NPM 7/30: Oral History

Oral History

My grandfather says last Saturday
the grandson of my buddy Yossi was out
bar-hopping among the crowded cobbled streets
of Binyamin Estate, nearby my house in Tel Aviv’s
off-hours shook. There was still ripe fruit
in the ruts between the cobblestones. Mashed up.
The Simoom blowing heat and dust up
from the Pyramids. There were a lot of hipsters out,
cheap, lipstick colored sunglasses, the booths that sell
smokes, coke and stolen telephones were hopping.
In the alley where the kids piss out their beers,
the boy, salt of the earth, Yossileh’s spitting image
spots two Russians trying to rape a girl, one with
his pants around his knees. So the grandson
(big around the shoulders) runs in there and starts
to tussle, tosses one off her and starts to lick the other
with his fists, looks down and there’s a knife
into his side. The two punks run, but Yossi’s pride
and joy is fine, they missed all of his organs.

That kid’s the only one turned out like Yossi.
During the mandate, a guy from Bet Shean,
which was an Arab village then (before the war),
broke into his Kibbutz and raped a girl. Yossi,
that ball-breaker, gets two friends
and sneaks into the village in the dead of night.
They ask around real rough and find the guy
inside his house, and Yossi simply castrates him
right on the spot. (Grandpa makes a gesture
like pulling a knife through doubled rope.)
It was some thing. Those days the Brits
had no police out, but nobody from
that village ever raped another Jewish girl.

~ by jonlib on April 10, 2010.