Vergessen, going and gone, Israelien’s to be made verboten territory, shtum…though rumors passed among the least respectable and rearmost of pews have Him surfacing next in Europa, scattered reports probably dubious (whispers during the Silent Amidah, jokes told during the final recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish), Apocryphal meaning hidden in Greek though its ramifications evident in any language evidenced here, on the tips of tongues intact and attached, placing Him in Portugal at the same time as Spain, then in Paris, too, living south to the sea, on Mediterranean time: misnomers, misnomrim, this season’s Polandland has Him gone and turned, according to some, fryzer’s apprentice in this sinkhole once known as Kazimierz, though others hold by yesterday’s Zamość, or a secondhand to a onehanded cowhand at what was once Sandomierz, what a pit; with only the ignorant swearing to the city formerly known to us as Warsaw…devotees and even Casualist cartographers marking the maps they’d salvaged from burnt books, ripped from outdated encyclopedia sets still mentioning — what else — Galicia, Bukovina, Bessarabia, Carpathia, Sub-Carpathia, Sub-Sub-Carpathia, Ruthenia, the only atlas ever to mention Yehupetz…in the courtyards and converted parkinglots of their services holding up evidence of antique postcards, German pastels, Bohemian black & whites, forgeries upon expert inspection, others stamped what’d been Vilna and Kovno, Litvakworld up toward Riga to the north, Sweden then the Pole. Anybody who’d expected to make a killing at auction’s left sore, though that might not be from disappointment alone: all of the kollectible kitsch, the ephemeral paraphernalia, the swag and the junk, it disappears overnight, mandated, maybe, on orders of, perhaps, but also consciously forgotten, in a mindful attempt to displace, to revise, always rewrite. Whoever they ever are to smash the plates of In Hanna’s Kitchen (Binder’s & Sons, 0 A.I., ISBN#: 0-394-53258-9), of Israel’s Unabridged Deposition Transcripts (Loot of the Frum, 0 A.I., ISBN#: 0-671-76089-0), Introduction & Notes by Doctor Elisha Abuya & Reb Shimi Schreiben, the Nachmachen, with a new Afterword by Dr. Allen Sherdowitz PhD…how they rip off the covers of the remaining copies killing any value in resale, then torch the remaindered stock because they can, that’s that. Icons are put out on firesale, then put out to fire, too, ash and then trash. All His Signs & Wundas (S&W in Industryspeak, referring to the entire Israelien family of products) are taken down and warehoused un-cataloged, secreted in the underground vaults of the Garden with a vast trove buried up in the Bronx dugout beneath the infield of Yankels Stadium turned perfidious genizah, and the whole image fades, is effaced, thumbedaway with fists, rubbed out with knucklespit, ghostly tongued in a great if painful schmearing: of laity’s laxities into potholes, into the sewers and subway tunnels, down into the inner guts — the gutter intestinal seething with a depraved deprivation, making room for a vast gastric disburdening to empty…there, the lower home of those who are or who have willed themselves to the life of the indigestible, the rumbling fate of the unassimilatable, those with no interest in observance, any next incarnation, shirking that whole dominant paradigm shtick — not so much goyim voluntaries as rat and roachlike people plagued with huge families both immediate and extended if not by sympathy then by appetite’s ravage: they’re hauling subterranean their keepsakes and stray kinder napped from streetside, fleeing the flood of Affiliation, the threat of Metro Gestapo, word making rounds of what’s still to face, whispers of renditions and roundups, lineups, mass detentions without representation, violations no one questions of rights now left to the dogs…
