Dream About the Vanished Jerusalem
Published in Issue #16 Translated from Russian by Yisrael Elliot Cohen subscribe to unlock the full storyIt seems that I dreamed about it when I was still in the cradle, long before I first saw it for real. Long before 1945, when it took me into its bleeding embraces that still reeked of the smoldering embers of war. Long before one could see there a burial hillock whose mud besmirched all my joys and forever stained, with a poison-yellow tint, all of my sorrows, because it was there that my mother (may her memory be blessed) found peace or perhaps did not find it.
In the course of my now already hardly short life, I have visited many cities — New York and Paris, London and Geneva, Toronto and Berlin, Turin, Prague and Warsaw. But not one of those majestic, inimitable, attractive cities ever entered my dreams.
I only dreamed about a single city in the whole world.
I dreamed about its streets and its alleys narrow like the clotheslines on which, for centuries, Jews hung out to dry their laundry that was still moist with tears that had been shed: laundry blue with the blueness of unfulfilled hopes that were daring and lofty like morning clouds, and the blueness of musings that fell like a downpour on the gentle souls of girls and boys with resounding regal names, like Judith and Ruth, Solomon and David, who played in courtyards.
I dreamed of its brick roofs along which cats scurried like angels and angels like cats.
I dreamed of its pavements where every cobblestone was like a fragment of the tablets...
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