Shtetl/Shoah/Poetry

April 10, 2008 - Robert Leiter, Literary Editor

Can poetry -- can any art form, for that matter -- encapsulate the Holocaust? Now that we're well into the new millennium, you would think this argument might have been settled in some definitive way. And there are critics who have said -- who continue to say -- that it can be done, has been done with considerable success.

I've argued in the past that the point is highly debatable and perhaps, in the end, cannot be resolved. But there was a time, back in the early 1980s, when I thought that the Holocaust could only survive the ravages of time and the assaults of popular entertainment -- which were then just beginning to appear on TV and in movie theaters, and which now seem quaint in retrospect -- only through the supremacy of fact. I would temper that judgment today, but not disavow the hard truth at its center. I still believe that the most successful prose works on the Shoah -- among them, Elie Wiesel's Night and Jorge Semprun's The Long Voyage -- are a species of memoir, which means the issue is immediately clouded.

So if one accepts the unsettled nature that still exists at the heart of the argument, how do we best approach creative expression that deals with the mass murder and suffering of the Jews?

The British critic and polymath George Steiner has argued that there is no way of critically assessing such books -- that they cannot be "reviewed" in any traditional sense; he suggests that "the only completely decent review ... would be to recopy the book, line by line." Other critics have spoken of the impossibility of approaching the Holocaust except through reverential silence. Reinhard Baumgart, a German writer, has suggested that such writing "imposes an artificial meaning on mass suffering and, by removing some of the horror, commits a grave injustice against the victims."

When Jerome Rothenberg began his major poetic project on Jewish themes over 30 years ago, he let no such issues stand in his way. The Holocaust was not his only interest and may not have even been on his radar screen at that point. It appears he began writing his long poem, Poland/1931, which first appeared in 1974, as an act of personal, historical retrieval. The work was not written from experience; this was to be a Poland of the imagination, spun of family tales he'd heard for years and from the sheer chutzpah of his creative energy.

More than a decade later, Rothenberg wrote Khurbn (a Yiddish word, we're told, that means destruction, human disaster, holocaust, with a lower-case "h"), a reaction to a visit the poet made to his ancestral home of Ostrow-Mazowiecka, where some of his relatives had died at the hands of the Nazis. It is a long poem, but not quite as long as Poland/1931.

These two have now been joined by a third -- the shortest of the three -- called The Burning Babe. Together, they form Triptych, which has been released as a paperback original by Rothenberg's longtime publisher, New Directions. Experiencing it, you might say that critic George Steiner's admonition to "recopy the book, line by line" is the only adequate response to such a grand, multi-layered work.

Charles Bernstein, who has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a poet and critic of astonishing range and fecundity, has provided a preface to Triptych filled with characteristically sharp insights. Bernstein notifies us, right at the start, of an important biographical fact -- that Rothenberg was born in 1931 -- which adds a layer of meaning for any reader of this expansive, complex work written in a variety of voices and styles.

As Bernstein notes, 1931 may be the poet's actual birthday, but it also marks "the beginning of [his] parallel, imaginative, investment in the Central European world of his parents, a world that had ceased to exist by the time Rothenberg had moved from babe to boy. Triptych is haunted by this double consciousness. It is as if written from the other side of this imaginative divide, so that the dead might come back and speak to us. ... The poems in Triptych envision a place neither there nor here: they build a liminal dwelling of betweenness, populated by ghosts and goblins, where objects are disguised as words and words are used as objects of resistance. All of this is presided over by historical personages brandishing indelible facts and syncretic figures making the only sense we may know this side of Heaven."

Rothenberg writes in his prefatory remarks to Khurbn that, in Poland/1931, he had come up to the edge of the Holocaust, but had not ventured into it. "This conscious, and no doubt unconscious, refusal or evasion or 'repression of war experience' (to use the title of Siegfried Sassoon's haunting poem)," writes Bernstein, "is an acknowledgement that the modes of representation available or even inevitable were inadequate or themselves evasive or repressive of the trauma.

"The problem is inherent even in the name," Bernstein continued. "The extermination of the European Jews was not a sacrifice, which is why Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning 'catastrophe,' is often used in preference to holocaust. Rothenberg, however, uses a Yiddish word, khurbn, meaning 'destruction,' which retains, for him, the power of the vernacular."

In the first long poem, Poland/1931, Rothenberg, then a young poet, took an aggressively modernistic stance and utilized biographical details, Jewish customs and liturgy to create a fractured image of the European and, eventual, immigrant experiences.

For example, in the section titled "The Code of Jewish Law," comes this little disquisition on "prohibitions":

the blood in fish wd satisfy her
but don't serve it gathered
in a vessel fearing
people wd talk she also feared
biting a crust of bread wd crack
her gums & draw blood in
she wd later cut away wd watch
for blood in milk
particles of meat between her teeth
of cheese on table she ate meat from
rinsed her mouth swept her tableclothv & baking goat in milk-of-almondsv wd put whole almonds in
fearing people wd see the whiteness & wd talk

By the time the more mature poet got to Khurbn and The Burning Babe, there's a purity and simplicity to the language, an unspoken quality that expresses in little more than a whisper great volumes of lived experience. Here is " ... Passing Chelmno on the Main Road Driving Past It ... , " a true poem of the Shoah that does not once speak its name (Chelmno was the place where the mobile killing vans of the Einsatzgruppen were instituted):

"In May,
along the road to Warsaw,

little ghost
of Lidice.

A row of peasants
cutting up the earth

on bended
knees.

A man spiffs up
a roadside shrine,

leaving a bunch of
tacky flowers.

Little figures
bathing in the Warta.

Little thought
to what was there."