Kaddish: Before the Holocaust and After - Softcover

Yolen, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0998601098 ISBN 13: 9780998601090

Publisher: Holy Cow! Press, 2021

Synopsis

Recipient of the Sophie Brody Award (2022) for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature, for works published the previous year in the US, presented by the American Library Association (ALA). Kaddish is the first and only poetry collection to have received the Sophie Brody Award. 

Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is recited in a time of deep sorrow. In it, the sacredness of the Almighty One is affirmed. In her new gathering of sixty poems, award-winning author Jane Yolen gives us a feminist view of Biblical themes and personalities such as Eve, Sarah, David and Goliath. The poems then morph into those about the Holocaust and after. Yolen's unflinching and stark record of the many death camp horrors serve as reminders of that era's brutality and the unrelenting suffering visited upon an innocent people. “Knowing means remembrance,” Yolen writes--as each poem becomes a memorial, a teaching, a warning for our and future generations. Her book concludes: “... no Jew truly escapes/that time, those places,/unscarred, unscathed./I have no numbers on my arms,/But I have studied the charts,/the cities, the deaths,/till I know them by heart.”

About this title

About the Author

Jane Yolen, often called "the Hans Christian Andersen of America," is the author of 400 books, including OWL MOON, THE DEVIL'S ARITHMETIC, and HOW DO DINOSAURS SAY GOODNIGHT. The books range from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, nonfiction, and up to novels and story collections for young adults and adults, and two books of adult poetry. Her books and stories have won an assortment of awards--two Nebulas, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic awards, two Christopher Medals, a nomination for the National Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award, among others. She is also the winner (for body of work) of the Kerlan Award, the World Fantasy Assn. Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Catholic Library's Regina Medal. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates. If you need to know more about her, visit her website at: www.janeyolen.com. She is the author of three previously published poetry books from Holy Cow! Press: "Things to Say to a Dead Man: Poems at the End of a Marriage and After" (2011); "Ekaterinoslav: One Family’s Passage to America" (2012); "The Bloody Tide: Poems about Politics and Power" (2014).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rusulka

She rises from the water, arms raised,
drops flooding her long, red hair
that so recently was as fluid as the river.
She looks at the shore’s stoic banks
still covered with withered stalks,
birch weeping openly into the weir.
She stares at the farmland beyond,
where nothing grew last season,
or the season before, the farm’s family fled.
She has been too long beneath the rills,
uncalled, unremembered, forgetting
her old promises of the much-needed rain.
She pulls herself into a weeping tree.
Unseen Cossacks cast their fish-hooked net,
drag her out, fling her into the furrows.
They call her Jew, spread her legs,
leave her on the ground, far from the river.
She dries from the inside out, too quick for tears.
The farm languishes, the river disappears.
So we treat our guardians, our stories,
our land, our world.

Un-seeing

How to un-see the photograph:
three men, one playing accordion,
eight smiling women in uniforms,
taking a brief break.
They pose, grin, hide the cigs,
(it was the forties, you know)
trade anecdotes about work:
who dropped dead in fright,
how many they lost to starvation.
The fourth ofen had a Fehlfunktion.
That photograph title?
“Laughing at Auschwitz,”
while Anne Frank wastes away there
dreaming of writing
if only she had some paper,
if only she had a pen,
if only she had some time.

Kaddish

It is all here, you know,
the darkness, the light,
though sometimes difficult
to know which is which.
My people escaped the Tsar’s Fists,
to find ourselves free
of the Shoah as well.
But no Jew truly escapes
that time, those places,
unscarred, unscathed.
I have no numbers on my arms,
But I have studied the charts,
the cities, the deaths,
till I know them by heart.
Knowing means remembrance.
We Jews may be short
much of the time.
But our memories,
our memories are long.

Edition details

• Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0998601098
• ISBN 13: 9780998601090
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88