility for polio. Three daughters obeyed the Yudeos family prescription for survival--follow Jewish custom and ritual and marry in the synagogue. But then. The fourth daughter--diminutive, dark-eyed, and buxom Jeniya--eloped with Aaron Kohan--a handsome, talented and hard-working photographer from Minnesota, no more than 5-foot 5-inches tall. And Max married Sally O'Flaherty--they both drank a lot. Jeniya and Max broke their Orthodox Jewish mother's heart and aggravated her polio. She never forgave them. They never forgave themselves.
    With Jeniya, Danny was always, to use her phrase (which she uttered with a Yiddish accent and an equally wide, embarrassed smile), up shit's creek without a paddle. By eight years' old, given his mother's emotional distancing, Danny (a singer with no mean voice), glommed onto Bunny Berrigan, who played his trumpet as though his mouthpiece was set against his heart. His line--"I'm broken-hearted, 'cause I can't get started with you"--Danny would sing repeatedly until a Jeniya slap upside his head snapped him out of it.   

LOVE IN THE PIAZZA
by
SUSAN ASHLEY MICHAEL

    An angry goddess tossed a bowl of sweets, and it landed here in the lagoon, scattering shards of crystal and candy. That's how Venice came to be.
    I liked that. The idea of smashing something old to create something new and in this case, incredible. Magical. Of all the cities in the world, it is Venice that captures every visitor's imagination, convincing each of us that spirits roam its ancient alleys, that their longings hang in the air like the lagoonal mist. Adrift in this vaporetto on the canal, I could hear echoes of their footsteps and sighs. Echoes of echoes.
    "Mar-co!" the ghosts of Venice seemed to call, and my heart reached out to them.
     "Po-lo," I answered.
    I boarded the Numero Uno, a water-bus that zigzags the Grand Canal, stopping at Ferrovia Santa Lucia, Riva di Biasio, and every station along the waterway. My heart vaulted at the marble palaces sliding by on a watery mirror of fleeting images. A waterlily, less seen than reflected. La Serenissima.
    Our clunky vaporetto slowed when a dressed-down version of the gondola crossed our path to ferry commuters from one side to the other. What the traghetto lacked in glamor it made up for in practicality. Bridges crossing the Grand Canal were few and far between and for some sixty thousand, Venice was home sweet home, where business must be conducted and groceries bought.
Poised at the stern of a traditional gondola that skimmed swift and silent beside us, a sweet-faced boatman in striped shirt and pressed pants, worked the long, single oar. I got off at the next stop, called to him, and negotiated his fee before handing him my bags. Then he helped me into his gondola, introducing himself as Angelo.
     I convinced him to take me way out into the lagoon, and when we were quite alone, I opened Bernie's luggage and, piece by piece, hurled his clothes overboard. Then I ordered Angelo to drown them.
©2008 by Susan Ashley Michael

[[edit]]=i posted loads of tags and mindsay changed it to tag spam D:
hmmmm not too long ago i had loads to say
now i dont
gnargh
i was pissed off at something
oh thats right my dream
(another reason to hate going to easts)
i had this wierd dream that easts was going to have a dance thing i was like wtf retardationess i was hunging out with randoms from athena and kale had to go somewhere so i was looking afta his phone
a random from wellington coll rung up and said "Hey kale do you want touse a whole lotta girls at the dance" and i was like wtf is your problem you dessperate ho
and hung up
the only way to stop the girls from falling for some fag was freaking bebo *sigh*
anyway on the way home i saw lottie and i was like OMG!YAY! haha (shes my friend from aus who i havent seen since begining of this year :'( )
so she told me to explain it to her on the way home in her helicopter. ok. so i did. and the next day on the news was all the footage of me explaining it on the helicopter--ummm yay? i was kinda freaked out
then i woke up and realized that sexism is a bigger problem then i'de realized.
i was listening to a song and the lyrics were a bout sodomizing random "chicks" D:<
and i thought about somethings that had happened a while ago one of my friends gave my number to his friend i didnt care but he txtd me so much i was creeped out
a couple of months later my other friend introduced me to his friend, i didnt know his friend very well i'de nevermet him in person, but he ended up telling me he liked me
WHAT A FAG! HE BARELY KNOWS ME!
obviously he was just another stupid perv
GNARGHAGNAGHANAGHRNRGARHNRGAHNRGAHRHT!
im okay now :)


i hate bebo




and people sometimes



they can suck


bye