Kaddish: Before the Holocaust and After - Softcover

Yolen, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0998601098 ISBN 13: 9780998601090

Verlag: Holy Cow Pr, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Recipient of the Sophie Brody Award (2022) for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature, for works published the previous year in the US, presented by the American Library Association (ALA). Kaddish is the first and only poetry collection to have received the Sophie Brody Award. 

Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is recited in a time of deep sorrow. In it, the sacredness of the Almighty One is affirmed. In her new gathering of sixty poems, award-winning author Jane Yolen gives us a feminist view of Biblical themes and personalities such as Eve, Sarah, David and Goliath. The poems then morph into those about the Holocaust and after. Yolen's unflinching and stark record of the many death camp horrors serve as reminders of that era's brutality and the unrelenting suffering visited upon an innocent people. “Knowing means remembrance,” Yolen writes--as each poem becomes a memorial, a teaching, a warning for our and future generations. Her book concludes: “... no Jew truly escapes/that time, those places,/unscarred, unscathed./I have no numbers on my arms,/But I have studied the charts,/the cities, the deaths,/till I know them by heart.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane Yolen, called the "Hans Christian Andersen of America" because of her work with fairy tales, is also a fine poet. Kaddish is her 13th book of poems for adult readers. In March, 2021 her 400th book was published. She works across all genres--children's books and adult books: science fiction, fantasy, historical novels, storybooks, short stories, cookbooks, music books, nonfiction, anthologies, collections--even a novel in verse. She has written musicals, and the lyrics for many bands.She writes a poem a day which she sends to over a thousand subscribers. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates for her body of work. Her latest awards have been from the Jewish Book Council, the World Fantasy Association, a Massachusetts State Book Award, and a nomination by the USA for the International Astrid Lindgren Award. She lives in New England and in Scotland. If you need to know more about her, visit her website at: www.janeyolen.com. She is the author of three previously published poetry books from Holy Cow! Press: Things to Say to a Dead Man: Poems at the End of a Marriage and After (2011); Ekaterinoslav: One Family’s Passage to America (2012); and The Bloody Tide: Poems about Politics and Power (2014).

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Rusulka

She rises from the water, arms raised,
drops flooding her long, red hair
that so recently was as fluid as the river.
She looks at the shore’s stoic banks
still covered with withered stalks,
birch weeping openly into the weir.
She stares at the farmland beyond,
where nothing grew last season,
or the season before, the farm’s family fled.
She has been too long beneath the rills,
uncalled, unremembered, forgetting
her old promises of the much-needed rain.
She pulls herself into a weeping tree.
Unseen Cossacks cast their fish-hooked net,
drag her out, fling her into the furrows.
They call her Jew, spread her legs,
leave her on the ground, far from the river.
She dries from the inside out, too quick for tears.
The farm languishes, the river disappears.
So we treat our guardians, our stories,

our land, our world.

Un-seeing

How to un-see the photograph:
three men, one playing accordion,
eight smiling women in uniforms,
taking a brief break.
They pose, grin, hide the cigs,
(it was the forties, you know)
trade anecdotes about work:
who dropped dead in fright,
how many they lost to starvation.
The fourth ofen had a Fehlfunktion.
That photograph title?
“Laughing at Auschwitz,”
while Anne Frank wastes away there
dreaming of writing
if only she had some paper,
if only she had a pen,

if only she had some time.

Kaddish

It is all here, you know,
the darkness, the light,
though sometimes difficult
to know which is which.
My people escaped the Tsar’s Fists,
to find ourselves free
of the Shoah as well.
But no Jew truly escapes
that time, those places,
unscarred, unscathed.
I have no numbers on my arms,
But I have studied the charts,
the cities, the deaths,
till I know them by heart.
Knowing means remembrance.
We Jews may be short
much of the time.
But our memories,
our memories are long.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Holy Cow Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0998601098
• ISBN 13: 9780998601090
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 77
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar