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Published
in Safe Passage, White Leaf Press,
2007, ISBN
978 0 9551932 1 7
Grandfather
In 1914, at twenty-three
years old, my grandfather
decides
to join up. It might be Isaac or Morrie
from
shul who nudges my grandfather in the queue.
The
smell of tobacco and stale beer in the drafting office,
the
rain drumming outside. My grandfather is hungry
for
the gefilte fish his mother is at that minute frying.
Half
a century later his daughter, my aunty Stella,
will
fill her house with that same steamy oil-droplet smell.
You
don’t want to join up with that regiment
says
Isaac or Morrie. You want to join up as a batman
or
chef like I’m doing. My grandfather’s decision
is
forever circled in red on our family history map.
In
1918 he returns from the war, from France
and
Italy, with no more than permanent baldness
and
a hearing impairment that I might recall whenever
a
doctor asks me the reason for my own loss
of
hearing. But that battalion my grandfather
almost
joined, that tracked away from him
when
he changed his mind, are long since dead,
lie
under the charred French earth, the lot of them.
Joanna Ezekiel
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