The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish: Avrom Sutzkever’s <i>Geheymshtot</i> (1948)

Pollin-Galay, Hannah

doi:10.1080/13501674.2018.1559692

Cited by 1 publication

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“…63 After the war his epic Geheymshtot (Secret City, 1948) was hailed as "a centerpiece to that new entity called 'Holocaust poetry'." 64 His poems recording the daily death which the ghetto Jews lived through reflect his sense of responsibility until the day he fled to join the partisans in the forests, exchanging cultural or spiritual resistance for a gun, feeling that no more could be done to save those left behind after a leading resistance fighter was forced to give himself up.…”

Section: Poetry As Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

Sicher¹

2020

NoZ

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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.

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Section: Poetry As Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

Sicher¹

2020

NoZ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The Epic Demands of Postwar Yiddish: Avrom Sutzkever’s Geheymshtot (1948)

Cited by 1 publication

References 9 publications

A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

A Poetics of the Holocaust? Three Exemplary Poets

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