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  • Young Jewish Poets Who Fell as Soviet Soldiers in the Second World War by Rina Lapidus
  • Nahma Sandrow
Rina Lapidus, Young Jewish Poets Who Fell as Soviet Soldiers in the Second World War. New York: Routledge, 2014. 240pp. $145.00.

This book can break your heart. Rina Lapidus commemorates the brief lives of fifteen Jewish poets under the age of 35 who served in the Soviet military during World War II and uses their individual stories to personify the mass deaths, Jewish and non-Jewish, of that dark time.

The individual biographies vary. Whole-heartedly committed to the Bolshevik revolution or ambivalent, from somewhat observant homes or totally assimilated, from cultured backgrounds or virtually unschooled, urban or rural, poor or comfortable, married or still too young for much romantic or erotic experience—a few snapshots suggest the variety: Hennikh Shvedik, who began writing in the new autonomous Jewish region of Birobidzhan, translated Anton Chekhov into Yiddish, and marched as the “leader of song” at the head of his battalion; Aron Kopshtein, who triumphed over his miserable childhood as an impoverished orphan to publish six volumes of Ukrainian poetry; Jack Althausen, a widely popular poet, given to criticisms of the Soviet Union that would inevitably have led to his arrest if he had survived; Vladimir Avrushenko, a loyal Communist who defied his Nazi captors so fiercely that they tied his legs to two army tanks and tore him in half; Elena Shirman (the only woman), consumed by unrequited passion for a younger man; Leonid Rosenberg, conscripted right out of school, whose entire oeuvre when he died at nineteen consisted of one poem that had won him a Russian youth prize, plus his letters home to mother. All were dead by 1944 at the latest. Because the fifteen chapters are organized chronologically by year of birth, they seem to get younger and younger as the book progresses. But all of them “made a significant contribution to the development of Soviet poetry concerning ... war,” and all of them have been forgotten.

The editor has made a valiant effort to do justice to each poet. The facts of their lives are difficult to trace, and publications from that chaotic period, especially minor publications, even more difficult. However, each chapter ends with many solid [End Page 254] footnotes, and a sizable bibliography deepens the volume. A useful introduction provides context, and the conclusion reflects on poetry about death. In addition, a simple list of the names of other poets who were too old to fit here intensifies the emotional impact.

Woven into each biographical chapter are samplings of the works, both excerpts and whole poems. Unfortunately, the cruel result of fifteen such samplings, one after another, is that the poets’ individual voices tend to blur together. The subjects are largely predictable: descriptions of preparation for battle, of camaraderie among soldiers, and of the terrible battles themselves; longing for home, wife, and especially mother; patriotism. Many, many are about death. In her conclusion, the editor proposes an entire literary genre of young people facing—or some cases refusing to face—death. The reader of these poems must keep in mind that censorship precluded any hint of fear or even regret at the prospect of laying down one’s life for the Soviet homeland. Similarly, expressions of religious feeling or references to Jewish religion or culture were strictly illegal. The book also includes poems about such poetic staples as nature, poetry itself, and (surprisingly infrequently) personal love. We do not know the editor’s criteria: did she choose the poems she considered best, or most typical, or most revealing of the historical moment?

Writing about the poems themselves clearly presented a challenge. They were written in Russian, Ukrainian, or Yiddish but are all rendered in English translation, which inevitably homogenizes their effect and makes the analysis of meter and diction difficult. The editor offers some useful context about the influence of contemporaneous literary movements, notes recurrent images such as the wind, and identifies individual distinguishing characteristics such as “poet of dreams.” However, her glosses are often reduced to simple restatements of text, such as “the poet longs for his childhood home,” which are unnecessary and...

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