Blessed Is the Match
Blessed is the match, consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the heart’s secret places.
Blessed is the heart that knows, for honors sake, to stop its beating.
Blessed is the match, consumed in kindling flame.
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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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Letter to the Front
To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:
Your…
You’ll Return with God’s Help
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
A…
We Polish Jews
“All right,” someone will say, “granted you are a Pole. But in that case, why ‘we jews’?” To which I answer: because of blood “Then racialism again?” No, not racialism at all. Quite the contrary.
Th…
In the Army
With evening a whistle. Again the sweating store room
opens its throat wide, and we march out in formation
worn down by the heat wave and a day so long:
hard working soldier-women.
And why should…
God of Mercy
O God of Mercy
Choose—
another people.
We are tired of death, tired of corpses,
We have no more prayers.
Choose—
another people.
We have run out of blood
For victims,
Our houses have been turned into…
The Neila
The end of the day approaches.
The Book of Life and Death
is about to be closed,
and the hand of God will inscribe
the destiny of man.
It hesitates, trembles, stops.
A voice, sweet and frail,
an…