Family History
He came from Odessa.
I remember his glass eye
and someone said
he was a horse thief or he left
because the Russians were drafting men
into the Czar’s army and only a fool
would stay and mom said he was a real
wheeler-dealer and I was named after his wife,
my grandmother that I never knew,
Anna, gave me her Hebrew name Chana with that
guttural beginning sound that has no place
in English—and no one looked
back to that shtetl life in Europe.
They shed that old world like my mother
who changed her name from Friedela to Frances,
ate hot dogs on the street and Chinese food
and they gave me a real American name of Aileen
and though I asked about Anna, my father
never said much, just she was pregnant or sick
all the time and my no-good grandfather
sent her to die with her Philly family and farmed
his seven kids out, some to relatives and others
to the orphanage and Uncle Lou rode the rails
to California while dad played a lot of hooky
and I don’t know how grandpa lost his eye
but the last time me and my kid brother
went to his apartment, his third wife gave us
hard candies stuck to shiny paper wrappers
and we spit them in our hands and hid them
in our pockets and when that old man
fixed his one brown-grey eye on me
and started talking trash about my father,
I grabbed my brother’s hand and said, c’mon,
we’re not coming here again.
Aileen Bassis is a visual artist and poet in New York City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. She was awarded two artist residencies in poetry to the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart prizes and two poems appear in anthologies on the subject of migration. Her journal publications include B o d y Literature, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal, Canary, The Pinch Journal and Prelude.
