micro-fiction dedicated to my daughter: “Have you ever listened to Impossible Germany by Wilco,” I’m asking my sullen teenage daughter who sits across from me in the kosher-style New York deli-style restaurant located in the suburbs of Long Island that isn’t anything like an...
authentic kosher deli to be found on the LES or anywhere else on G0d’s green earth or under Apollo’s or any other pagan god’s multitude of suns… and never was. It is modeled on the authentic deli experience. It’s an approximation. It’s a decorated, mediated, contemporary...
postmodern experience. There is no point asking her if she has ever read Walter Benjamin. She picks at her matzo ball soup that isn’t authentic matzo ball soup and never was. I’m an immigrant. She’s a suburban American. This is the real heart of our conflict.
My daughter’s momentary reality is the product of her mother’s limited American suburban experience in the artless age of mechanical reproduction. Her ages ago past includes a moment of inspiration on a trip into the City during which she saw some graffiti in the knot of...
highways where the LIE meets the BQE and became, for a moment, despite the divorce, whom she was always destined to be, a preschool aged beat poet. She recited out loud, having asked me what all that mess was and immediately internalized my explanation, with rhythm, building...
in emphasis, upon having authored the rhyme, “Graffiti graffiti graffiti In the City How bad is graffiti Tell me! Tell me! How bad is graffiti!”
Her maternal grandmother used to have flashes of precognition and other forms of ESP all the time so her family named them “Rosen moments” because that was the family surname and there were myriad such moments. Multitudes of moments deserve to be named… and good names stick.
Recently I was thinking that all I wanted to do was hug my daughter and let her know she is loved. These are the only words to describe the feeling I was having.
Nearly immediately after the thought emerged in my mind, her mother used those exact words in an email to me… that my daughter just needs to know she is loved. As if I didn’t know that. As if I needed her mother to email me that.
My daughter’s paternal grandmother was a Holocaust Survivor… a sole survivor… an orphan. Hence my question about the song.
There’s no way for me to be sure of the real intent of the lyrics. Still, for the son of a Survivor there can be little more jarring an opening than, “Impossible Germany Unlikely Japan…”