Garden: The Compiler of the Torah's Legends Recollects
Rosenberg, Joel
Garden: The Compiler of the Torah's Legends Recollects It was a nickname we would give these scrabbled hills. "Like a garden of delights," one of my tribe would say. They loved this place with...
...Quite a shame...
...But come on, the cafe songs, those drunken cafe songs, knew more of God than I will ever know...
...Joel Rosenberg Joel Rosenberg's poems, "Rembrandt's Jews," appeared in our premier issue...
...We all grew red with shame, because we knew the name would hurt my uncle Adam...
...At the tribe-feast honoring the succession, long ago...
...It was all God-this, God-that...
...Walls of thornbush stretch across the Shechem road...
...They say there was no greater joy than water-feasts...
...Our poets, those of them gone mad on honeycomb and locusts, used to stumble down the hillsides, through parched brush, with burrs and bramble hanging from their beards, raving, shouting: "Blessed be the names of Heaven, now and evermore...
...They say he had a woman long before, before the North fell out...
...Not even when he died...
...Women sang all day and night, and brought wine up from below...
...They say one time only, really — I remember it myself...
...They were blind madmen, all of them, their women, too...
...Were I disposed to being kinder to myself, I guess I'd say something was given me to hand on clumsily to others, something I didn't understand myself...
...But, as we say, you and I should only live so long...
...It's stored away somewhere...
...Quite a bit of rubbish...
...But he never would explain...
...All I see is out my window...
...My father rode out against the Aramaean, down to take his land...
...I used to write a lot of poetry...
...In cafes the men would dance, and 'round bonfires till dawn...
...In the name of David and his son, old Peaceface, they send tax-collectors and conscription officers...
...But he almost never talked of her...
...He's the one who never married...
...Agents scour out the land for everything there is to know...
...And he, in fact, turned white, and whispered hoarsely, or he spat it out: "The snake...
...One rain brought weeks of partying, my mother used to say...
...There was a minstrel song about a woman of her name...
...Someday, maybe, they'll discover what to do with it...
...What God would ever let it get like this, you know...
...All we can hand on will be His name...
...It's playing with fire...
...They loved this place with their blood...
...When I wrote of Adam, I was thinking of my uncle Adam...
...He currently lives in the Boston area and is writing a literary study of Biblical narratives...
Vol. 1 • March 1976 • No. 8
