students of jesus

How about something different on Saturdays? For the next few weeks I'd like to share some of my favorite poetry with you. If you're not a poetry fan, then I'll see you for the regular Tuesday/Thursday posts. And, although this first offering is pretty serious, there's no rule requiring that every poem has to be somber--beauty and whimsy belong in my collection as well.

Fania Kruger (1893-1977) was born in the Crimean peninsula, married a rabbi, and eventually settled in Witchita Falls, Texas. I stumbled across a paperback collection of her work, and bought 63 poems for 97¢. That's a parable in itself.

I hope you like it. Let me know what you think:

THE TENTH JEW

The cold was bitter and the sky was red,

Within the Polish ghetto lay the dead.

And in the corner of a blasted of wood

In wounded bleeding circle, nine men stood

Praying for the dead. When the shadows draped

The fields with gray, these hunted had escaped—

Nine only out of hundreds burned and slain,

To offer Kaddish, grief’s austere refrain.

No other left in a ghetto of red slaughter,

To join in prayer for absent son or daughter,

For mother, wife, all vanished in that day—

No tenth man for a minyan and to pray.

And though the Temple's law required that ten

Male voices must make valid grief’s amen,

Shivering, moaning there, while bare boughs swayed,

Deep in the forest, only nine men prayed:

“Yisgadal . . .” Their quivering, plaintiff chant

Rose hoarsely as they held their covenant—

Closed in a gray mist, a cowl of twilight haze,

Their faces pale as a frozen meadow glaze,

Nine voices growing fainter and fainter . . . Then

Suddenly from the gloom a sound— “Amen!”

A tenth voice, a minyan! They all turn to see:

Behold upon a starkly twisted tree

A tortured sufferer, murdered anew,

Crucified Jesus, the tenth praying Jew.