cover image Truth and Lamentation

Truth and Lamentation

Teichman. University of Illinois Press, $44.95 (526pp) ISBN 978-0-252-02028-5

``Insensate, gray, degenerate they toil, / Cut off from human life, / Stiff, wounded, branded with official stamps,'' poet Gertrud Kolmar wrote in 1933, eerily predicting the Holocaust. In a vivid, lyrical prose piece, Irena Klepfisz speaks from the point of view of a three-year-old child who with her mother is passing as Polish. Sara Nomberg-Przytyk writes of a pregnant young woman in Auschwitz. Jerzy Ficowski offers lullaby-like words to an infant handed over to Christians outside the Warsaw ghetto. Alongside familiar writers of Holocaust literature (Elie Wiesel, Nelly Sachs) are others known mainly to avid poetry readers (William Heyen, William Pillin), and better-known writers are displayed in a new context (Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy). Among writings that grew out of the ghettos, the works of Simcha Bunim Shayevitsh, written shortly before his deportation to Auschwitz, draw moving parallels between Biblical accounts of exile and the people being carted off in 1942. Fortunately, the works in this volume are strong and rich enough to transcend the editors' simplistic analysis. Teichman is a professor of English at Marist College in New York; Leder wrote The Language of Exclusion. (Jan.)