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I weep, and am amazed. I have seen death so many times and have controlled myself. Have experienced so much torment, disgrace, and humiliation, and…
Our classroom was on the upper floor and in the rear of the building. Its two large windows opened on a garden which, because it could be reached only by crossing M. Shalom’s apartment, was forbidden…
The Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were tormented; they experienced terrible things. But from time to time they also experienced fine and wonderful things. They suffered. But they also loved. Except that…
I always thought
I had been here before.
Each year of my patched-up life
I mended the fabrics
of my decrepit, tattered world.
In memory I recognized faces and smiles,
even my father and mother…
I adapted the above psalm to my situation, for the blessed Lord freed me from the Inquisition—although broken, I was released and free—where I saw eleven seeming penitents burned to death for heresy…
[The writings of the nineteenth-century maskilic writers] Perets Smolenskin and Yitsḥok Erter opened cracks in the faith of Hasidic young men [like Asch himself]. Their life of [Talmud] study without…
He was the last. Truly the last.
Such yellowness was bitter and blinding
Like the sun’s tear shattered on stone.
That was his true color.
And how easily he climbed, and how high.
Certainly, climbing…
“Even if you kill us, we will leave traces,” insists the poet. Poems such as this one affirm the power of humanity even in the midst of atrocities committed by neighbors.
All those things whose names I hushed
in secret, I meet in the night’s abyss.
I face the dark. Alert, remembering. Silently,
again I’ll let you in—my friends, my beloved dead.
And here you are as…
My feet walk the streets of this blessed city,
Only yesterday full of faithful adherents of Sinai.
My eyes do not have the courage to look up.
The bitterness of my soul is great, O Holy God!
I…