The Feeling Body: Exiled Heritage in selected poems of Binem Heller and Hadasa Rubin

• In Event: Space and Place in Yiddish Culture

Abstract

Abstract: This presentation draws on a paper that is part of my on-going dissertation research, exploring three twentieth century Jewish poets and their selected poems, thematizing heritage and the embodiment of exile in the context of the Shoah. My comparative approach will expand beyond a mono national-cultural framework by exploring three authors that cannot be easily categorized into a monolithic heritage identity. I will first look to the Polish-language author and poet, Zuzanna Ginczanka, and her poem “Non omnis moriar,” followed by the Yiddish-language author Binem Heller and two of his poems, “Inheritance” and “Inherited,” finally concluding with the Yiddish-language poet, Hadasa Rubin and her poem “What will you inherit from my, my daughter?” Informed by Antony Rowland’s theory on ‘Testimonial Poetry’ in Poetry as Testimony: Witnessing and Memory in Twentieth Century Poems, I investigate how these poems written during flight and after a post-Shoah displacement, illuminate a poetics of exile that can be constituted as a type of heritage.
Beginning within a foundation of locating heritage within exile, I will focus on the overwhelming language of displacement that underpin these poems, followed by the presence of the body that negotiate the status of exile, finally exploring how both tangible and intangible heritage remains as a sort of inheritance for the post-Shoah Jewish subject. Moreover, through the lens of these poems and informed by Merleau-Ponty’s subjective body theory in Phenomenology of Perception, I will illuminate how the living and perishing body play a central thematic role and reveal how the body frames the narrative of these three poets who must negotiate their own experiences of exile – internal, external, and temporal boundlessness crafted into a testimonial, poetic form.

Author

• Käthe Erichsen, Johns Hopkins University