Narratives of Silence – Second Generation Poems
- Joined Mar 2020
- Published Books 6
Copyright © 2020
Introduction
There are two types of silences. Sometimes we are silent because words intrude. But mostly we are silent because we cannot find the words to say. We have no feeling or opinion. Or we are overwhelmed by emotion and words escape us. As in the poem above, the poet wants to remember but is unable to find memory and thus the silence which is meant to commemorate, cannot. The first and only time that I visited Auschwitz it was with an organized tour. They asked that we walk silently from the Auschwitz train station to the Birkenau camp in silence. I had lived my whole life in silence, for me the visit to Auschwitz was a time to find words, not to be silent. I had no memories to think about while I walked. No sense of family in this place.
I wanted to find their place among the wooden barracks and the scattered bricks of the shattered crematoria. But I needed words not silence in order to commemorate my family:
But if a voice can rise from the desolation,
To parse therewith a syntax of the pain.
Then words entombed shall resurgent flow
Words whose tears may heal the soul again
(Ineffable, Martin Herskovitz)
Via the creative process I was able to find the words, to express the pain and to mourn and thus to process the traumatic memory that is the Holocaust.
Silence without connection to memory is not commemoration. It is only when the silence can be wedded to real emotion does the silence have any commemorative weight. We have given the coming generation the historical facts to the Holocaust but are failing to connect them emotionally to the Holocaust.
This book of poems is my attempt to create a narrative out of the silence, to bring my past to life so as better to mourn. I hope it will help you the reader to connct to a new reality of the Holocaust, a Holocaust not of horrors and fear but of connection, caring and ultimately grieving.
Unknown/Unowned
If, as the Rabbis say,
Each life has a meaning,
Then each death should have its meaning too.
A tear, a shiver
A murmur
Of Blessed Memory
After a name.
Even just a glimpse of a memory
Like the flicker of a lamp.
But a death unmourned,
Unnoted
Is a cruelty that never should have been created,
It is a cruelty beyond flames,
Beyond dust
Yom Kippur
Yom Kippur Eve
I shut myself up in the bedroom and
take out the photographs
From before the Holocaust.
Neighbors and relatives
Who were probably murdered,
My mother doesn’t exactly know.
Some of the names I knew and forgot,
And some I never knew
Because she stopped talking,
And the next few middle of the nights I heard her in the hallways
And the rattling of the tea kettle in the kitchen.
So I don’t want to ask her again.
I just take out the pictures now,
And prop them up on my bed
To ask for their forgiveness that I haven’t mourned so well .
But maybe not
Because forgiveness means regret and change,
But I’m only doing the best I am able
and I can’t regret that.
And as far as change I don’t think things will be any different next year.
But if they can forgive,
then they can also love
and know the responsibility of being loved.
So maybe they can understand,
I ask for that.
Because on Yom Kippur the High Priest
Sacrificed two goats
One for his family
And another, the scapegoat
for them,
the multitude.
There are supposed to be two
And I am but one.
Unmourned
It is a time of mourning in Israel
Grandparents mourn their grandchildren
And children their parents.
An entire country versed in mourning
Except for me.
Amid the mourners’ wails
my grandparents hold their faces earthbound
To catch some of the tears deemed for others.
Tears they have never known for all died with them,
except a few.
And those feared to not cease crying,
So they never started..
They long to be mourned
But I who have never known their embrace, cannot.
I cry not rivulets,
but meager tears,
which can rinse no sorrow.
But I know their pain
In me their sadness has interred.
This too is a link
and it will have to suffice, as yet.
It is a time of mourning and I sit among the unmourned.
Photographs
1
My cousin Haim Stern returned to Serednye after the war
Took the key from the neighbor
To return shortly, a shoebox under his arm
And he strode toward the tree grove.
The bonfire in the grove burnt the photographs well
as he stood over the curling pictures, prodding them deeper into the flames
the nitrate smoke burnt his eyes.
He sat in the clearing till the embers died down, then freed, left for America
his spare set of shoes now in the shoebox.
2
My father has put away the pictures from before the war and he can’t find them.
But I think that he put away the pictures so he won’t find them.
What good are those pictures, he says, they were all blurry
and in the posed pictures they all look like statues
Better we should take pictures of our wonderful grandchildren, not blurry and in color.
Let’s finish the roll and in an hour we’ll have new pictures. Much better
3
I don’t have any pictures of my uncles who died in Auschwitz
not that it would help much.
My Uncle Meshulam died when he was 4 years old.
I would feel pretty silly holding a picture of a four year old
and saying this is my uncle.
It is hard for me to imagine that I had a family at all.
I’m not a god that can create a family out of motes of dust.
4
Whenever I would ask about the Holocaust my parents changed the subject saying,
“You have to put the past behind if you want to go forward.”
After 45 years of all sorts of directions, I am beginning to doubt their words.
Eclipse
How did I know about the Holocaust
Amidst the silence.
Or was the knowing enciphered on my soul
Trickling, in time, to my consciousness.
Knowing that is never taught
Can never be unlearned,
Can never be forgotten.
Silence
My mother has never spoke of what happened during the War,
and probably never will.
Her aunt made a video
And she spoke about the camps.
So the story has been told, she thinks
her pain untold.
She says the essence of her anguish
has been expressed by others of millions of times
only the words differ
Such that only her silence is truly hers.
I who have been wounded by mere silence,
fear her words and allow her her silence
Names
My mother’s father was named Mordechai Kleinbart
But maybe, because he was the eldest son,
His mother called him Tateleh,
And his father probably called him Mordkhe
like my father called me.
His sister and brothers called him, perhaps, Moti
Except for the baby sister who called him Momo
Even after she grew up.
His wife’s cousins at the winery may have called him Kleiny
And his children surely called him Tati
As did his wife,
Except late at night, alone in the bedroom
She would maybe call to him with Yiddish familiars
In a soft erotic lilt.
Or maybe not,
Because Mordechai Kleinbart is the single name I have
And it alone is carved into stone
and molded into bronze.
All the other names exist only in memories long interred
Or on pages yet unwritten.
Names and Stories
Some of us have only names.
Names are good for reading at memorial services
and putting on bronze plaques in the synagogue
next to a flickering bulb,
which is almost as good as mourning.
Some of us have stories without names.
Names have been removed from the story like fangs
so that it can no longer hurt the storyteller.
So I am destined to tell the story over and over again
Unsatisfied.
Sometimes I feel like putting the names in column A
and the stories in column B,
like the test we took in grade school
- George Washington and c. first President of the United States,
drawing a line between the story and the name
So every story has a name and each name a story.
And on Remembrance Day I can feel I am mourning a real person
not just a name without a past
or a story without an identity.
And I can hope that the tears fall more freely.
But if I match imperfectly
I have mourned a fiction
a phantom who existed only in my manipulations
and I have wasted the day.
Or do the dead know how to lift the tears
from the page on which they have fallen
and carry them in cupped palms
to their proper page.
Mints
When I asked about her grandfather,
My mother said he gave his grandchildren mints,
Then silence.
Not if the mints were azure blue or white,
Not the peppery scent of their breaths,
Not of the toddler’s cries because he would not get,
Just mints.
It is left for me to imagine my uncles crunching impatiently
the hard candy when they tired of letting it dissolve
as I would, a generation on.
Ergo Sum
The relatives who died “in the war”
have faded in and out of our lives.
Not alive, not even the littlest bit alive,
but then not dead,
gone or lost in the war.
Maybe once or twice mentioned as dead or killed,
but this is stated
with such dispassion
that it seems not true.
But these wraiths neither alive nor dead
have a prevalence beyond persons here or gone.
So I am going to Auschwitz
to give them life,
to find them within the ledgers and the Lagers
within the piles of shoes,
within the ashes.
For you cannot be destroyed unless you were once alive.
So amongst the destruction I will prove their existence,
like a latter-day Descartes,
“You were killed
therefore you were“
and I will grieve.
Ineffable
In the face of the ineffable
There can be no words, they say,
Only silence.
But my life has been measured by decades of silence,
Not mere kilometers.
So the crunch of flagstones,
The swirl of winds,
Even the tears
are no stead.
In Auschwitz silence will not suffice.
For when words return,
they return as they were,
Like seeds scattered on the frozen ground.
But if words can rise from the desolation,
To parse therewith a syntax of the pain.
Then words entombed shall resurgent flow
Words whose tears may heal the soul again
Tears
The souls of the dead lie dormant
under the filmy wrapping of the years
in anticipation
like a child who hides beneath a blanket waits
to be discovered.
Our cries of protest do not move them
nor do our tears of indignation,
they huddle tighter at the bolts of anger.
But when we whisper their names
and cry tears of longing that they have yet to know.
Then the warmth of the tears caresses their foreheads
and they blink open their eyes,
astonished
and stir themselves, loosening their limbs,
to fly down to our dreams.
Published: Apr 3, 2020
Latest Revision: Dec 17, 2021
Ourboox Unique Identifier: OB-764297
Copyright © 2020
