The following is an excerpt from Fragments, the new magazine from Emor.
by Anna Wrobel
You took me to the old foundry and
together we discovered America
You took me to the bridge over time where
we mourned the sad and dying Passaic
No river like no person should
be tortured and abandoned
We rejected the Kingdom of Heaven
You said there was no heaven
I said it was no kingdom
And we kissed deep in the
democratic utopia of our dreams
in the clean and pristine
fields of our yearning
Anna Wrobel (she/her), daughter of postwar refugees, is an American historian, teacher, poet and Holocaust Studies educator whose poems and essays appear in journals including Lilith and Jewish Currents. Anna’s poetry collections are Marengo Street (2012) and The Arrangement of Things (2018). She’s presented at the Holocaust Human Rights Center of UMaine-Augusta, Maine State Museum, Puffin Foundation, Jewish Community Alliance, Maine Conference for Jewish Life, Maine Jewish Museum, University of Maine’s OLLI Sage Lectures series. Shoah poems from her manuscript, Sparrow Feathers: Second Generation / First Person, are explored by students here and abroad. Anna presents history and poetry in high school, college and adult settings. She once studied theater, lived as a farmer-artisan, was foreman on a construction site, and for over a decade was president of her local teachers’ union. Anna’s daughter was born on a Galilee kibbutz and her son in the mountains of Maine.
