VII
For
years I struggled with you:
your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty which came
inextricable from your love. For years all arguments I carried on in my
head were with you. I saw myself, the eldest daughter raised as a son,
taught to study but not to pray, taught to hold reading and writing
sacred: the eldest daughter in a house with no son, she who must overthrow
the father, take what he taught her and use it against him. All this in a
castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny
they will always be aliens.
After your death I met you again as the face of patriarchy, could name at
last precisely the principle you embodied, there was an ideology at last
which let me dispose of you, identify the suffering you caused, hate you
righteously as part of a system, the kingdom of the fathers. I saw the
power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see
beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you
had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me. It is only,
under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and
deny no part of my own.
In Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems (1986)
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