By
David Lehman
New
York, NY, USA
“After
Auschwitz”
In the yeshiva playground they were
marching
chanting marching around in circles
bearing pickets
bearing scrolls saying “No poems
after Auschwitz! No poems
about Auschwitz!” while in the back
row
the poet sat dreamily and stared
out the window, hungry.
Could there be lunch after
Auschwitz?
His mother did everything she could
have done
but there wasn’t money enough for
the necessary bribes
and her parents were deported to
Riga and shot.
A woman he met at a writer’s
conference
told him she was working on The
Holocaust and Memory
at Yale. The question she had was
this:
Are American Jews making a fetish
out of the Holocaust?
Has the Holocaust become the whole
of Jewish experience?
“You go to shul on Yom Kippur or
Passover
and everything is the Holocaust.” I
shut my eyes and hear
the old prayers made new: “Shame
is real,” said Ida Noise.
Hear, O Israel. The Lord is One. I, an
American, naturally preferred
a temple carved out of water and
stone: the rage of a waterfall,
the melody of a brook. But
back-to-nature as a strategy failed
when the phones started ringing in
the woods,
and only a child would think of
collecting dead leaves
and trying to paste them back on
the trees. So I returned
to the city, married, settled down,
had a child of my own,
pretended that I was just like
anybody else.
Yet I feel as if my real life is
somewhere else, I left it
back in 1938, it happened already
and yet it’s still going on,
only it’s going on without me, I’m
merely an observer
in a trenchcoat, and if there were
some way I could enter
the newsreel of rain that is
Europe, some way I could return
to the year where I left my life
behind,
it would be dear enough to me,
danger and all. To him,
an emissary of a foreign war, London
was unreal. He wondered
which of his fellow passengers
would make the attempt.
He knew now that they would try to
kill him,
tomorrow if not today. How could he
have been such a fool?
Herr Endlich said: “We have our
ways of making a man talk.”
In the last forty-eight hours he
had learned two things:
That you couldn’t escape the
danger, it was all around you,
and that the person who betrays you
is the one you trusted most.
The strategists in Washington
couldn’t figure it out. Why in hell
were the Germans wasting fuel on
trains to camps in Poland?
From Yeshiva Boys by David Lehman
(Header graphic from a painting entitled Birkenau Barracks Memorial 2 (2015) by Bruce
Gendelman. Courtesy of the artist.)
______________________________
David Lehman is a renowned editor,
literary critic, anthologist, poet and the founder of The Best American Poetry series.