My fathers mother, Grand-Ma Rose

was not the famous Rose Schneiderman,

powerful, Jewish-immigrant writer

in the hurley-burley-lower-Manhattan-chaos of the early 1900’s.

No, she was merely Rose Schneider,

one of thousands of escapee’s from what was not yet Poland,

who passed away at 95 in her New Jersey nursing-home room

begging, in her senility, her two daughters and her son to speak,

“Pa Ruski! Pajolister! Pa Ruski Pajolister!”

Who, when we visited in her apartment,

just off Mashula Parkway in The Bronx,

would bake potato pancakes

(to die for!)

and “Fricken-chic-a-zee”

as we called it then, giggling together at the oven,

her arm around my waist,

while she navigated through

ice-capped-volcanic-tension

between her husband and her son,

combatants since Dads refusal of his thirteenth birthdays rite.

Yet, she is to me,

Grand Ma, still, the warm weight on the scale

balancing me between her and my mothers

derelict Irish father and cool Norwegian Mother.

Mom, the reason I’m not Jewish.

(The Shicksa not the nice Jewish girl

my shape-shifting, rebellious father

should have, maybe, married after all…)

just as the World War and Holocaust horror ended,

he in his Navy blues, she in her white Nurse garb.

But,

of all those who are my blood,

Grand Ma harvests the widest swath in my souls soil,

stretching from the Pale of Settlement,

through war-warn-Europe,

across freezing Atlantic waves

to Bleeker and Canal Streets…

In my fading , but sweet

memories of her,

enough to make me weep,

like a Shabboths rest,

soft and deep.