A poem which avoids answering the question "Why me?"

October 16, 2006 Carnivores do not consider that a steak was once part of a cow which may have cried when its calf was taken away, that goose pate is a force-fed liver, or that crabs and snails find it unpleasant to reach their deaths by being thrown into boiling water. Dorit Weisman is not a vegetarian, and in ‘Schnitzel’ she comes off not only as a talented poet but also as a chef who knows her business in the kitchen very well.

The poem’s logic and most of its charm derive from the parallel between the poet, who just yesterday lay on the operating table, and the housewife who today operates on the counter on a piece of dead meat which she will eventually eat. The Jewish religion repeats that people and animals do not share the same fate, and it is also completely clear that the goal of the biopsy and mastectomy has nothing in common with the preparation of cutlets (‘schnitzel’); however, the violent acts committed on human flesh for our own good are really like the violent acts committed by people on animals, which are not for the animals’ good.

In the movie Kika by Spanish director, Pedro Almodovar, a charming woman who appears to take life in the correct proportions, even moments after she is raped, says: “One woman is raped every minute; today was my turn.” What’s good for the movies is not necessarily good in reality, not to one who is forced to live the rest of her life with one breast, and of course not for those creatures eaten by human beings after spending their lives in a coop or a pen, giving up their eggs and milk before they must give up their flesh. The choice of “bread crumbs or matza meal” is in a certain sense like the choice of a coffin or cremation, a choice made at leisure, with an eye to convenience, and with great concentration and careful consideration by today’s heros, the living. Tomorrow all predators and their prey will come to the same end.