Poetry in the Yizker-Bikher of Galicia

• In Event: Here there are only words: Memorial Literature of the Holocaust

Abstract

It is shocking that, in Holocaust studies, poems in Yiddish and Hebrew—the common languages of the majority of the Shoah’s victims—are among the least studied. This is certainly the case in the still emergent field of Holocaust poetics, where texts in Yiddish and Hebrew represent a small fraction of a nascent canon. So, for instance, of the 159 poems in Hilda Schiff’s Holocaust Poetry (1995), only thirteen were originally composed in Hebrew and just five were written in Yiddish. The situation has remained largely unchanged in the intervening years; of the nearly 100 poems Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght’s recent anthology, Poetry of the Holocaust (2019), just seven of the poems were written in Yiddish.

While it may be true, as Boase-Beier and de Vooght assert, that Holocaust poetry translated into English does not provide a full accounting of the diversity of experience among the Nazi’s victims, neither does it adequately address the Jewish experience of the Shoah. Only a fraction of the thousands of poems composed by Jews during and after the Nazi genocide of European Judaism have been translated into English

This project hopes to present a modest initial step at addressing this lacuna by offering preliminary thoughts on the function of poetry as it appears in yizker-bikher—the nearly 1000 memorial anthologies composed by Jewish survivor communities after the Shoah. These volumes hundreds of poems in Yiddish and Hebrew, some by major literary figures including Nathan Alterman (1910-1970), Celia Dropkin (1887-1956), Shmuel Halkin (1897-1960), Sarah Kahan (1885-1941), Itzik Manger (1901-1969), Anna Margolin (1887-1952), and Meyer Shtiker (1901-1970). Not only are many of these poems not represented in the major anthologies of Holocaust poetry, but also some exist nowhere else in print. Drawing on methodology from the fields of literary criticism and disaster studies, this paper hopes to understand the liturgical function of these poems, especially as they relate to other forms of Jewish memory literature—particularly the liturgies of memory contained in sifrei zikaron literature, which thrived in Ashkenazi communities from the early modern period to the twentieth century.

Author

• Daniel Stein, Congregation B'nai Shalom