Abarbanel

[Read Write Poem prompted us this week to "go ancestral." Check out what fell out of people's family trees. The image of Isaac Abrabanel is in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons .]















Abarbanel

My father's father came to America as a boy,
his family fleeing pogroms in the Ukraine, sailing
west to Ellis Island where they changed his name.
We weren't Mayflower people – no D.A.R. for us.

Abarbanel

My dad said we were related to Abarbanel,
famous pawn-broker to Queen Isabella, whose jewelry
became cash to buy three ships for Columbus,
sending him sailing west across the ocean.

Today I read that Isabella didn't hock her jewels.
She filled an empty bank with the wealth of Jews expelled
by the 1492 Edict she and Ferdinand signed.
Yet Abarbanel did back Columbus and, with other
Jewish bankers, launched him west toward America
from harbors crammed with Jews fleeing for their lives.

Abarbanels and Abravanels and Barbanels
from around the world gathered in 1992,
a family reunion in Queens to honor
Don Isaac Abarbanel. One man's father was from
the Ukraine, so maybe I am related after all
to Abarbanel.




[One note - my grandfather's original last name was not Abarbanel.]