Transgenesis

CONFESSION

I am no Jew by Orthodox standards.

My mother, born of Irish-Catholic stock, never converted and neither have I.

We might pray over the Shabbos lights but rarely bother to bless the bread.

My father insists on the Orthodoxy

of our ancestors, but the midrash

of his youth was Fiddler on the Roof,

while in Słupca, the Yizkor book suggests, Reform had already taken root.

Either way, an immigrant baker’s eighteen-hour workdays

would leave little time for piety, so I like to imagine our family washed their hands of ritual when they left the shtetl.

Still, I worry that I dishonor

my father and my father’s father

by questioning the few stories that survive

when twelve of my great-grandmother’s siblings did not. You want to confess, Rabbi says,

better you should find a priest.

He speaks to me from the small screen where he’s played by Meryl Streep.