NAMESAKE
Introduction
My name is Sima Rose Greenfield.
My name is from a history of perseverance.
My name memorializes the struggles, my family endured.
Sima
Sima lived in Poland, when the Holocaust began.
She heard rumors of Jews, who were in the woods.
They emerged from the forest to fight and die;
They emerged to take Jews from walls to freedom;
They emerged to resist intolerant hands of tyranny.
Sima went to the woods with a gun and a glimmer of hope.
She believed humans deserve better than dying emaciated in a cloud of blue smoke.
Rose
Rose was told her family was too rich and too Jewish to be together.
She and her daughter were sent to Siberia her husband and sons to Poland:
Instead of lying down;
Instead of letting them die; she
Instead went to Poland with vodka and a short dress.
Rose told the guards she was a Russian whore,
She sat in Nazi laps as her daughter got her family out.
They cried in each others arms by moonlight.
They snuck through pitch black night to Austria.
They came to Danville, IL.
Rose ran a liquor store.
She never had to hide her Shabbat candles again.
Greenfield
Mikael Grunsfeld was of the huddled masses Lady Liberty lifted her lamp for.
He came to America to escape stick and stones meant to break his bones.
The paper told him, he was Michael Greenfield.
The paper told him he could be American.
The paper told him he was allowed to live.
Michael fought to kill the Nazis that would have killed him.
He almost died to save his fellow Jews lives.
When World War Two ended he became a doctor.
When World War Two ended he welcomed survivors to his home.
When World War Two ended he sang Kaddish for the lost souls.
Michael Greenfield is the American dream,
He was the Jewish American dream.
