Benjamin Goluboff
Emmy Andriesse Photographs the Star
It doesn’t matter how far we’ve come
from any supposed point of origin:
a weather event on Sinai,
the first Spaniard, refugee-profiteer,
to land upon these Protestant shores.
It doesn’t matter the gain and loss,
how we penetrated the culture, or it us:
Bauhaus our temple, our prophets Freud and Marx.
Our repudiations and fallings away,
our failures of memory,
solidarities, leanings, affiliations:
none of it matters.
We still must wear the star.
About the writer:
Benjamin Goluboff teaches English at Lake Forest College. In addition to some scholarly publications, he has placed imaginative work — poetry, fiction, and essays — in many small-press journals, recently Unbroken, Bird’s Thumb, and War Literature and the Arts. He is the author of Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse, and Other Poems (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2017).
Image: Yellow Badge by Dzeni. No medium specified. No size specified. 2008. By free license. This image was contains the names of 1,692 victims of the Shoah. These names were found on the Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims. The boy in the image is taken from the famous Warsaw Ghetto photograph.
