Tallith (Jewish Prayer Shawl)

"This is my grandfather's Tallith, his prayer shawl, that according to Jewish custom he should have been buried in. Instead he met with death, when he was gassed in Auschwitz, the concentration camp organised by the Nazi regime. My father, the poet Maurits Mok, somehow smuggled it at great risk, as he was a persecuted Jew himself, through World War 2 while hiding in different places every six weeks. I knew it as a barcode of memory pinned to his wall and when my father died it travelled with me through Europe to all the different countries where I lived to end up in Ireland. There it rests beside my desk and I stroke it sometimes thinking or imagining that my grandfather would have loved all these places that his prayer shawl has been brought to. I believe that this tattered piece of cashmere belongs here. It is all I have from my grandfather. "