How I Became a Zionist Without Really Trying

Born on the wrong side of the Jewish blanket,
all I knew of Israel growing up was not the Exodus
but my crush, on fellow half-Jew Paul Newman
as he played a full one in the movie.

My uncles were anti-Zionist Communists,
my grandparents supporters of Birobidzhan,
the Soviet version of a Jewish homeland.
My father played violin at their parties.

I fell in love with a dual-national Jew from Detroit
and then with his nine-year-old Israeli son.
Terrorists attacked schools near the kid’s,
and he told me he felt like a target.

During the Gulf War, the kid put on a mask
and, surprise, my husband was called up,
ordered by the IDF to report to Fort Dix
with his reserve unit, all old men over 40.

Later the kid learned how to drive a tank,
got sent to Lebanon. In the West Bank, he checked
IDs, told me how easy it was to slip
on a mask of power in that thankless job.

My husband and I were on treadmills, watching tv,
when Rabin got shot. My beloved froze, almost fell.
Fast forward to October 7th. For failure to denounce
Israel’s response, I became a Zionist to anti-Zionist pals.

Now I felt like a target myself. Short on ideology,
I was long on lived experience. Love and history
met, as I double-checked the box for chance,
wept like a Jew by the rivers of New York.

*

Long Ago in the Bay Area

I never knew our gardener’s name
and he didn’t speak as he worked
miracles with the rosebushes.
Our last backyard had been ok,
but this one was heaven,
with a flagstone patio just outside
our backdoor, and two more levels,
up small flights of flagstone stairs.
Next came the garden, and on top,
a tall flagstone barbecue. We ate
our charcoal burgers at a redwood
table, sat on redwood benches, drank
red wine from Napa. Two first-generation
Americans, a Pole and a Jew,
my parents, had made it in California.

Our gardener came once a week.
I didn’t know where he lived, or
that, before I was born, he’d been forced
to live in hell. It wasn’t until college
in Berkeley that I happened upon the truth.
Sorting through boxes of paper files
and photos, randomly stored on a shelf
in the library where I worked, I understood—
there had been an internment—
and why, when the cute Japanese
guy from Oakland who was dating
my Jewish roommate from L.A.,
mentioned he’d been born in Alabama,
and I’d asked in surprise, How did that
happen?—he didn’t answer.

*

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including ONE ART, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Pedestal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in the spring. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, with whom she works in a company to slow the rate of global warming.