All Over the Place: US Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds

For Yom HaShoah—
Holocaust 

Remembrance Day

By Michael H. Brownstein

The day the commandant of the Nazi POW camp called us outside,

he came to our commanding officer and told him to separate the Jews from the others.

Our Christian leader said in a voice steadfast and perfect so we could hear:

We are all Jews here. Everyone step forward.

The Commandant put a gun to his head and demanded: Separate the Jews.

He answered: Sorry, we are all Jews here. See? My men stand with me.

The Nazi threatened to blow his head away if he didn’t do as he said.

I am a Jew. Jews are not afraid of death. Jews are not cowards.

The only cowards present today are those who obey orders without thought or restraint.

The Nazi’s face bubbled over, his lips quivered, his eyes lost control of their sightline.

Then he placed his sidearm in his holster much too hard, turned and told his soldiers:

Get into your vehicles. We are abandoning this camp. Let the Jews starve.

It’s been many years now, I still remember how I stood for something moral and great.

Many times I met with frustration, conflict and life-threatening circumstances.

I would recall his words. Jews are not afraid of death. Jews are not cowards.

A great peace would fall over me. I knew he had said the only truth I needed to learn.

Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

At a beginning

An unlikely exemplar for a commencement address

By Kyle Garza

[Editor’s Note: Kyle is a past columnist here, and we are grateful that he has shared this witty, serious piece of writing with us. It is the text of a speech he delivered last June at the commencement of the graduating class of Calvary Christian School, Oxnard, California.]

Thank you kindly, Dan, for those words that I may or may not have written myself. I can proudly attest to the truth of one of those points: today actually does mark the 1,095th day, or 3-year-anniversary, of my marriage to McKenzie, which means we’ve outlasted the average Hollywood marriage span by about three years now.

Sunday Review: Woman in Gold

The past revisited and restored?

By Jonathan Price

The 2015 film Woman in Gold (directed by Simon Curtis) is based on a true story and retells it with some detail, intelligence, and passion. At the center of the story is an actual portrait by an Austrian painter of the early twentieth century, Gustav Klimt, of a friend and patron, Adele Bloch-Bauer, surrounded by ornamentation in shimmering gold.