|
Richard Fein------
Tenth-Grade
Histroy Lesson
The life of Gandhi or Lincoln, and if neither one then Washington,
George or Booker T.,
were all standard choices.
But I needed a book no one had read,
so my phony quotes and false synopsis
in the Social Studies book report
I’d slap together in five minutes couldn’t be exposed.
For such a fraud there was nothing better than Hitler’s Mein
Kampf.
I had been told it was the coffee table book of the Third Reich,
displayed by all good Nazis but read by none,
except it had no pictures, and beer was served instead of
coffee.
I was sure Mr. Goldstein had never read it.
In fact, no one sane could plow through it.
But I thought Mr. G might give me a 90 just for originality of choice.
The day before the deadline I actually read a few pages
to get at least one legitimate quote from that illegitimate book.
In the rush-hour subway I read about a beer-hall brawl,
a crucial event for modern Western civilization,
because he survived.
The two seats in front of me became vacant.
An elderly man wearing a yarmulka and a middle-aged woman fled
before the large printed name of Adolph Hitler.
The man had a look of fear and the woman of loathing,
for I had been grinning while I was reading,
but only out of self-satisfaction with my sophomoric scheme.
Then suddenly I understood the entire book,
by reading living faces instead of dead words.
My feet ached,
but I didn’t take one of the abandoned seats.
In that very crowded subway,
I swayed back and forth holding on to the hand straps,
thinking of Hitler, thinking of suffocating freight cars,
all the way to the Sheepshead Bay Station. |