He Left His Homeland Like A Salmon Poem by gershon hepner

He left his homeland like a salmon,
and found a new one which he left,
and went to Egypt when a famine
had rendered him of hope bereft.
He prospered in his exile, just
as salmon do when in the sea;
no point, he thought, in God to trust,
when there’s more life and liberty
in places God had not intended
for him to live in. This solution
of exile has been long extended
by Jews, whose fitful evolution
depended on their exile, which
may contradict God’s primal wish,
but helped to make Jews’ culture rich,
and is essential for some fish.

Inspired by an article on Bruno Schultz, “The Age of Genius: The legend of Bruno Schultz, ” by David Grossman in the June 8,2009 issue of the New Yorker, where Grossman writes:

In my book “See Under: Love, ” Bruno Schultz appears both as himself and as a fictional character. In his fictional guise, I smuggled him out of Drohobycz, under the noses of the literary scholars and the historians, to the pier in Danzig, where he jumped into the water and joined a school of salmon. Why salmon? Perhaps because salmon have always appeared to me the living incarnation of a journey. They are born in freshwater rivers or lakes. They swim there for a while, and then head for salt water. In the sea, they travel in huge schools for thousands of miles, until they sense some inner signal, and the school reverses direction and begins to return home, to the place where its members were hatched. Again the salmon swim thousands of miles. Along the way, they are preyed upon by other fish, by eagles and bears. In dwindling numbers, they scoot upriver and leap against the current, through waterfalls twenty or thirty feet long, until he few that remain reach the exact spot where they were spawned, and lay their eggs. When the babies hatch they swim over the dead bodies of their parents. Only a few adult salmon survive to perform the journey a second time. When I first heard about the life cycle of salmon, I felt that there was something very Jewish about it: the inner signal which suddenly resonates in the consciousness of the fish, bidding them return to the place where they were born, the place where they were formed as a group. (There may also be something very Jewish in the urge to leave that homeland and wander all over the world––that eternal journey.)

6/4/09