Stone Voices

Yesterday Ronnie took Jill and Christine and me to the Rossau Cemetery, the oldest Jewish Cemetery in Vienna. It was way out in the Ninth District. We took the D streetcar towards Nussdorf past Freud's old apartment and office. Got off someplace. Walked into an old age home. Past the desk, past some non-Jewish old folks in wheelchairs and out into the courtyard. That's where the cemetery was. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, big slabs of stone with Hebrew calligraphy on them. Ronnie and Jill deciphered bits of the inscriptions: a name or two. I went around finding some stones with pitchers carved into the tops: that means Levites, my tribe by patrilineage, the ones who washed the hands of the priests back in the temple in Jerusalem. One stone had a carving of two "Mr. Spock" hands: that was the stone of a Cohen, the priest tribe, descendents of Moses' brother Aaron. Ronnie said, "In nineteen forty-three the Jewish community moved the stones and buried them someplace else to save them from the Nazis. After the war they dug them up again and brought them back." Some even older gravestones found in other places had been mortared into the cemetery wall. Most were no more than fragments. The Hebrew letters were larger, looser, less professional, more childlike, expressionistic, almost dreamlike. Stone voices whispering from the fourteen or fifteen hundreds. Ronnie deciphered a bit: "This means 'dripping,'" he said, puzzled, then finished the phrase: "'...My eyes are dripping.'"