“Smoke” by Andrew Merton

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Evidence that We Are Descended from ChairsOn July 31, 1932, the Nazis won 229 seats in the Reichstag,
while in Frankfurt, the Jew who would become my father
sank a sixteen-foot putt
to become, for a month or so,

the top-ranking golfer in Germany.
He was nineteen. His prize, a silver cigarette box,
was one of the few things he brought with him
six years later, on the boat to New York.

He was a short, strong man, built to withstand wind.
He wore a trench coat and a fedora.
Often a cigarette hung from his lips.
Whether any of this attracted the Jew who would become my
.    mother

I cannot say. Maybe it was just that they were in the same boat,
steaming away from the cauldron. As for the rest:
After Europe burned he built a business.
Fathered two children.

Bought a ranch house on Long Island.
Was cremated after dying young,
on the fourteenth green of a country club in Queens,

–Andrew Merton,
Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs (2012)
Accents Publishing

More from Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs and Andrew Merton:

Andrew MertonAndrew Merton has been a political reporter and columnist for the Gloucester (Massachusetts) Times, The Boston Herald Traveler and the Boston Globe, and a contributing editor with Boston Magazine. His articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Yankee Magazine and The Boston Phoenix. His book Enemies of Choice was published by Beacon Press in 1980, and his anthology In Your Own Voice: A Writer’s Reader was published by Harper Collins in 1995. His poetry has appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Powhatan Review, Paper Street, The Comstock Review, Silk Road, Third Wednesday, The American Journal of Nursing and elsewhere. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire.

193 thoughts on ““Smoke” by Andrew Merton”

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