You’ll Return with God’s Help
Malka Heifetz Tussman
1944
You will come back.
You will, with God’s help, come back
With a far-off, alien look.
(I’m preparing myself,
I already know,
I’ve seen how they come back.)
You will sit in your regular chair, unsure
And silent
With nothing to tell.
And I won’t know how,
And I won’t be able to heal your stark silence.
So with quiet words, I will
Stroke the horror…
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Related Guide
Holocaust and Post-Holocaust Fiction and Poetry
1939–1973
Jewish literature developed individual rather than collective voices, as postwar Jewish identity was transformed by the forces of modernism and assimilation.
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Related Guide
The Holocaust: Years of Catastrophe
1939–1945
Jewish writing in Nazi-occupied areas documented ghetto life, moral questions, and Jewish identity, while writers in free zones grappled with the unfolding tragedy.
Creator Bio
Malka Heifetz Tussman
ca. 1896–1987
Born in Ukraine, Malka Heifetz Tussman immigrated to the United States in 1912. She lived in Wisconsin and California and became a Yiddish-language poet, loosely aligned with the introspectivists Jacob Glatstein and A. Leyeles. She taught in Yiddish secular schools and at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Her themes addressed Jewish women in history, the natural world, and love. Heifetz Tussman published six volumes of poetry and wrote for numerous Yiddish journals. She received the Manger Prize for Yiddish Letters in 1981.
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