Israeli Poetry Of The Holocaust

"The fact that the Holocaust poetry discussed here is also Israeli poetry makes the book even more important and relevant. One may cogently argue that the state of Israel was established on the ashes of the Holocaust. If so, the fact that contemporary Israeli poetry is dedicated to the topic of the Holocaust celebrates the victory of humankind over Nazi atrocities. This book should be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust, modern Hebrew/Israeli poetry, and literature in general."--BOOK JACKET.

Poems selected for this collection are translated from Zeitlin's Collected poems, 1965-1970 edition.

A selection of children's poems and drawings reflecting their surroundings in Terezín Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia from 1942 to 1944.

Of the 6,000,000 Jews who perished in the Holocaust, at least 160,000 were Sephardim: descendants of Jews exiled from Spain in 1492. Although the horror of the camps was recorded by members of the Sephardic community, their suffering at the hands of Nazi Germany remained virtually unknown to the rest of the world. With this collection, their long silence is broken. And the World Stood Silent gathers the Sephardim's French, Greek, Italian, and Judeo-Spanish poems, accompanied by English translations, about their long journey to the concentration and extermination camps. Isaac Jack Lévy also surveys the 2,000-year history of the Sephardim and discusses their poetry in relation to major religious, historical, and philosophical questions. Wrenchingly conveying the pathos and suffering of the Jewish community during World War II, And the World Stood Silent is invaluable as a historical account and as a documentary source.

In his new collection Terra Treblinka: Holocaust Poems Hanoch Guy brings readers into the rough terrain of Holocaust memory. At once vivid and piercing these poems neither pretend immediacy nor do they shy away from exploring the intimacies of traumatic memory. Through these poems, Guy constructs links in the chain of memory. He shows us how extended and intimate engagements with the works of survivor poets and writers make this possible. What he recreates is not so much the physical landscape of Treblinka but rather its abiding haunting presence. These are fierce and heartbreaking poems. Bristling with passion and rage, in their specificity these poems demonstrate what it means to keep the legacy of the Holocaust alive in the present. Laura S. Levitt, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender, Temple University. Among other works, she is the author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007) and an editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (2003).

A compilation of 119 poems by fifty-nine writers, including such notables as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Stephen Spender, and Anne Sexton, captures the suffering, courage, and rage of the victims of the Holocaust.

Suddenly, the Sight of War is a genealogy of Hebrew poetry written in pre-state Israel between the beginning of World War II and the War of Independence in 1948. In it, renowned literary scholar Hannan Hever sheds light on how the views and poetic practices of poets changed as they became aware of the extreme violence in Europe toward the Jews. In dealing with the difficult topics of the Shoah, Natan Alterman's 1944 publication of The Poems of the Ten Plagues proved pivotal. His work inspired the next generation of poets like Haim Guri, as well as detractors like Amir Gilboa. Suddenly, the Sight of War also explores the relations between the poetry of the struggle for national independence and the genre of war-reportage, uniquely prevalent at the time. Hever concludes his genealogy with a focus on the feminine reaction to the War of Independence showing how women writers such as Lea Goldberg and Yocheved Bat-Miryam subverted war poetry at the end of the 1940s. Through the work of these remarkable poets, we learn how a culture transcended seemingly unspeakable violence.