Luminous Language

Walter Hess's collection of poems Jew's Harp sits on my coffee table. Illustrated deftly by Herb Stern, the book's cover is nondescript; nevertheless, its title beckons. Jew's Harp calls for an inquiry, a cross-examination, a response. Visitors to my home pick up the book, blindly scanning its pages. They press me: "Jew's harp? What is that?" Their tones are impatient, skeptical, and, finally...dismissive. I wonder about this. Is it the word "Jew" that provokes? Do the words together suggest something incongruous or inscrutable?

I delve further: a Jew's harp, an ancient musical instrument whose sound is produced by mouth and fingers, is so named, some sources claim, without any deserved reference to Jews. Apparently, in some quarters, the name is avoided altogether, considered too controversial to be uttered. Hess's collection, too, albeit doused in Jewishness, struggles with themes, motifs, and feelings that the Jew's harp arouses—utterance and avoidance. Walter Hess's poetry, like the sounds of the Jew's harp, is resonant and earthy, has deep overtones, and seems as ancient as the civilization from which he hails and of which he writes.

A quick glance at Walter Hess's biography confirms his abiding interest in Jewish identity. Born in Germany, he emigrated to the US in 1940 via Ecuador. He earned a masters degree from the City College of New York in 2003. He has translated the poetry of the German-Jewish émigré poet Hans Sahl in Metamorphoses, has had his own poetry published in, among other journals, New Vilna Review, American Poetry Review, and in the anthology, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (2007). In 2001, he won an award from the The Academy of American Poets. Jew's Harp, his first collection, comes at a pivotal moment in Hess's life: as the poet Marilyn Hacker has remarked, "Here is a 'new' poet whose voice breaks through in late middle age, in poems deep with memory and wide with history and writerly skill."

The poems in the collection explore the dimensions of silence and utterance, the buried expressions of a survivor. On Kristallnacht, Hess witnessed his own father taken off to Dachau. Soon after, the family fled to Ecuador. In Hess's own words:

As a teenager growing up in New York's Washington Heights, in which lived a large colony of refugees with histories similar to mine, I heard the almost constant repetition of...prayers for those who had died in the camps. The Holocaust became very personal and painful. Probably, because of that pain, I needed, for a very long time, to distance myself from it. For many years, I could not, for instance, read anything about the Holocaust. Only when I began to write poetry...did that begin to change.

In "Survivor," Hess expresses that distancing:

that book of shadowswhen we were kidswho knew enoughto fill in that which happened;knew to perfection that desire,no, the need to stay apart,away from them...

This necessarily brings up Theodor Adorno's oft-quoted declaration that to write poetry after Auschwitz is "barbaric." The debate lingers and the poems in this collection do nothing to quiet the debate. Can the Holocaust be represented adequately, compellingly? Does the systematic extermination of a people resist our ability to render the experience into art? Is the only appropriate response silence? Although Hess's poems wrestle with silence and have a beautiful quiet about them, the answer to these questions in Hess's poetry is resoundingly affirmative: art can be created; poetry about the Holocaust can and must be written and read.

The poems in the first half of the collection are in one way or another about the Holocaust or Judaism or Jewishness. The collection tellingly begins with "Survivor." Poems that follow are "Haimat," "1938," "Opa—The Old Synagogue," "A Midrash on Genesis 23." At around midpoint, the collection turns outward, not to the post-Holocaust or European world, but to the "new" world: "Melville Crossing Madison Square," "Washington Heights...