Liz Marlow

CHAIM RUMKOWSKI ON HIS EXODUS FROM A RUSSIAN SHTETL TO POLAND

—   Passover, 1892

Eighteen minutes

            was all it took

                        for her 

to turn her back 

on my drooping 

daisies, to stay behind— 

snow huddling in the shade,

not melting. 

A character 

            in the Haggadah, 

I wanted the sea 

            and her

legs to part, 

                        but where 

was it written that she, 

            unmoving, 

would stand

                        for some battle 

without proper weapons—she 

with wooden spoon, they 

with steel knives? They

say that matzo flour comes 

            from the blood 

of Christian children—dripping 

from our mouths, hands— 

a minyan of Saturn men 

            devouring their sons,

but our fathers already 

have sons to devour.

I, wandering in my own 

desert, know that G-d

will devour 

my firstborn son,

all my sons. I, without 

a womb to fill, 

see all air filled 

            with dust, 

a Seder plate covered 

with mourning eggs.



NOTE: Due to an imperial decree by the Governor General of Moscow on Passover Eve in 1891, all Jewish craftsmen had to leave Moscow. This caused many other Jews throughout Russia to migrate over the next few years, Chaim Rumkowski being one of them. The Nazis appointed Chaim Rumkowski the Judenrat Chairman of the Łódź, Poland Ghetto on October 13, 1939, and he held this position until the ghetto’s liquidation in August 1944. Survivors of the Łódź ghetto have documented that while he was Judenrat Chairman, even though he was impotent, he sexually assaulted women and children.

Liz Marlow's debut chapbook, They Become Stars, was the winner of the 2019 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Additionally, her poems have appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Permafrost, Minnesota Review, Tikkun, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Western Michigan University and MBA from the University of Memphis. Currently, she lives in Memphis, Tennessee with her husband and two children. 

Please visit her at: http://www.lizmarlow.com