New Year wishes

From Adrienne Rich, "Sources":

But there was also the other Jew. The one you most feared, the one from the shtetl, from Brooklyn, from the wrong part of history, the wrong accent, the wrong class. The one I left you for.       The one both like and unlike you, who explained you to me for years, who could not explain himself.       The one who said, as if he had memorized the formula, There's nothing left now but the food and the humor.       The one who, like you, ended isolate, who had tried to move in the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.       Who drove to Vermont in a rented car at dawn and shot himself.       For so many years I had thought you and he were in opposition. I needed your unlikeness then; now it's your likeness that stares me in the face.      There is something more than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands:       there is something more.

Happy New Year, my dears, and may the year bring you the something more.