Andrea Dworkin: The New Womans Broken Heart

shops and pogroms, amid hard benches and mountains of laundry to

do and meals to prepare and yes candles to light and heads to be

covered, that sadness had been bom. amid the hard screaming births and the quiet obedient deaths, amid the bone poor hunger and the melancholy prayers, amid the vile hatred of her kind, the sadness

had been bom.

bertha had her own idea, in fact, as to how the sadness had been

bom. she had long ago learned that the memories of men, in

whatever form, were not to be trusted, generations of men had

passed as scribes, rabbis, and storytellers and yet, bertha knew, the

real story had never been told, this was not mysterious to bertha,

since she knew that men avoided life, not respecting it, never daring

to look it squarely in the face, treasuring only their sons and their

own self-importance, this bertha might lament but she could not

change it. for those generations of scribes and rabbis and storytellers

life had been an abstract canvas full of abstract ideas—they had

obscured the actual shape of things and the actual facts of the case,

they had passed their avoidance of lines and proportions and direct

commitment on to each other over so many generations that now it

had soaked into the very marrow of their bones, and so they had invented Law and W ar and Philosophical Arguments and with all their arsenals of Culture and Learning and Civilization they had

stopped all dissent, even as their children were starving they could

ignore life and argue the philosophical ramifications of death, in

particular the men of whom bertha was thinking had worshiped

their dreadful god, Mighty Jehovah, they had argued with hard

hearts and stony arrogance His Laws to the nth degree as others who

cared only for life had washed and cooked and sewn and cleaned

and given birth and served and scrubbed and died around them, this

especially they would not look in the face.

these others, the mothers and the daughters and the mothers of

the mothers and the sisters and the aunts, had never written a word,

their arguments had no capital letters or commentaries, these others

had worked with their hands and hearts scrubbing and cooking and

enduring and though each separate life was due to them and

depended on them still they were required to be silent, not invited to

argue on the nature of existence about which they knew very much,

even as their legs were spread open in blood and pain, muscles

stretched as the head or feet came through, flesh tom from this, the

very mud of life, 8 times, 9 times, 13 times before they died, still their

views were not solicited, there the sadness was bom, over and over

again, as each new bloody head emerged and with it their insides

dislodged and gone from them and still no one asked their opinion,

this was no genteel sadness, small, pitiful, indulgent, weak, this was

a howl into the bowels of the earth, urgent, bellowing, expressed only

in the eye that cut like a knife, the mouth tangled trying to escape

the face.

this sadness grew as they saw these children flesh of their flesh live

and grow and die. this sadness grew as their children became sick,

hungry, afraid, this sadness grew during pogroms and on regular

days when there was just the family life, this sadness especially grew

as they saw their sons go off to the hard wooden benches where the

rabbis would teach them, the sons, how to read and write and

discourse on the Law and Life itself, this sadness especially grew as

their sons forgot them, disdained the gift of life given in blood and

pain, preferring instead to putter in stony arrogance in the world of

men. this sadness especially grew as they saw their daughters fight

against the unyielding silence of scrubbing and cleaning and each

month bleeding, and finally in the end or long before the end becoming servants at first smiling to those who would argue about this or that in the world of men. this, bertha suspected, was the actual story

of the sadness that came over her, handed down from mother to

daughter and from mother to daughter and from mother to

daughter, first in mother russia, that birthing, heaving, bloodsoaked

mother, then transported step by step on foot and by horse across

the vast land called Europe, then come to be bom and grow anew

here in the sweatshops of Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh,

those other houses of strained female compliance.

she remembered her dog. yes, her dog. let others, those abstract

painters, laugh but bertha knew the details and intricacies of life, no

single line or fact was hidden from her view, for life was life, each

day of it and every living thing of it, one after the other, and she had

loved her dog heart and soul, this dog had been her friend in straits

where people fled and no one could convince her that in any canvas

her dog did not figure.

bertha had given this dog away, with her own hands led it to a

huge dark building, left it abandoned like a child wrapped in swaddling clothes, its mother wants it to live but cannot feed it, there is a light, a stranger, a promise that is implicitly a threat, there is the

darkness of midnight, the despair of the next morning without food,

there are the tears that never no matter how many come wash away

the sorrow, there is the wretched agony of the heart, the dog not yet a

skeleton but too thin its bones showing while she had turned to fat,

the dog that would follow her anywhere, lick the tears of its own

abandonment from her face, the dog that had cowered beaten by the

same hand that had beaten her, and together, after, when he had

gone they had huddled together, both cowering in dread, insides

bruised beyond all knowing, this dog that had her eyes, the eyes of a

beaten woman, her eyes looking at her now as she led it trusting

perhaps to be gassed or mistreated she would never know.

dogs too, bertha knew, were conceived in suffering, this dog had

been bred, bred they call it, those cold calculators of markets and

worth, this dog had wailed out as a huge penis had plowed into it, a

wail that could have shattered bones, a wail that could have made

the dead rise and march, her husband had sat laughing drinking a

beer while the huge german shepherd a stranger off the street found

by her husband loved by him right away because its penis was so big

because its shoulders were so broad because its teeth were so sharp

because it sniffed and salivated from the smell of female blood had

come into the living room where the females were, she and her dog,