To My Father in Brooklyn

by Itshe Slutsky

Today is Yom HaShoah, which every year raises difficult questions about remembrance and about forgetting. How do—how should, how can, how must—we remember the Holocaust? What do we forget? And towards what ends?

The Holocaust looms large over the last 80 or so years of Yiddish poetry. How could it not? Many great Yiddish writers survived and wrote about those years of destruction; many other great writers did not survive them.

But what about those artists who were murdered before they could become truly great? I’m thinking of Itshe Slutsky, whose poem I’ve translated below. I love Itshe—it’s hard for me not to call him by his first name—and I’m haunted by his writing, by his life, in ways that I can’t do justice to in this little newsletter entry.

Today he’s almost completely forgotten. Born into poverty in southern Belarus, in 1912, he studied in the famous Mir Yeshiva before falling in love with classical music, and leaving orthodoxy behind. In 1936 he moved to Danzig, and in 1938 tried to emigrate to America, where his father was already living. He was denied entry at Ellis Island, and returned to Europe. His only poetry collection, Inmitn, “Within,” was published in Warsaw, in 1939.

Warsaw, 1939: not an auspicious time and place to publish a debut collection of Yiddish poetry. By the end of the war, all but two copies of his book had been destroyed. It’s never been reprinted.

At some point after his return from Ellis Island, Itshe moved back to his hometown of Lakhve, where he helped to lead the local ghetto’s underground resistance movement. On September 3rd, 1942, when the Germans attempted to “liquidate” Lakhve’s Jews, Itshe was among the planners of an armed uprising. Many historians consider this the first armed Jewish resistance against Nazi occupation.

He survived the ensuing battle, and helped hundreds of other survivors to find at least a temporary refuge in the woods and marshes of southern Belarus. For the rest of his brief life, Itshe fought as a partisan, serving with a Soviet partisan unit in the forests outside Minsk, and leading guerrilla attacks on Nazi forces.

Itshe died in battle in the Belarussian forest, in the winter of 1944.

---

My Father in Brooklyn
Danzig, 1936

Like pages of a book whose cover is tattered and gray
his 63 years are spread in front of me;
each line is full of a repressed sadness
and of his generation’s silences.

His every word speaks of despairing weeks,
of anguished days. Each word, each letter.
Since 12 years old he’s carried everywhere
a yoke, a heavy burden, and he’s never once asked
why—
never a why—

From Lakhve-Mikashevitsh and from Minsk as far as Kharbin
pain lingers behind him, a mute shadow,
as he flies like a nestless bird, no destination,
from country to country, town to town. 

I write a poem for him now, a poem separated by five thousand miles,
by the tumult of a sea that swells and ebbs:
I stand beside its shores and try to catch a whisper,
a whisper from his pages as they read themselves...

---

I have to admit that I don’t know what to say here. It’s a poignant poem, animated by distances. By the distances—physical, temporal, emotiona—between Itshe and his father, but also by the distances between Itshe and us.

What can I say in the face of the chasm which Europe became, which almost destroyed every one of Itshe’s poems without a trace? The chasm in which he died fighting, and through which this poem, against all odds, has somehow reached us. Two copies of this book survived, but how many other young poets were murdered or died in combat without even one copy of one poem outliving them?

When I read Itshe’s poetry I have the sense that I’m communing with an exceptionally talented, sensitive, and sad young man. Somebody who was working hard to find a structure for his sadness, and to render it beautiful.

Should we try to consider his poetry without thinking of the circumstances of its near-destruction, and of his death? Is this even possible? But isn’t it disrespectful to his poems if we let the Holocaust retroactively become an essential part of their story?

To me these questions are a microcosm of some of the most difficult, more general questions about Holocaust remembrance. I’m inclined to try to resist the impulse to turn Itshe into an object lesson in Artists During the Holocaust, even though it’s an impulse I don’t think I can fully overcome. Maybe I should just say that I’m moved and impressed by his verse, and awed by the resilience and heroism with which he lived the last years of his life.