This Is How My Opa Strauss Died

He walked home from work in the blizzard of ’47.

My Oma opened the door.

“Natan, why are you carrying groceries in this weather?”

“I always bring you something, Jenny,” he said,

and collapsed in her arms.

But the dying began long before, when

he was forced to sell his butcher shop

after Hitler came to power, when

he saw his six-year-old daughter

beaten up by schoolchildren for refusing

to say “Heil Hitler,” when

he was forced to sell his beloved horses,

his home, his land, when

he was seasick on the S.S. Roosevelt

for the ten days it took to cross the Atlantic

from Le Havre to New York City, when

he stood on cold concrete warehouse floors

as a night watchman in Harlem, when

the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society got him

a job as a farmer’s helper in Connecticut and

he wouldn’t tell the owner he had a heart condition, when

he sat alone in a corner of the greenhorn section

of shul each Shabbos, when

he found out after the war he would never see

any of his nine brothers and sisters again, when

he worked as a meat cutter through each heart attack, when

he walked up Meadow Street and his neighbor Rose DeNegris,

eight months pregnant, saw him carrying a bag of groceries, asked

why he was out in such weather, he said,

“I don’t have long to live.”