David G. Roskies - Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide

IN 1963, THE MONTREAL BRANCH OF THE JEWISH LABOR Bund marked the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Old-line Socialists, they commemorated the uprising by gathering on April 19, which fell on a Friday that year. No synagogue would host a secular event on the Sabbath, so they met in a school auditorium; the local Bundists had always gone their own way, since the time when they were the largest Jewish political party in Poland. I was fifteen years old, old enough to attend without my parents. My best friend Khaskl, who considered himself a Bundist and went to a Bundist summer camp in New York State, had brought me along.

There was no cantor to chant prayers in Hebrew, no prayers to a God that no one believed in anyway, and no concessions made to the Anglophones. Yiddish was the language spoken because the story happened to people who spoke Yiddish: the grandparents, parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and comrades of the people sitting in the auditorium. That evening I heard about the heroic exploits of other ghetto fighters: not Mordecai Anielewicz but Abrasha Blum; not Mordecai Tenenbaum but Michal Klepfisz; of those who survived, not Antek Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin but Marek Edelman and Vladke Meed. Apparently, the Zionist and Bundist underground had been divided along party lines and joined forces only in the eleventh hour. This was a very different picture of the Warsaw ghetto uprising from the one I had learned at school, and I was now old enough to hear it, at a gathering that ended with the singing of two Yiddish hymnsthe Partisans Hymn, which I already knew and the Bundist hymn, which I didnt.

But nothing prepared me for the centerpiece of the evening: a dramatic reading of an epic poem by someone named Simkhe Bunem Shayevitsh, a martyred poet from the d ghetto. Abba Igelfeld, Khaskls uncle, read from a large printed folio. Abba had been a semiprofessional actor in his youth, and he had real stage presence. Un atsind, Blimele, kind-leb, he began in a sepulchral toneAnd now Blimele, my child, / Restrain your childish joy... , as if a father were interrupting an intimate conversation with his daughter to get her ready for the unknown road, because just now, in the dead of winter, theyve been ordered to leave their home, and besides packing what few belongings father, mother, and daughter can carry, they must also say goodbye to the thin wooden walls of their unheated ghetto room, to the table, the wardrobe, the conjugal bed, and above all the books, and there is just enough time to give Blimele instruction about those of her forebears who made similar journeys into the unknown, like Abraham of old, or like the poet Leivick who was exiled to Siberia, and Shayevitshs poem, I noticed, rhymed the way that Yiddish folk songs rhymed, and there wasnt one word or reference that eluded me, so simply was the poem written, for even if Id never heard of Tuwim or Yesenin, mentioned among the books that were being left behind, I could guess from the context that they were famous writers in some other language, and while Blimele was never taught the Torah directly, as a girl who grew up in a traditional home, I was old enough to know how Abraham leading Isaac to Mount Moriah and the prophet Jeremiah accompanying his people into exile were the biblical back story to the deportation of the Jews from the ghetto, and after Abba had been reading for a good fifteen minutes he raised his voice when the father said, Nor lomir nisht veynen, lomir nisht / yomern un lehakhis ale sonim / shmeykhlen, nor shmeykhlen, az vundern / zoln zey zikh vos yidn konenBut nows not the time to weep, / Not the time to lament, but to spite all our foes / Its time to break into a smile, yes a smile / To astonish them at what the Jews can do, and in the poets voice and through Abbas ventriloquism I recognized the call of Jewish defiance, the studied response of a stiff-necked, persecuted people.