By Maya Wahrman

By now in Germany

rare books were so unwanted you could buy a sack

for only a shilling. So downtown Jerusalem

was bookshops bustling

with treasures of the written word

from the exile-land. Men of faith, famous authors,

many frequented his store, mingled among

the bookshelves, set out to explore

the words he owned and printed. Vanilla,

must, tan wood-based pages, bound.

The aroma made a man want books

with his tongue. Some men

found books they’d always wanted,

some wanted books they’d just found.

One customer fingered spines as he muttered prayer

under his breath. Rebuild our city Jerusalem,

please, hurry! It was 1939,

Jerusalem was being rebuilt in our time,

the storeowner’s home back in Frankfurt

was torn apart.

In the store,

men from all over the city would start

reliving, would meet Jews who seemed

foreign, would accustom themselves

to the desert dry heat of the Judean hills.

No longer reliving, now living.

He died. Store shut, past-life books

became harder to find.

But men said and wrote,

the city was never the same

when the doors closed.

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Maya Wahrman graduated from Princeton University’s Department of History, with certificates in Creative Writing and Near Eastern Studies.  She currently works at Princeton’s Office of Religious Life on issues of faith and forced migration. She has had opinion pieces published in the English and Hebrew editions of Haaretz, and has had poetry published in the Nassau Literary Review, the Jewish Currents poetry anthology Urge, and Sweet Tree Review.