Post-memory and the Shoah
And Anne Garvey analyse books of poetry and prose that reach across a spectrum from gravity to absurdity
Poems born in Bergen-Belsen
By Menachem Z. Rosensaft Kelsay Books, £13.53
AThe language of ‘Seder’ acquires a quasireligious intensity
DAM KAMMERLING is part of a new wave of cool, young, culturally hyphenated British and American poets. Seder features syntactically and typographically experimental poems, like those by the Cypriot-British Anthony Anaxagorou, whose press publishes Kammerling’s debut collection, and the Jewish American Ilya Kaminsky, whose blurb – “a beautiful lyric collection” – adorns this volume’s cover.
Seder is a collection about memory, and its centrality both for Jews observing the Passover ritual and in everyday life. This is beyond personal memory. As Kammerling shows, writing about the Shoah — “I have not suffered this” — the Holocaust is evoked here as what the critic Marianne Hirsch calls “post-memory,” or the memory that one inherits from others.
Kammerling describes “a strange feeling to reach for memory and hold nothing/ like leaning into a fall blindfolded; the stomach jumps’.” However terrible a memory, it appears to be better than the alternative of “nothing”.
Lyrical lines convey the spiritual transcendence of Judaic ceremony: “our every arrival to when there is set these candles/ this horseradish cut finely this glass holding its small fire”.
“Fire” may evoke the Ner Tamid (eternal light), which burns near the ark in every synagogue, and also something as ineffable as the soul. The absence of punctuation here is typical of Seder, and serves to heighten and estrange the language so that it acquires a quasi-religious intensity. Seder’s general religious theme is punctuated by poems specifically about Passover. Kammerling writes in the closing poem: “my prayers are music on the edge/ of collapse alive in tongue’s root/ like an ache Hebrew fits messy/ into song’s holes”. These lyrical anglophone poems approximate awkwardly (“fits messy”) to prayers recited in Hebrew.
In his very different poems, the American poet Menachem Z. Rosensaft displays no awkwardness in evoking religion and relating it to the Holocaust. Indeed, the epigraph to Poems Born in BergenBelsen is taken from the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “To bless grandchildren and be blessed by them, to teach them and to be taught by them – these are the highest Jewish privilege.”
Rosensaft’s foreword opens by expressing gratitude to his “teacher and mentor Elie Wiesel”, the quintessential memoirist of the Holocaust in America. Thus, the parameters of this collection are starkly presented in the title, the epigraph and the foreword. What follows are primarily meditations on the Holocaust and its relationship to a Judaic world-view.
So far as ethics are concerned, this collection cannot be faulted. Rosensaft assures the reader that “Black lives matter/ of course Black lives matter”, and relates “Auschwitz” to other, more recent genocides: Srebrenica, Butare, Darfur and Myanmar’.
Read from ethical, religious and biographical perspectives, Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen has important matters to teach the reader. However, it disappoints as poetry. Rosensaft’s use of language does not come close to, say, Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975) or many of the poems anthologised by Hilda Schiff in Holocaust Poetry (1995) and Marguerite M. Striar in Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (1998).
Of course, it is tragic that Rosensaft’s five-year-old half-brother was gassed at Auschwitz, three years before the poet was born. However, Rosensaft’s repetitive, flat language struggles to unite intellect and emotion — “once upon a time/ my brother/ used to laugh/ used to play/ used to sing/ used to have/ tomorrows”; “he/ does not know how many/ minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years”; “he/ no longer remembers/ a smile/ a hug/ a kiss’’, and so on.
Overall, I would recommend Kammerling as an experimental poet exploring the significance of ritual and memory, and Rosensaft as a worthwhile Holocaust memoirist.
Peter Lawson’s books include the anthology ‘Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry in Britain since 1945’ and a volume of his own poems, ‘Senseless Hours’