Lisping the Lucid Light

Argentinean Black Catholic Jew

I am a Tango dancer, Chicago born (we moved later) and I remembered my father. The verses below show why.

Argentinean Black Catholic Jew

I.

Cante

He was an Argentinean Black Catholic Jew.
It’s too bad but I am one too.
How sadly I think of my father!
After Mass he would play
Hernando’s Hideaway
Then the Blues, then yell at my mother.
After Mass he would play
Hernando’s Hideaway
And bitch of the Schwartzes and Yentels
Then damn the Ofays
And, in his own special way,
Evict some of the Yids from his rentals.

II. Cante Cante

Take a Jew. Take my father.

Born in the beginning of the 20th century –
that century of universal disaster.
Born in the USA to a family of neurotic vaudevillians:
African American Jews who disguised their Jewishness
and pretended to be an Argentinian family of tango dancers.
An African American Jew dancing the tango:
the one dance that, above all, speaks of fatality,
of destinies engulfed in pain. It is the dance of sorrow.
Then take this Jew (my poor Papa)
and arrange it so that he falls in love in Berlin
months before Hitler takes over …
Falls in love with that fatal woman: Ilsa.
The rest of the family flees while my Papa,
the fake gaucho, is drawn inexorably
into the darkest of the dark underworlds that existed in Berlin:
the Nosferatau: the secret society of decadents with
their Vampire balls and Grand Guigonal orgies!
And my father and Ilsa dancing
El tango de la muerte there
while Europe descended into
madness and my father danced
Danced to the dark music of the bandoneon and the violin.
A long stillness as the watchers
waited in the dark and my father
and Ilsa waited frozen on the stage and then
the quick motion that begins the tango!
stillness…
and then the sudden violence –
the dynamic of a frozen world suddenly shattered,
the apotheosis of the twentieth century!

III.

Cante Cante Cante

I stepped out into the night from the funeral home remembering
how horrible it must have been for my father
to pretend he was a Catholic.
This explained his strange melancholy
during my first holy communion and,
as I remembered more of the story he told me,
I thought back to those times when,
my mother gone to Novena,
how he would lock himself into the bedroom
and all we could would hear was "Hernando's Hideaway"
on the old record player and
the sounds of my father shuffling about,
breathing …

IV.

Cante Cante Cante Cante

Ilsa said "I am IRA.
And I think I can get us away.
But you must be baptized
And then in disguise
We’ll go to the U S of A!"
They fled cross the dark Irish sea.
My mother was Ilsa you see.
And they remained in good health
And Pope Pius the Twelfth
Cried fie and fiddle dee dee!
Then they came to these shores at last
But the fad for the tango had passed.
What could a Jew do?
So, he did a soft shoe
Grateful that he wasn’t gassed.
He starred in some old minstrel show.
Papa said he wanted to go.
Mama said "You Black Jew
You’re working for two.
Dance – it’s all that you know."

posted by & @ 9:32 AM