“We Should Make a Documentary About Circles.” (After Terrance Hayes’s “We Should Make a Documentary about Spades”)

Ian Kohn

And this is all we need before our shoot:
A pen, some paper, sprawling migrant fleets
Which disembarked from southernmost Ukraine;
The passengers each arrive in New York,
Becoming hands to man the factories
Or threading looms in dingy sweatshop mills
A fair substitute for deliverance,
But still in stark and plainly dressed galut.
What worth is geulah to a fair wage,
A ladder up from urban peasantry?

So show America’s conveniences
They’ll recline into for a century.
Gaze upon the bareheaded juveniles
With ruddy cheeks and red persuasion,
The vanguard of the General Labor Bund.
Then turn your gaze to those who kept Torah,
Their children donning Borsalino hats.
And turn again to ba’alei teshuvah,
Whose trembling knees are cured with bitachon.

Recall the etymology of kike,
Derived from Yiddish kaykel, or “circle”—
The shape our forebears signed papers with
At Ellis Island, in lieu of an X,
Which evokes a cross they don’t deem holy,
To say naught of their illiteracy
In our exalted Roman alphabet.
Then note the circle we built for ourselves,
Preserving tautly tied bonds between us.

The nations commend our architecture,
As well as the narrow space between each of us.
Yet their resentment washes over praise.
Alas, no new case for our dignity
Will crush interminable bigotry.

Emancipation happened so far back
That you can make up damn near anything
To argue we pull the whole world’s strings.
When Mayer Amschel became his own boss,
And then left the Judengasse in haste,
A false quote of his was left to cite:
“If I control its currency’s supply,
I care not who writes a country’s laws.”
Don’t spend the effort answering this quote
So early on into our humble film.

Instead, begin it on Shabbat in shul,
When men sing and dance to Lekhah Dodi
Around the podium, for the night’s bride.
She then takes each man there as her groom:
The sinful and tzaddikim equally,
And those in between—the majority.
They surround the amud, then circle it,
A microcosm of the larger one,
Which we assure ourselves will never break.
It’s been intact for two millennia.

Indeed. Allow me one note on that, though.
The circle’s exit door oft is ajar;
We plant one foot outside it—integrate.
Our Nobel Prizes do not win themselves.
And yet the nations will not reckon us:
Suppressing fight or flight, we carry on;
As much as they revile and attack us,
The circle stays intact, maintaining calm.
Some in the circle’s center may soon move
To Israel, in light of current times;
They therefore widen the diameter,
Allowing me more space to drift within.
When I’ve come of age, I’ll catch up with them.

Yet still, we can’t discount the open door,
Enticing us to turn and leave for good.
Assimilation screams from yards away,                     
Or perhaps a few feet beyond the porch.                 
It rings in your ears, akin to the shame
That you feel secondhand as you behold
A couple spontaneously divorce.
If we depict a Jew marrying out,
It must provoke our grimmest pangs of guilt.
Recall Moshe as he ground up the calf,
Its dust dissolved and forced into our mouths—
Or perhaps a Shoah-surviving man
Conveying inner demons to his son
At the sharp tip of a leather belt.
Why must he store it on a closet hook,
Where it crudely forms a circle as it hangs?

But please, leave me out of the brunt of it.
I get the stakes for continuity,
So don’t put undue pressure on me too.
I already strived not to marry out.
This circle will not force me out its door.
Nor will I choose to stride across its fringe,
As if I might as well not be inside.
How can I forego this circle’s warmth,
Its insularity that, nonetheless,
Spans wherever in the world we go?

And yet the circle will no doubt compress
And shift to Israel, as is presaged.
Our circle is a migdal, or mitzpeh.
The nations wouldn’t dare to mount a raid,         
Nor breach our walls, all hardened by our past.
We clench our fists in daily consciousness
Of how we must maintain eternal wrath.

But let us not forget to teach ourselves               
Our means of buttressing the circle’s walls.          
To do so calls for some geometry.
Circumference: 3.14… and so on,
A 6.28 radius—six days
To create the world, one day of Shabbat,
6,000 years for us to be redeemed,                          
A people bound together by design,
Some on the fringe and others at the core,
While some up and leave, never to return,
And G-d agrees to keep this status quo
Until its obsolescence is made clear.