Joyce Parkes
How
in memory of Jeanette Dubois
The mother of my father
married the brother of her mother.
Her maiden and her
married name were the same.
Telling my dentist that I too had
a Jewish grandmother, he smiled.
To be a Jew, one’s mother
must be one as well.
Might a DNA test tell, nowadays?
The dwellings of my father’s
mother in the monsoon of her
years leaves me to
wonder, in the winter of mine,
how I was related to
Jeanette Dubois, my Tante,
who was beaten to death
for smuggling salt into
an internment camp built in
Bandung – a city once
known as the Paris of Java.