Souvenirs, by Pesach Rotem

Crucifixion, by Salvador Dali (Spain) 1954

Souvenirs 
   
Before leaving the museum we were each allowed to buy a poster from the gift shop,
not realizing that our choices that day would foreshadow the directions our lives would take
for the next fifty years. 

Michael was twelve. He selected Salvador Dali’s Crucifixion.
He will tell you that he was intrigued by the artist’s depiction of three-dimensional geometric forms
             free-floating on a two-dimensional canvas. 
I will tell you that he was excited by the prospect of the grownups telling him it was forbidden for  
​             Jewish kids to hang crucifixion posters on their bedroom walls so he could proclaim his  
             inalienable right to self-expression and tell them they were fascists and so on 
but he was disappointed when the grownups said OK and paid for the poster and it went up on the  
​             wall without a fuss 
and he has spent the next fifty years trying to shock the grownups 
and occasionally he succeeds  
and some sucker takes the bait and exclaims “Oh my goodness, Michael, I can’t believe you said that” and his face lights up 
and he admits to being an irrepressible iconoclast. 

I was nine. I selected El Greco’s View of Toledo. 
I chose it just because I thought it was beautiful 
and I have spent the next fifty years finding beauty in places of darkness and foreboding.
​I have found beauty in the cubicles of my corporate day-job, 
in the stories of Franz Kafka, 
in the songs of Leonard Cohen, 
in the rhythms of the Mourner’s Kaddish, 
in women of self-destructive tendencies. 
I, too, have had a happy life.

​Pesach Rotem

This was first published in arc.
 
Pesach Rotem was born and raised in New York and now lives in Yodfat, Israel. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his J.D. from St. John's University. His poem "Professor Hofstadter's Brain" was nominated for a Best of the Net Award.

View of Toledo, by El Greco (Spain) 1596-1600