Shhh by Raymond Federman Page A

a personal and emotional dimension to what I am writing about my childhood.
    So, I’m not going to ask permission, I’ll put my poems where I think they should be.

The Soup Kitchen
    when we stood in line
    at the soup kitchen
    while our father
    was losing our food
    at the race track
    betting on the wrong horse
    my mother would pull the collar
    of her coat up around her face
    to hide her shame
    but we the children
    my sisters and I
    we thought it was fun
    to stand in line
    at the soup kitchen
    we would play games
    counting the number of people
    before us and behind us
    also because we were growing children
    we would always get a little extra food
    and even our mother would give us
    the food from her metal container
    saying that she was not hungry

You know, Federman, with all this back and forth, and these poems, and digressions, and detours, your publisher is going to tell you to go take a walk. You can’t just shove anything you want anywhere in your story. Your publisher is going to object.
    Mister Federman, that’s not what we expected from you, he will tell you. How can our readers follow what you are writing if in the middle of a story you start another story without finishing the one you were telling? We were hoping for something more readable, more accessible from you. Something less incoherent. Less surfictional. And also all those references to your other books will certainly affect the sale of this one.
    Yes, I know that I never manage to get to the end of what I am telling, but that’s because now that I have, so to speak, fallen back into childhood, everything gets crowded in my head.
    When children tell a story they say anything that comes to their minds in any old way, and in so doing, they poeticize without realizing it.
    Well, that’s how I want to tell my childhood. In a kind of poetic disorder. After all, my childhood was pure chaos, incoherence, and incomprehension. And on top of that starvation. Or what the French call, crève la faim.

Ah, crève la faim! How many times during my childhood did I tell my mother, Maman I’m still hungry. And my mother would say, Tell that to your father, while sliding from her plate into mine the rest of her food.
    Tell that to your father, she would say. My father who was losing the grocery money at the race track in Auteuil or at the Café Métropole, Porte d’Orléans, where he spent most of his time playing cards with his friends. All of them foreigners, Communists. I know because often my mother would send me to the Café Métropole to tell my father to come home.
    Federman, stop! Stop! We just wanted to warn you that the way you’re telling this story may not be what your publisher is expecting. And here you go jumping into another story about your father and his gambling.
    This is not the place for that. These pages, these special pages in italics are reserved for comments and reflections about the way you’re telling your childhood.
    Then in this case, I’ll go back to the regular pages, the pages of the stories, and I’ll go on with what I was saying.

I really never knew my father. He was a stranger, even at home. How then can I describe this stranger who accepted to live with us? How to recognize him? That inexplicable man absent from the world. How to thank him for having given me his name to contemplate, to preserve, to surpass?
    It’s possible that the marriage of my father to my mother was arranged. As I said my mother was raised in an orphanage. And I understand that when young women left the orphanage they were given a small dowry, and in some cases a husband was found for them. Well, that’s what I’ve heard.
    The orphanage was called La Maison Rothschild. As the name suggests, it was a Jewish orphanage. My mother once showed me where it was in le douzième arrondissement. I don’t remember why my mother and I were in that neighborhood. We were walking past a tall wall and my