Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Address to West Central Jewish Working Girls’ Club
Today for you all there is an opportunity more important than any that has ever before been given to you.
The boys out in France and Egypt are learning the value of their homes. We believe that they…
Day and Night
Day and night—
Shivering, we wait in bitter day
For moonlit night,
For the caressing moon.
Quivering, we wait in angry night—
For the sunlit day,
For the warming sun.
Day and night—
We must loom…
Transformation
Year after year, that cruel monster in the heart
growing, sense of guardedness expanding.
Year after year—generations’ blessing
gouged like a needle into the body.
I have wrenched it with irons…
Friends of My Age!
Friends of my age,
My happy generation,
We strode, pained-pleased,
Through the wreckage of whole worlds.
Before the living and the dead
fell on our portion
Inherited old skins
of ourselves—and…
A Series of Verses to the Venerable Ancient Whose Portrait Hangs in the Window of a Lottery Agency
The Avenida de Mayo
glows with a virginal light beneath the Sabbath sky.
That light strikes
the window pane that displays your portrait:
Laban amidst a flock of gaily colored lottery
tickets, green…
Tropic Nightmare in Singapore
Seven continents, seven seas,
and two and forty years—
and torrid equatorial nights
filled with nightmare fears.
Open eyes, naked heart.
And draining blood from me,
mosquitoes buzzing, buzzing…
The New World
A new world being made—one hears
In childhood that it has begun;
Then comes the passage of the years—
Is it not yet fully done?
The new world being made—always,
From childhood on—and on the day
The…
Birds Are Drowsing
Birds are drowsing on the branches.
Sleep, my darling child.
At your cradle, in the field,
A stranger sits and sings.
Once you had another cradle
Woven out of joy.
And your mother, oh your mother
W…
An Open Wound
Six million perished not because of a cataclysm of nature, as is evoked by use of that inadequate term “holocaust”; they died not because they lacked courage, but because they lacked the minimum…
Clockwork Doll
That night, I was a clockwork doll
and I whirled around, this way and that,
and I fell on my face and shattered to bits
and they tried to fix me with all their skill.
Then I was a proper doll once…
Each Rose
Each rose is an island
of the promised peace,
the eternal peace.
Inside the petals
of each rose dwells
a sapphire bird called
“And They Shall Beat Their Swords.”
And it seems so
close, the light…
Fool’s Paradise: Germany Jewry, 1933–38
Looking back, we readily recognize how many illusions were inherent in Jewish ideologies.
The Assimilationists idealized emancipation. Some of them became German…