The Last Lullaby: Poetry from the Holocaust (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 159 that the abyss between experience in Auschwitz ,and its recollection afterwards is bridgeable, no matter how empathic the teller of a tale might be. We, who were not there, are inevitably limited as we desire and search for the right words. This applies to Germans and to the world. At best we can demonstrate the willingness to listen to that struggle in the voices ofsurvivors and their children and grandchildren and also to the generations following those who perpetrated the Holocaust or who stood by in silence. Hamida Bosmajian Department of English Seattle University The Last Lullaby: Poetry from the Holocaust, edited and translated by Aaron Kramer, drawings by Saul Lishinsky. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. 256 pp. $19.95 (p). Regardless ofwhatever one may think ofthe Holocaust as a suitable course ofstudy or area of research, the fact is that in the last two or three decades the Holocaust has garnered immense interest and will no doubt continue to attract students and scholars for a good while to come. It is hardly surprising, then, that a collection of poetry devoted entirely to poems written during or about the Holocaust should recently be published, translated, and edited by a fme Jewish American poet, Aaron Kramer, and supported by a grant from the Dora Teitelboim Foundation. The book is also abundantly and graphically illustrated by Saul Lishinsky, who besides being a noted artist is also an art therapist. Not that the poems in this collection are in any way therapy. After reading through them, one may instead feel the need for therapy! Many are disturbing in the curious way that many lullabies are disturbing and, closely analyzed, hardly seem able to engender sweet dreams. Here, for example, are a few stanzas from Am Kurtz's "Song of a Substitute Mother": Life's gone to ruin and rack~ not one crumb in the sack. Hush, my child, my curse~ such is our universe. Typhus grips your mother; they've shipped your dad away. In wicked times another must rock you night and day. For a Sudeten child the muddy ground's a bed, your cradle~thoms gone wild, your joy~a crust of bread. 160 Your father's splitting stones in Hitler's swampy land: a helpless pack ofbonesdeaf and dumb and blind. SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 Like other lullabies, the verse form only partially disguises the horrific content of the lines. Ifthe lullaby was sung, the tune might further camouflage the content, grim as it is. Many of the other poems in the collection reflect this paradox of the lullaby; some are rather more comforting, others less. Kramer has done an excellentjob in collecting poems from a wide variety ofpoets who lived through the Holocaust or, dying in it, left behind their work, which miraculously survived. Some, like Avrom Sutzkever, are well known; others, like Chanan Kiel, are less well known. Some poems are by poets who luckily did not experience the Holocaust at first hand, but remain nonetheless haunted by images of it that have become our common heritage. Almost all of the poets come from eastern Europe, especially Poland and the former Soviet Union, where the Holocaust was most terrifying. Kramer, himself an American-born Jew, has written Holocaust poems, though he modestly does not include any in this anthology. Nor does Kramer include the original Yiddish. This is not a bilingual collection, like the Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse or the earlier Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, in both of which Irving Howe had a hand. It is not possible, therefore, to comment on the translations except by hunting down the originals, if they exist, in either of those anthologies or elsewhere. But as every poet understands, translation is always approximate. The best one can hope for is what Robert Lowell called an "imitation," that is, the equivalent in another language of the idiom and emotions the original evokes. In a sense, the translation is a new poem, derivative though it may be, and must be judged on its merits as such. Most of the poems in The Last Lullaby are not great poetry. I doubt that an anthology ofoutstanding poetry in...