October 1, 1939 Songtext
von Gabriel Kahane

We are travelling, through a flat, beautiful landscape

Writes my grandmother

Ancient forests; trees like bewitched figures, thickets of shrubs

In 1939,

Farmlands, small wooden houses,
Blue lakes, green village ponds.

Her father arrested, then released.

Now and then, cattle.
Earth covered with high grasses.

Fake passports

Enchanting places, where one
Would like to stop.

A steamship from Hamburg to Havana

Now, a small wooden church,
Now, a village train depot.

Six months on an island

I wish

Then New Orleans

I wish I could


Then a train to Los Angeles

I wish I could describe

Where she keeps a diary

I wish

Which I read on a different train

I wish I could describe each place to you

Almost eighty years to the day...

•••

After school
They chant her name.
She runs home
She prays.

But caught because her father
Couldn′t quite believe
What ought to've been plain to see,
′Til broken glass was at their feet,
And now they could not wait,
Some clothes and letters in a crate;
Left the cat and drove away.


Steamship.
Wool sky.
All seasick,
The tide.

She held her breath until
At last they'd got across,
But they weren't allowed to dock,
All because the country didn′t want
To let those people through.
Ain′t that a familiar tune?
I have to sing it back to you.

History
Don't have a chance.
Drowning in the false, fat
Present tense.

And why would you need
To know anything
That happened any earlier
Than late last week?

Lucky one,
She got in—
Some papers signed
By distant kin,

And every night she wrote
Six postcards sent back home,
And when she read the brief replies,
My grandmother would start to cry,
The careful script it could not hide
The fear in every one
She read beneath the L.A. sun
Until the letters did not come.

History
Don′t have a chance.
Drowning in the force-fed
Present tense.

Why would you need
To know anything
That happened any earlier
Than late last week?
Than late last week?
Than late last week?