Holocaust Poetry Research Articles

Dark Poetry and the Anti-Elegiac: Approaching the Unspeakable

Abstract: Dark Tourism is a term associated with pilgrimages to places associated with the famous dead. "Dark Poetry" attempts to imagine, explore, or reanimate a dark event. Using Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust poetry and Mariko Nagai's collection, Irradiated Cities (2017) as examples, we discuss dark poetry's use of an anti-elegiac mode, which focuses on historical particularities in refashioning and problematizing dark events while employing numerous gaps and fragmentations. This poetry, often written by second-generation and non-survivor poets, approaches notions of the ineffable while providing an important bridge between incomprehensible events and the human imagination, and challenging language's capacity to comprehend the "unspeakable."

‘Your earth is foul:’ the image of earth in Holocaust poetry

ABSTRACT This paper examines how Holocaust poets use the image of earth to convey a shattered world. Earth features as world or planet, but also as ground and soil, and in both meanings is participant in and witness to genocide. Moreover, earth becomes a figure for understanding the natural world and its relation to human horror. Valuable observations are made about how, in the Holocaust setting, humans experienced their environment and how they represent it poetically. Though the ecocritical view often calls for moving away from the anthropocentric standpoint, the poets examined ultimately insist on the centrality of the human victim.

Dreadful Noise: Jean-Claude Pecker on Loss, Remembrance, and Silence

Abstract: French astrophysicist Jean-Claude Pecker, who passed away in early 2020, left behind a rich body of work that reflects his active engagement with areas beyond the scientific, among them the visual arts, social activism, and poetry. This paper follows Pecker as he grapples with the loss of his parents in the Holocaust and articulates the impact of this loss on his life and work. My discussion draws primarily on Pecker’s poetry collections Galets poétiques and Lamento 1944–1994 , with occasional references to other writings, among them a provisional draft of the opening chapter from Pecker’s memoir and letters recounting his family history. Allusions to Pecker’s Jewish heritage are absent from the poetry collections yet are prominently present in other writings in the context of antisemitism as the core of his “feeling Jewish” on the one hand and the rejection of Judaism among all other religions on the other. Reflecting on the violence that afflicted his life during the war years and admitting his deep pessimism regarding the future of both humanity and the environment, the elderly Pecker conveys in his writings a sense of diminished agency both in his own life and in that of the sun, the celestial body broadly considered a mainstay of his scientific work. Contextualizing Pecker among his peers, I suggest that while the themes of deportation and death figure centrally in the poems, Pecker is less in conversation with Holocaust poetry or poets and more in dialogue with a group of French artist-friends, united in the knowledge of nature’s timeless beauty and in the recognition of the presence within humanity of love, friendship, and the unlimited capacity for inflicting harm and great pain.

Silent Witnesses: The Testimony of Objects in Holocaust Poetry and Prose

Silent Witnesses:The Testimony of Objects in Holocaust Poetry and Prose Leora Bilsky (bio) and Vered Lev Kenaan1 (bio) The Holocaust brought about a crisis of testimony that led to critical engagement with the limits of representation by lawyers, historians, psychoanalysts, and poets. This question was first addressed by the architects of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (1945) who preferred incriminating documents produced by the perpetrators themselves over the testimony of their victims. A reversal was brought about 15 years later in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961), where the testimony of Holocaust survivors took center stage. In the last two decades another transformation has occurred, known as "the material turn"—the rising interest in material objects (from artworks to everyday objects) in anticipation of the death of the last survivors. This material turn was accompanied by a wave of restitution litigation over artwork looted by the Nazis. In this article we offer a new theoretical perspective on the complicated issues raised by the material turn in Holocaust memory. What kind of testimony or voice can we attribute to objects? How can the testimony of objects change the relationship between law and literature in representations of the Holocaust? At the center of our discussion are three Jewish-Polish poetic testimonies written by Zuzanna Ginczanka, Władysław Szlengel, and Rachel Auerbach during the war in Poland, under Nazi occupation. Anticipating the crisis of testimony brought about by the new crime of genocide, these writers give voice to everyday objects and assign them the role of witnesses in an imagined future trial, held after the extinction of their communities. By introducing inanimate objects as privileged witnesses in an imagined Holocaust trial, we argue that these authors problematize the notion of courtroom testimony. By adopting and employing the rhetorical figure of the testifying object, these Jewish authors respond to the rich Western humanist [End Page 379] tradition of testament poetry, while at the same time performing acts of intervention. Our reading shows that these texts disrupt the continuity of the European convention of the testament poem, precisely by ascribing the testifying voice to Jewish things. Preface "The Telephone" With my broken and sick heart,with thoughts on the other side,I sat in the eveningBy my telephone. I thought: I will callsomeone on the other side,when there comes my turnto sit by the telephone. And soon I realize—God, there's nobody to call,I went another wayIn 1939. Our ways have parted,Friendships became stuckAnd suddenly, here I am,Without anybody to call. (Szlengel, 1943, pp. 38–41) "The Telephone" was written in Polish by the Polish-Jewish poet Władysław Szlengel (1943/1987) in the Warsaw ghetto (Oneg Szabat Program, 2021). Szlengel's poem is about the dreadful loneliness caused by being forced to move to the Warsaw ghetto away from the familiar habitus. Drawn back to the other, forbidden part of Warsaw where all his Polish acquaintances continue to live, the speaker longs to reconnect with old friends and neighbors. Yet his wish soon resolves into bitter realization: [End Page 380] "God, there's nobody to call." Here the poem shifts from the lyric mode to the satirical. Looking for some other channel of communication, the poet turns to the telephone's speaking clock as a substitute for familiar interlocutors. Szlengel thus produces a Jewish variation of Cocteau's (1928) La Voix Humaine by conducting an imaginary conversation with an automated female voice.2 Associating a broken human voice choked with tears and the voice of the machine, Szlengel conveys the loss of trust between the ghetto's Jews and their former Polish neighbors. When Szlengel (1943/1987) writes, "It will be easier on the heart, knowing that when I call, someone on the other side will listen to me quietly," the voice he craves to hear from the other side is of someone who shares memories of their hometown and is not afraid to talk with one who was cast out of it. In 1939 the telephone could still provide a means of communication to overcome the ghetto walls. Notwithstanding this technical possibility, such an effort is doomed to...

Massacre of the Innocents: creating a Holocaust memorial libretto

ABSTRACT Part I of the article looks at the challenge of writing Holocaust poetry and music in the light of Adorno’s revision of his famous pronouncement about poetry after Auschwitz into an acknowledgment that suffering ‘demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it,’ and goes on to consider how the poets Paul Celan, Karen Gershon, Geoffrey Hill, Primo Levi, Sylvia Plath, Peter Porter, Nelly Sachs and Hilda Schiff, and the composers Harrison Birtwistle, David Lumsdaine, Steve Reich and Arnold Schoenberg make use of their personal distance from their subject matter as they attempt to create art out of atrocity. Part II discusses how the historical source material of the author’s libretto in memory of the child victims of the Holocaust was crafted into the musical forms of recitative, lieder, lullaby and biblical lament.

Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay

Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay

‘I Searched for Words’: Holocaust Survivor Poetry in Postwar Association Journals

ABSTRACT Extensive focus has been given to the development of a post-Holocaust genre of poetry, often by those who are not survivors of the Shoah. This article notes the distinction between Holocaust poetry (poems on the theme of the Holocaust) and poetry that is authored by Holocaust survivors and their families, a nuance that often goes unrecognized in the wider literature. This article foregrounds the importance of poetry as not just a testimonial device in these contexts, but a way to align the past with the present and to create a sense of wholeness and completion to an individual survivor’s life while reflecting on challenges to that cohesion. This article utilizes poetry authored by survivors and their spouses from survivor association journals in the UK such as the ‘45 Aid Society and Association of Jewish Refugees to explore the value of personal reflection manifested in creative poetic expressions.

A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

Whether or not we understand the Holocaust to be unique or following a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, there is no doubt that the writing that came out of those traumaticevents is worth examining both as testimony and as literature. This article looks again at Holocaust poetry, this time circumventing Adorno’s much-cited and often misquoted dictum onpoetry after Auschwitz. The essay challenges the binary of either “Holocaust poetry is barbaric and impossible” or “art is uplifting and unaffected by the Holocaust.” I analyse three individual cases of Holocaust poetry as a means of both survival and testimony during the Holocaust – not retrospectively or seen by poets who were not there. Aesthetic and ethical issues are very much part of a writing in extremis which is conscious of the challenge well before Adorno and critical theory. In a comparison of Celan, Sutzkever, and Miłosz we can see their desperate attempt to write a poetry that meets the challenge of the historical moment, for all the differences between them in their cultural backgrounds, language traditions, and literary influences. As I argue, although scholars and critics have read these poets separately, they should be studied as part of the phenomenon of grappling with an unprecedented horror which they could not possibly at the time understand in all its historical dimension and outcome. We should no longer ignore their sources and antecedents in trying to gauge what they did with them in forging a “Holocaust poetics” that would convey something of the inadequacy of language and the failure of the imagination in representing the unspeakable, which they personally experienced on a day to day basis. By not reading “after Adorno” we can arrive at a more nuanced discussion of whether there isa Holocaust poetics.

A semiosic translation of Paul Celan’s Schwarze Flocken and Weggebeizt

Abstract The need for a comprehensive semiotic understanding of poetic translation is at the heart of the present paper. This task is framed in terms of a multidisciplinary theoretical framework termed semiosic translation that I apply in this article to the translation of Holocaust poetry. This type of poetry is characterized as a distinct sign system that poses a number of challenges to both translators and semioticians. One of the most conspicuous problems is the ineffability of nothingness, which is particularly evident in the poetry of Paul Celan. Building on the notions of abductive inference (Charles S. Peirce) and rule-following (Ludwig Wittgenstein), I introduce a method for the translation of two key poems Schwarze Flocken (‘Black Snowflakes’), corresponding to Celan’s early period, and Weggebeizt (‘Worn down,’ a poem written in 1963). The semiotic method applied shows that the underlying Firstness of Holocaust art (an anti-semiotic sign system) is the driving force behind Celan’s poetry. It is also suggested that iconicity and indexicality are not peripheral semiotic processes but central elements to elucidating how the translation across sign systems takes place.

Geoffrey Hill, the Holocaust, and the Redemption of British Poetry

Among the most important British poets of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Geoffrey Hill often received strong criticism due to the allegedly reactionary themes and ideas in his poetry. While he demonstrates a pronounced love of British culture, Hill’s patriotism is complemented by an attentive witness to the Holocaust and the trauma of World War II. Balancing his supposed nationalism with his Holocaust poetry, we see in Hill a generous and humbly patriotic British national poet.

Holocaust Poetry and Literary History: Abraham Sutzkever’s Prophetic Mode of Witnessing

“Using the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever as a test case, I demonstrate in this essay how Yiddish Holocaust poetry can be devoted to continuity within devastating rupture. The lasting continuity of trauma, which erupts repeatedly into Sutzkever’s poems years after the war, is vital to his role as a prophetic witness to the Holocaust. This continuity also aligns itself with the survival of the Yiddish language against the erosive forces of modernist assaults on literary tradition. In order to better understand the force of Sutzkever’s regenerative creative literary continuity, I suggest that we must first understand its contexts and antecedents. It is not enough to think of Yiddish poetry as a set of faint strangely syllabled murmurs from the past…. Instead, it is the ghostly marker of our estrangement and alienation from the world of pre-Holocaust Jewish life.”

Fasetowany język: bilingwalna poezja Ireny Klepfisz w poetyckim dyskursie o Zagładzie

The bilingual poetry of Irena Klepfisz, a Polish-born Jewish-American poet, seems to constitute a unique case of Holocaust poetry. The poet, an intellectual and activist engaged in lesbian, queer, feminist and gender movements, advocates the reading of Holocaust poetry within the ramifications of gender oriented cultural theories. Her bilingual poetry undermines the hypothesis of the postvernacularity of contemporary Yiddish. The paper substantiates the thesis that the choice of the target language in the translaton of bilingual Holocaust poetry has clear axiological underpinnings.

Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust by Jan Schwarz (review)

Reviewed by: Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust by Jan Schwarz Adi Mahalel Survivors And Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust By Jan Schwarz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015. xi + 355 pp. Jan Schwarz, a professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University in Sweden, sets out in this book to “present a multi-faceted picture of a transnational Yiddish culture” (3) that grew out of the near complete annihilation of its speakers during the Holocaust. Focusing on the years 1945–1971, Schwarz argues against the common portrayal of Yiddish as being in a state of “irreversible decline and extinction” during these postwar years, instead claiming that its “cultural leaders emphasized consolidation and continuity . . . completing historical and cultural projects that in some cases had been initiated during the war” (7). He symbolically derives these questions and goals from the poem “Yiddish” by Avrom Sutzkever, written in 1948: “Where will the language go down? / Maybe at the Western Wall? / If so, I shall come there, come, / Open my mouth, / And like a lion / Garbed in fiery scarlet, / I shall swallow the language as it sets. / And wake all the generations with my roar!” (3). Sutzkever (1913–2010) was born in Eastern Europe, survived the Holocaust via the Soviet Union, and settled in the Land of Israel in 1947 prior to the state’s establishment. Two-thirds of his life were spent in Israel, and it is there that the core of his literary work was produced. Schwarz’s fascinating recount of Sutzkever’s works in chapter 1, “Vilna,” continues the trend of past scholars by strongly deemphasizing Sutzkever’s “Israeliness” and highlighting instead his “European” Holocaust poetry. However, even the poem, “Yiddish,” which serves as the book’s starting point, portrays a clash between the refugee Yiddish poet and the Land of Israel, both as symbolic and physical reality. Unfortunately, the story of this clash and the creation of Yiddish Israeli culture after the Holocaust is not a part of Schwarz’s book. This omission equally applies to his chapter devoted to another Yiddish writer who also survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel, Leib Rochman (1918–1978). But more broadly, it speaks to the need for a dual outlook on Yiddish culture, both through the transnational framework, which Schwarz emphasizes, and also via the local-national perspective. Schwarz acknowledges the latter when he deals with the influential role that Yiddish American culture had within the American and the Jewish-American cultural spheres. Chapter 3 tells the story of Rochman’s memoirs. Schwarz writes that the memoir genre was “the main feature of the Yiddish cultural world, in the aftermath [End Page 128] of the Holocaust, that welcomed and encouraged the survivor writers to publish their Holocaust memoirs” (68). However, since these memoirs were written in a minor language, none of them even came close to the popularity of Anna Frank’s or Primo Levi’s works, despite their tremendous value. Schwarz uses historian Timothy Snyder to assert that they were just too Jewish and too Eastern European for mass Western consumption (76). A highly interesting fourth chapter is devoted to the monumental Yiddish Argentinean project of Dos poylishe yidntum (Polish Jewry). It was a series of hundreds of books that came out in the years 1946–1966 in Buenos Aires that were distributed in 22 countries in hundreds of thousands of copies. This project “indicates the existence of a vibrant Yiddish book market that empowered Jewish survivors to share their experience about life before, during, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust” (93). This valuable resource of survivors accounts “became a venue of hope for the continued creativity of Yiddish literature” (116); and this rich body of work remains accessible to this day almost exclusively in Yiddish. It was followed by another Argentinean project focused on republishing Yiddish literary classics (the Musterverk series). The centrality of the Yiddish cultural center established in North America, with New York City as its undisputed capital, explains why Schwarz dedicated the second half of his book to this region. Chapter 5 focuses on particular years (1953–1954) in Yiddish literature, which included I. B. Singer’s debut in English translation. Chapter 6...

Reading Holocaust poetry: singularity and Geoffrey Hill's ‘September Song’

During classes on an interdisciplinary module I taught for ten years, literature students sometimes pointed out to those from other disciplines that the reader needs the objective tools of close reading in order to understand Holocaust poems properly. Such a subjective/objective dichotomy actually demonstrates that non-specialists in the field may have something important to tell us about reading, as a potentially missed encounter in the classroom, and in professional practice. The latter has resulted in three different ways of reading Holocaust poetry in recent years: Susan Gubar responds to such poems as ‘stymied testimony’, and I have argued elsewhere for the consideration of ‘awkward poetics’ – in which writers self-consciously discuss the problems of representation within the texts – as well as lyrics as a form of testimony in and of themselves. This article takes these critical positions forward by exploring the interaction between recent theories of engaging with poetry more widely and the specific case of Holocaust poetry. Can the concept of the singularity of literature fruitfully account for the ‘events’ of Holocaust poems, or does it obscure the importance of the metatext, and possibilities of ethical response? Also, in response to Derek Attridge's work since The Singularity of Literature (2004), can the ‘objective’ close readings that critics engage in be too ‘powerful’ for Holocaust poetry? Can close reading be, essentially, an unethical enterprise?

Radnóti, Blanchot, and the (Un)writing of Disaster

In her article "Radnóti, Blanchot, and the (Un)writing of Disaster" Jennifer Anna Gosetti- Ferencei applies Maurice Blanchot's notion of disaster to the Holocaust poetry of Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944). Radnóti's work contemplates a catastrophic present and brings authorial experience and the writing self to the fore. Blanchot's thought may help us to understand Radnóti's poetry, yet paradoxically so, since the poems repel Blanchot's central formulations about the passivity and sacrifice of the author and, in his reflections on Kafka, about the uncertainty of death. Gosetti-Ferencei's study shows that despite divergences Blanchot's treatment of writing and authorship illuminates these themes in Radnóti's poems and that the latter also sheds new critical light on Blanchot's elusive understanding of disaster.

Writing Nothing: Negation and Subjectivity in the Holocaust Poetry of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis

This article addresses the pervasive articulation of nothing in the poetry of Paul Celan and Dan Pagis. The essay ties nullification in speech to cancellation of self in Celan and aims to understand his attestation of a form of subjectivity reconfigured by the Holocaust as negative presence. Celan's depictions of negative subjectivity, I argue, vitally inform his attempt to create a negative poetics and reveal an important distinction between Celan's and Heidegger's ontologies of nothing. For Heidegger, nothing is nothing more than negation; for Celan, however, nothing may itself be negated. Finally, by tracing the same structure of negated subjectivity in the work of the Hebrew poet Dan Pagis, I show that this dispute is not merely a local debate between two German-language thinkers but an indication of a deeper fault line in poetic representation of the Holocaust.

Culpability and the lyric in Tadeusz Borowski's Selected Poems

This article argues that Tadeusz Borowski's poems have been unjustly neglected in Holocaust studies. One reason for this comprises Borowski's uncomfortable engagement with the culpability and complicity of former inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, his rejection of the notion of the ‘sacred survivor’, and his intense distrust of lyrical forms in the context of the camps. Borowski's most striking (but unknown) poem written in Birkenau is ‘October Sky’: this poem constitutes a dialectical anti-lyric in the sense that it ‘hates tradition properly’ – according to Theodor Adorno's definition in ‘Minima Moralia’ – because it rigorously examines and challenges traditional forms without rejecting them entirely. In contrast, Borowski's post-war poems become journalistic, mimicking the style of prose testimony in their attempts to respond to daily events. A more practical reason for Borowski's neglect can be explained by the lack of translations: only three poems are readily available for English readers, in Hilda Schiff's popular anthology ‘Holocaust Poetry’. This fact demonstrates that canons of Holocaust literature are bound up with the availability of translations as much as literary merit: Borowski's ‘October Sky’ deserves to read alongside the ‘classics’ of Holocaust poetry, such as Paul Celan's ‘Todesfugue’, Nelly Sachs's ‘O the Chimneys’ and Primo Levi's ‘Shemà’.

Translating Celan’s poetics of silence

Holocaust poetry is like all poetry in that it does not just convey events, but also triggers emotions, and has the potential to change cognitive models and challenge unconsidered views. And yet it relates to real events that must not be falsified. Silences are at the heart of Holocaust poetry. Here I examine a poem by Paul Celan and how it, and its silences, can be translated. Using the notion of conceptual blending I explain how the poem works, and how its translation can also work as a Holocaust poem.

The Precariousness of Genre: German-Language Poetry from the Holocaust

While publications on all aspects of Holocaust literature continue to abound in German Studies, the study of German-language poetry written during the Holocaust in situations of internment has been surprisingly marginalized, particularly in comparison to the multitude of publications on poetry written 'after Auschwitz'. Guided by John Frow's reflections in Genre, who views texts as performances of genre and, ultimately, as bearers of discursive power, this article explores the reasons for the imbalance by tracing uses of the term Holocaust Poetry in West Germany and by illustrating perceptions and readings of German-language poetry from the Holocaust. The article engages with current research on poetry written in the camps to illustrate the various modalities and combinations that constitute the hybrid nature of poetic texts, especially of those produced by prisoners in the Theresienstadt transit camp between 1941 and 1945.

'Regaladas de Sus Madres': Judeo-Spanish Women's Poetry on the Holocaust

This article examines the characteristics of women's Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) poetry of the Holocaust. We will try to answer several questions, such as the subjects addressed by women's poetry, the generational circles to which Sephardi women belong, the explanation for the high percentage of writing among Sephardi women on the Holocaust, and above all, the existence of unique gender characteristics in Judeo-Spanish women's Holocaust poetry.