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"Los Bibilikos de Rossmor" won the First Place poetry prize in Bay Area CLEA's first literary contest. Rosenbaum won the Shoshanna Shabao Prize for Fiction in the 1998 National Sephardi Literary Contest.  On the fiction jury were Victor Perera, Ilan Stavans and Jordan Elgrably.

Long before nightingales

sang love songs

while Albert and Luiza

dined on plastic patio furniture,

conquistadores and sacerdotes

landed with their flags and crucifixes

to affix the names of saints

in the Valley of Mount Diablo

Lo the Landlords of the Latter Day Elders

discovered

San Pablo, oh

San Ramon

O San Ygnacio, oh but

seldom San Anseimo.

Like colonial gentry,

they renamed conquests for Britannia

and Suburbia.

And built with sod and asphalt and brick

the manors of Rossmoor,

paving over the graves of Saklan Indians

and Mexican peasants

with faux lagoons and putting greens.

No more the legacy of El Camino Real,

the mission bell is now a streetsign

In tidy white block letters

are names of vanquished tribes and

vanished Spanish vistas

Reminders of scorched earth

and natives forcibly converted

like the Jews and Moors before them

The blood of the

Most Reverend Holy Office Inquisitors

--who wholly offed every last infidel --

spilled into New World lands.

with every small-minded friar

brandishing the Pragmatica

in pursuit of the last disbeliever

El Espiritu Santo

Santo' Santo' Santo'

There is the roar of freeways

where once were ranchos.

and sandtraps carved out from

Indian dwellings.

Gardens of roses and

storebought Madonnas

and birdbaths are

shadowed by carports,

while thrushes

hover in bushes

kantando, kantando de amor.

The aged and pre-aging

come here for enforced recreation.

To tarry on decks of redwood.

To showcase their independence

and bronzed leathered faces.

Their silver hair

and offwhite teeth gleaming,

they are decked in terrycloth or

polyester

Native Sons of the Golden West

join hands with Holocaust Survivors

and Knights of Columbus, Conversos,

Rotarians and Judaizers.

And every Polly, Esther. Peter and Saul

goes shopping at Cosco's in Contra Costa

and lunches on terraces

off Terra California.

They enter Rossmoor Leisure World

driving El Dorados and Sevilles

under portals that bespeak a friendly border crossing

- where smiling sentinels named Rod or Tom

dressed only in their shirtsleeves

protect descendants of Don Rodrigo and Don Tomas

from inside neo-Yeoman huts equipped with video

monitors

Albert and Luiza come here

to dream of Constantinople,

hoping to transform aisles of canned soups

and cereal boxes

into the isles of Marmara

and markets of Stanbul

Even self-assured sentries

cannot stop the nightmares of

AmsterdamBarcelonaBerlin

or AragonAuschwrtzBnissels.

Townhouses at twilight

become ghettos or juderias

Mount Diablo does not shield the

tombs of Inquisitors and their massacred.

The mission of Torquemada

and Eichmann's minions

is not obscured by a mezzuzah

at the screen door.

Nor soothed by birdsongs

or supermarket Muzak.

At dusk a gardener's walkman

plays a bass ranchera

unheard in the upstairs condo

where a high fidelity player murmurs:

Come quickly my love.

Korre I salvame

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