MENDELSSOHNSTRASSE

Here in the nineteen-thirties lived an upper-middle-class family
with butler & cook & housekeeper & nanny. The husband
worked as the director of a bank in Frankfurt until he was dismissed,

while his dear wife Hedwig stayed at home with the children
and held a small salon each week, where other ladies came to talk
about the latest books and exhibitions. The artists and writers

that they talked about have long since gone out of fashion
or been forgotten by those people who read books or visit exhibitions
in the twenty-first century. The salon ladies themselves,

all of those women with German first names and last names
that conjure mountains or stones or roses, or shtetl life much further east,
went to the ghettoes or the camps. They, also, were never heard of again.