WHY MY FATHER BECAME A RABBI
He was stationed in North Africa,
fasting at the makeshift synagogue on Yom Kippur,
when he learned he was scheduled for a mission.
Boarding his B-25, he asked Tail Gunner McGuire
for a cup of black coffee. The captain protested,
“Don’t break your fast now. Bad luck for us all.”
It was a low-flying mission to bomb German troops.
“That low, they can shoot you down with a rifle,” he used to add.
My father prayed that he not be off-target,
lest he hit the American troops on the other side of the line.
When the photographs came back,
he learned that every bomb had been true.
And that’s why he became a rabbi. 
MY FATHER’S BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY
One morning in 2013, Dad phones me from
his gated retirement community in Florida
to share memories of his years as a Freedom Rider
because he is flying to Chicago to be honored
with other surviving Freedom Riders for Oprah’s last show.
He remembers how they would deliberately cross state lines
so their lawyers could make a federal case that
the segregated bus terminals were violating federal law.
He remembers hate stares, late night strategy meetings
after speaking at churches to make sure the local people
followed through to keep the town desegregated.
He remembers speaking to packed houses
that they were just as good as whites, maybe better;
their wives just as good as his, maybe better;
their lives just as valuable as his, maybe better.
He describes the way they’d join in as he spoke;
how it took getting used to, but after a while,
it was like responsive reading in shul. Only unscripted.
When they spoke in Birmingham, the adoring children
asked the Freedom Riders to inscribe their copybooks
with words they had said on the pulpit.
He remembers how reverently the little girls
placed the copybooks in their cubbies for safe keeping.
On September 15, 1963, the church was bombed,
killing four of the girls whose books he’d signed.
Dad saw on Cronkite the cherished copybooks,
charred from bombs and soaked from hoses.
He said those pages held the holiest words he’d ever written.
Those words are still burning in his heart.
Those words are still burning in my heart.
YOU GOTTA LEARN TO LET THINGS GO
A family trip to the Lower East Side for kosher Chinese food.
A drunk is talking to himself on the street.
Dad comments, “He’s arguing with his boss 30 years ago—
‘I was right. I was right!’ —
See, son, gotta learn to let things go.”
A squeegee man cleans our windshield.
Dad gives him quarters with a dignified “thank you.”
A Florida filling station fifty years later.
A beggar approaches, “Can you help me out?”
Dad says, “Get a job.” We drive away.
Dad asks, “Y’think I was too hard on him?”
But here’s what makes this about me at 78 .
More than his shift to the right toward the end of his life:
I won’t let myself remember what I answered.
OUR FATHER’S PTSD
Only one of our father’s fifty-four missions
caused him guilty dreams all his life.
He was tasked with bombing a bridge in Italy
but, when he reached the target, saw
a white cross on a building near the bridge.
He hesitated. It’s a hospital!
By the time he realized it was a Nazi trick,
he had kicked out the bombs too late.
My sister and I always wondered
why, of his fifty-four bombing runs,
this one gave him guilty dreams.
So, after his ninety-fifth birthday party,
we asked him privately in his study.
He answered with a forced patience
that made us eleven years old:
“How many GIs had to die
taking that bridge that I could’ve—
should’ve—wiped out with one click—
if I hadn’t been so damn indecisive
or thought for a few impudent seconds
that I knew better than my superiors?”
“HOME OF THE BRAVE”
Two months after he died I remember
when he took me to “Home of the Brave,” and
what he’d learned overseas about survival guilt.
It doesn’t mean you feel guilty about surviving;
it means you feel guilty feeling happy about surviving.
You were praying it wouldn’t be you and it wasn’t.
The guilt comes from that part of your baby brain
Celebrating that it got God to kill your buddy instead of you.
What kind of a friend are you?
You must be punished.” That’s what paralyzed
the soldier in the film. I was no more than 12.
He must have been so lonely.
SPINNING RED HORSE - SOOS ADOM HA-MISTOVAYV
For Grades 5 and 6 Dad would drive me
to my Hebrew day school in the Bronx.
Usually I’d listen to Alan Freed, or call out
the year, make, and model of cars.
But sometimes he’d teach me Hebrew
by making up a phrase for me to repeat
about what we saw on the road.
After a while the sites became our
private landmarks; the phrases,
mantras of those beautiful years.
The spinning red horse at the gas station
right off the Mosholu Parkway:
Soos Adom ha-mistovayv.
Reciting it now feels like a prayer.
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Zev Shanken has been literary editor of Response, A contemporary Jewish Review. His poems appear in Richard Light’s Jewish Rites of Death, Red Wheel Barrow, Brevitas Festival, and others. With Richard Siegel he developed How to be a Perfect Stranger: a Basic Guide to Religious Etiquette for Jewish Lights. A retired college and high school English teacher, Mr. Shanken lives in Teaneck, NJ with his wife, a retired clinical psychologist.
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