Survivor :: Personal Narrative Judaism Papers

Survivor I walk. I wake. I work, when I want to. I create uneven labyrinths of garner, I word. He worded and He created what He called earth, water, and swamp. I sink as I drown in that swamp, the same slick color as my patent green boots. I stomp on my existence. My father called them Nazi boots. He wasnt nerve-racking to be provocative thats how boots find to him. Thats how I look at a pile of shoes, a serial number, even a bar of soap. Thats how I look at an Aleph, the first of Hebraic letters, the sound that precedes speech its arms grow 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 sticky, suffocating nosegay clings to us as we learn to read and later still as we try to escape who we are, but cant. My education is not level(p) to those books, but to my self, myself as I march up narrow staircases of apartments atop stores atop Brooklyn cellars, numbers on my grandmothers arm as she lavees the dishes and uses her own thumb as a ensnarecushion. She cant assure pain from life. She used to urge my aunts to keep on sewing. Arbeit Macht Frei, she said. Work frees. press out 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 pose me a Band-Aid but doesnt know where she keeps them. The pressure stops the bleeding, and I get into my fathers car. Go home. Sometimes I cant tell whether persecution is an interruption of freedom, or if freedom is just how oppression looks from the stance of the oppressor. The massah experiences subjugation as luxury. I scrub my own arms, trying to wash off the stain of white privilege, to find 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 motto clutching his Bible. Inheriting the earth. Do I truly believe that God reward s the near and punishes the blind? Does this anonymous man deserve only 17 cents in a cup, while I have merited my $38,564 a twelvemonth?