Survivor :: Personal Narrative Judaism Papers

Survivor I walk. I wake. I work, when I want to. I create rasping labyrinths of letters, I word. He worded and He created what He called earth, water, and swamp. I sink as I drown in that swamp, the same s influence color as my patent green boots. I stomp on my existence. My father called them Nazi boots. He wasnt trying to be provocative thats how boots side to him. Thats how I impression at a pile of shoes, a serial number, even a bar of soap. Thats how I look at an Aleph, the first of Hebrew letters, the sound that precedes speech its arms produce rigid revealing the swastika tattooed upon my memory. When they teach us what it means to be a Jew, they coat the letters in honey, and coax us to lick it off. A sirey, suffocating sweetness clings to us as we learn to claim and later still as we try to escape who we are, but lavatoryt. My education is not tied to those books, but to my self, myself as I frame up narrow staircases of apartments atop stores atop Brooklyn cellars, numbers on my grannys arm as she washes the dishes and uses her own thumb as a pincushion. She cant distinguish pain from life. She used to urge my aunts to clasp on sewing. Arbeit Macht Frei, she said. Work frees. Iron gates and barbed wire. I stick myself with a safety pin and I bleed. My grandmother chuckles generously at my soft, suburban, spoiled hands. She would get me a Band-Aid but doesnt know where she keeps them. The closet stops the bleeding, and I get into my fathers car. Go home. sometimes I cant tell whether persecution is an interruption of granting immunity, or if freedom is just how oppression looks from the perspective of the oppressor. The massah experiences subjugation as luxury. I excise my own arms, trying to wash off the stain of white privilege, to go back the Negro slave underneath. I breathe. I bathe. I believe.Sometimes I wonder what I believe. I wonder if Im that homeless guy that I saw clutching his Bible. Inheriting the earth. Do I real believe that God rewards the faithful and punishes the blind? Does this anonymous man deserve only 17 cents in a cup, while I control merited my $38,564 a year?