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.

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).

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.

Artist and poet, Renate Kaufmann, expresses what it was like living through the bombing and the hiding and then through all the sorrow and confusion in the war-torn aftermath. She also tells how, later in life, she came to know her Jewish Messiah in a deeper way. Renate did not learn English until she came to America as an adult, yet she writes beautiful poems in what is not her mother tongue-all for the glory of the Lord! Some of the titles of her poems are: "What Is Peace?" "Why Hate The Jews?" "What Is A Home?" "Mama, Is There Life After Death?" "My Hiding Place" "Who Am I?" "Why G-d Why?" "I Found The Truth" "Not An Alien Anymore" "Let's Be Women Of Influence" "Shalom To You." Renate, a child Holocaust survivor, lives in Rochester, New York, and is in the process of immigrating to Israel. She has been denied citizenship by the Israeli government because of her belief in Yeshua as Messiah. Her court case is currently being handled by the Jerusalem Institute for Justice. Funds from the sale of this book will go to help her cause. Winning her case will help set a precedent for other Jewish believers.