Counting the Stones

Heartwrenching, direct, personal poems about the Holocaust and the resulting dislocation endured by its survivors and their children, with 44 accompanying photographs.

In these heartwenching, unforgettable poems, three daughters of the Holocaust - one a survivor herself - recount their brave pilgrimages, psychic and physical, to bear witness to the past and to retrieve, in some measure, its terrible losses. Through clear language and imagery, poetic testimony reaches back to parents and relatives shrouded in terrors of memory, to rescue grief-frozen remembrance. "There's a bloody hole in my history./My losses are double for not knowing," writes Ruth Steinberg. Along in a synagogue after her mother leaves, Barbara Hyde Haber feels "amputated from my feelings/as I have been amputated from my past." Everything in the journeys becomes eloquent: the stones of Treblinka, a pile of shoes, of combs, babies' pacifiers. The smallest gesture tells a story. In "Auschwitz: The Blown-Up Crematoria," June Gould picks up a buttercup and crushes. "Just like this/I think --/Just like this." While the poems stand on their own merits, one is also grateful for the photographs. They reinforce the reality of the poets and their families who escape the borders of Counting the Stones into our consciousness, and who will endure in this powerful work. --D.H. Melhem, author of Country, Rest in Love, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice

This is survival, these poems that break silence. Reading them I become a daughter holding a mother's hand - "Mother, let us cry together - inheriting "waltzes not danced" and "jewels unseen," passing from Odessa to Quebec City carrying plum preserves always to taste, losing family forever to mourn. These three voices raise the ashes. What we cannot change is braided into clear, lived poems that refuse to fear the future. "...try to imagine this:/under the earth are roots/sending up more stories." Like stones these poems are gifts of remembrance, witness and endurance assuring us I was here, am here and will be. --Myra Shapiro, author of I'll See You Thursday

AUTH0RBIO: June Gould, Ph.D., the author of The Writer in All of Us: Improving Your Writing Through Childhood Memories, E.P. Dutton, teaches writing in the Masters of Writing Program at Manhattanville College. She is a published short-story writer, poet and essayist and is currently working on a novel, Outside a Train is Waiting, about a Holocaust survivor's daughter. She has received three grants from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on behalf of her novel as well as a grant from the Westchester (New York) Holocaust Commission to visit Poland's concentration camps in order to research her novel. She has been the director of numerous writing institutes for Fairfield University, Southern Connecticut University, Manhattanville College and Bank Street College. She is also a keynote speaker and workshop leader for the Internation Women's Writing Guild.

Barbara Hyde Haber (Messer) is a second-generation Holocaust survivor whose parents fled from Vienna after the Nazis came to power. She is a psychoanalyst with practices in New York City and Bedford, New York. She is on the teaching and supervising faculty of the Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and has published in this field. She lives with her husband in New Rochelle, New York and is a member of the International Women's Writing Guild.

Ruth Steinberg is a Holocaust survivor who was born in Vienna and emigrated to the United States when she was four years old. Before her retirement she was the Director of Technical Publications at a telecommunications research and development company. Her poems have appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Voices Past and Present, the Chosen of the Chosen, and The Jewish Women's Literary Annual. She is a member of the Academy of American Poets and the International Women's Writing Guild.