Bearing the Unbearable: Yiddish and Polish Poetry in the Ghettos and Concentration Camps

Chapter Two. The Great Chain of Being

o Chapter Two The Great Chain of Being Although an avowed Jew, WJadysJaw Szlengel was not as deeply rooted in Jewish culture and its literature as was Abraham Sutzkever. Moreover, while Sutzkever sought an idiom within aesthetic structures, and while he fine tuned his own lyric voice, finding in art a source of redemption and a vehicle of immortalizing evanescent Jewish life, Szlengel intuitively, rather than programmatically , seemed to avoid the aesthetic, recoiling from traditional poetics, which he apparently regarded as inappropriate for ghetto reality. Since this reality was a function not of familiar norms and values but rather of unimagined daily catastrophes, familiar terminology often sounded absurd and meaningless. The ghetto lexicon was, therefore, in a process of continuous change, providing nuances of meaning that the register of common language could no longer transmit. And it is in these linguistic transmutations that Szlengel found the most precise correlatives for ghetto surreality. Hence, Szlengel's poetic idiom is simple but ironic, conversational, and prosaic, imploding ghetto slang and deliberate Yiddishisms to destroy the perfect diction of prewar Polish poetry. Unsymbolic and concrete, unimaginative and sachlich, his images mean what they are. Yet no less than Sutzkever, Szlengel intended his poetry to immortalize fugitive life. This he did by casting that life into poetic form. The Last Ember and the Document Poem Both Szlengel's nostalgia, a tone that marks such early ghetto poems as "Telephone," and his preoccupation with the pain of cultural truncation were to undergo rapid and radical changes. His 40 a Bearing the Unbearable later poems, notably those written from 1942 to 1943, reveal concerns that dominate the poetry of those poets who like Sutzkever are rooted in Jewish tradition. Szlengel's transformation was probably a result of the inverse relationship between the growing atrocities and his intensified sense of Jewish identity-a phenomenon not unusual among assimilated Jews in both the Holocaust and other oppressions. Catapulted from his non-Jewish heritage into the ghetto, Szlengel, like the others, realized the bankruptcy of assimilation. His later ghetto poetry shows the dissolution of the lines between personal and communal grief. In this Szlengel reflects Jewish liturgy of destruction that tends to avoid individual grief and tragedy. Moreover, this tradition mourns not the individual victim or martyr but rather invokes the memory of communal suffering. Indeed, Judaic theodicy includes no saints' days, and whether it is individual martyrs, exalted leaders, or the mass destruction of thousands of Jews, they are all incorporated into Yom Kippur commemoration services.I Like Sutzkever's, Szlengel's later poetry is in the tradition of the duty of the "last ember" to leave a chapter of martyrology for posterity. As Irena Maciejewska states, his poems-like the notes of Adam Czerniakow, chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat, and the diary of the famous physician, educator, and writer Janusz Korczak or the entries of the noted historian Emanuel Ringelblumbecame the self-conscious chronicles of the condemned. Szlengel is now the poet of "documentary poems" (wierszy dokument6w), the recorder of "terrifying events" (straszliwych zdarzeri). "Te okreslenia raz po raz pojawiajQ si? u samego Szlengla i w nich zawarta jest najpelniejsza autodefinacja rodzaju jego tw6rczosci.,,2 (These descriptions repeatedly appear in the writings of Szlengel himself and embody the most comprehensive self-definition of the character of his work.) In an essay, a form of prose-poem, Szlengel writes: Wszystkimi nerwami czuj? si? duszony coraz mme7 dawkowanym powietrzem w lodzi, kt6ra nie odwolalnie idzie na dno. Rotnica jest minimalna: jestem w lodzi nie niesiony gestem bohaterstwa, ale wtrQcony bez woh winy czy wytszej racji. Ale jestem w tel lodzi i czuj? si? ;esli nie kapitanem, to w katdym razie kronikarzem tonQcych. Nie chc? zostawic Great Chain of Being 0 41 tylko cyfr dla statystyki, chc? przyszJfJ histori? wzbogacic (zJe sJowo) w przyczynki, dokumenty i ilustracie. Na scienie moiei Jodzi pisz? wiersze dokumenty, towarzyszom mega grobowca czytaJem elaboraty poety, poety anna domini 1943, szukaifJcego natchnienia w ponurei kronice swoich dni. 3 000 With all my senses I feel myself being suffocated by the diminishing air in a boat that is irrevocably going down. The distinction is minimal: I'm in this boat not carried by heroic gestures but rather thrown in without volition, guilt, or higher law. Still, I am in this boat; and if I don't perceive myself as its captain, I am nonetheless the chronicler of the drowning. I don't want to leave...