Yiddish Gothic

Shtetl-born, the era of the
transition from Polish pogroms
to the Aryan Nazi Third Reich
establishing its death camps where
no inconvenient furor of protest
was anticipated, the presciently
few sailed off to America and
there finding no streets paved
with gold, men took humble
employment in the trade of
peddling; broken furniture,
trinkets, schmata, and live
chickens from farm to market.
Hard work for pittance pay,
while women laboured in
sweat shops now exploiting
poverty-stricken women in
the Philippines. He was the stern
unbending paterfamilias their
children enraged easily and at
their own risk. She was the gossipy
meek balabusta vainly stretching
hope to make ends meet. Their
struggle to survive taught their
offspring what the parents knew
by experience; the world was an
unlovely place with few beckoning
opportunities. The second generation
adeptly grasped those elusive
chances fatalistically inuring
themselves against failure
attracting to their worldly success
the envy and the enmity of the 
latest crop of anti-Semitic haters.