Henry Israeli

THE AMERICANS

In the show The Americans, Philip and Elizabeth’s teenage
daughter has a hard time accepting that her mother

killed a man in front of her, or maybe it’s that
her mother killed countless people not

in front of her, or more likely it’s that her mother
is capable of clipping someone in a matter of seconds,

crushing a windpipe or puncturing a major artery
to start a quick bleed-out, and if this is reality then what

is mere fakery, and what else are they pretending to be—
are they even travel agents?

My parents were immigrants, too, and also emerged
from behind the Iron Curtain, masquerading

as model citizens in a red brick house, three kids,
and what horrors, I wonder, lurked behind it all,

my father’s screams waking us in the middle of
the night from dreams where he still hid in the forest,

his rage when he felt that not finishing a meal
was a sign of our ingratitude and ignorance,

my mother’s heavy silence weighing her down
like a lead apron, her mouth clamped shut

like all the good wives of the postwar generation.
Life was a costume ball in the 1970s, avocado-

green furniture and wing-tipped collars,
and yet how many times did I come home from school

to the spectacle of jiggling cow hoof displayed
like a grotesque trophy on the kitchen counter,

Polish, Russian, or Hebrew music on the hi-fi?
Did they think they could really pull it off—

immigration, integration, acculturation, sophistication,
and us kids their new world experimentation?

They never taught us any of their many tongues,
enigmas laid out in Latin, Cyrillic, or Aramaic lettering.

Like Philip and Elizabeth, they hid many secrets
and, like Paige, I felt bewildered, confused:

my mother’s cancer, the radiation treatments,
how she kept every strand of lost hair hidden

from us, her children, although I loved to touch the wigs,
the wisps that looked so real until you felt

their unnatural stiffness and the scratchy mesh
that held them in place; my father’s late nights, countless

affairs—a foreign singer, at least one prostitute,
a Russian dental hygienist he would eventually

run off with when mother finally said, Enough.
When Philip sleeps with other women he looks

miserable. He doesn’t want to be a cheater,
but he does sneak off to EST meetings,

and, when he returns, they fuck as if naked and
alone they can finally be who they really are

for a few intense moments before putting their
disguises back on. My father had pork chop burns,

my mother a bouffant wig and dresses with groovy
patterns. She looked nothing like the daughter

of a simple watchmaker, and he looked nothing
like the peasant shepherd boy he once was.

Once a refugee, always…? Well, I can’t say for sure.
What I do know is that when they left me home alone

I scoured the backs of my father’s closet drawers for clues
but found instead the Joy of Sex and How to Please

a Woman, a woman clearly not my mother.
With my erection and my shame who could say

what damage I soaked up through this
secret language of betrayal and rage

that no amount of money could overpower.
And yet, here I am, with my own children nearly

grown up, the burden of history folded
into my front pocket, imagining my father

homeless and ragged on the streets of Kiev,
his mother gunned down by Ukrainian fascists,

his father dying of starvation somewhere
in a Siberian prison camp, and who should offer

him food and shelter but a struggling Yiddish
poet, a true believer in the Communist dream,

who would one day die in the dank basement
of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison on Stalin’s

Night of the Murdered Poets. In flashback we see
grainy footage of Philip’s and Elizabeth’s childhoods.

No spotty films of my parents’ childhoods exist,
the horrors of their lives recorded only in my mind

where I try to splice them together to better understand
myself, for aren’t we all products of history, children

of refugees scattered across the globe, descendants
of spies, dissidents, turncoats, double agents

trying desperately, impossibly, to survive our own wars?

HENRY ISRAELI is the author of four collections of poetry—most recently Our Age of Anxiety, winner of the 2018 White Pine Poetry Prize—and the translator of three books by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. He is also the founder of Saturnalia Books and Associate Professor of English at Drexel University.