Tikvah and Hershel
Gone I am..sure as the sea rolls over the bones of the deep
Gone is Tikvah, gone is hope, gone as so many Jewish brides
from history in the guises placed upon them by gentiles.
All who chose to remember at all, name me Typkia Friedberg..
Ah but, Hershel, my dear, was merely from the town of Friedberg.
Third class we were, entertainers not what either parents
had wanted for their kinderlekhs, there darling children.
When the warning horns sounded, we were entertaining the others.
Hershel with the wee piano on his back, and I
dancing and playing around him in a whirl of skirts.
The room was packed, the clink of beer mugs and laughter
All stilled slowly in disbelief as a clarion call of horn filled the room.
Eyes moments before full of life now haunted the space,
knowing not the way upward, out of the hidey-hole nest of the lower decks.
As the crowd surged from the room, hopelessly, we retreated
hand in hand yet we were torn apart.
Hershel fell and the crowds surged over him, crushing him piano and all
to the carpeted floor of the hall, mere steps from the stairwell.
He screamed for me to run. Eyes, hands, feet, knees elbows
no hope, no hope at all of any movement but upward with the throng.
Up one level I made it, clothes in tatters, scratched and bleeding
and then I too fell, under the boot heels of passengers.
I do not rest beside my Hershel, yet with my last breath, I cried
“Mother, mother you will never met him now.”
My dear, my heart, for before the Titanic ever sunk, we died.
*It has been said there was a newly married couple
the woman called Typkia Friedberg aboard the Titanic
but her name does not appear nor her husbands in the records.
Survivors spoke of the couple and the woman family from Chicago.
I do not believe the names are correct for Typkia is not a name
not a Jewish name but a word meaning journal, diary and Freidberg
is the town where the pianos for the Titanic were made.
Tikvah is a Jewish woman's name and means Hope.
Hershel means deer.
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