THE SONG OF THE MURDERED JEWISH PEOPLE (Dos Lid fun Oysgehargetn Yidishn Folk)

Epic Poem by Yitzhak Katzenelson, 1944

The epic poem The Song of the Murdered Jewish People (1980; Dos Lid fun Oysgehargetn Yidishn Folk, 1944) by Yitzhak Katzenelson tells in 15 cantos the story of the destruction of Eastern European Jewry and their world, from the German invasion of Poland through the executions and deportations to the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto after the 1943 uprising. It begins, like Homer's Odyssey, with the exhortation to the poet to "Sing!" and ends, again like the classical heroic narrative, with a fight to the death between a small band of heroes and an overweening hostile force. Unlike Homer's epic, however, Katzenelson's ends in defeat: the heroes—the Warsaw Ghetto fighters whose death prefigures, in this poem, the fate of the Jewish people—dead, their possessions plundered, their lives and deaths unmourned, already half-forgotten. Katzenelson wrote his poem in the winter of 1943-44 while he was interned in Vittel. To increase the chances of his text's survival, he prepared six manuscript copies: two survive (one smuggled out of Vittel and taken to Palestine in the handle of a leather suitcase, the other buried on the camp terrain and exhumed after the war) and are preserved in the archive of the Beit Lohamei Haghetaot (Ghetto Fighters' House) in Israel. It was first published in Paris in 1945 in the original Yiddish in Hebrew script and has been translated into all the major European languages.

Encyclopedia Judaica has described Katzenelson's Song as "one of the greatest expressions of the tragedy of the Holocaust," and Hermann Adler has called it Eastern European Jewry's greatest poetic act of resistance. It is also an act of mourning, a lament for the dead: "Woe is me … There was a people once. All gone." The poet remembers them—the murdered millions who have been turned to fish food, to bone meal, and to soap—and bears witness on their behalf. This was the very job assigned the poet himself by his fellow partisans in the Warsaw Ghetto, who smuggled him out so that he could live to tell their story, the story of "the last Jews on Europe's earth." The poem thus begins with the poet's orders: "Sing! Take your harp in hand … and sing the last song of the last Jews who lived, who died, unburied, gone." And he accepts the charge: "I will sing … give me my harp that I can play."

Like all Katzenelson's work, this is an intensely oral text: its title, " Song, " can be taken literally. In this regard the poem bears the mark of the poet's previous work as a popular writer of lyric poetry, children's songs, and plays, designed for use within the life of the community. All the verses rhyme, the largely iambic meter is easily recitable, and large sections of the poem are written as dialogues. Indeed, the presentation constantly shifts from narration to dramatic action. In canto 8, for example, the brutal humiliation of two Jews—a rabbi and his shammes — by a German officer is staged as a terse three-person drama. By thus enacting the events, not just telling about them, the poet includes us, too, in the act of witnessing.

In stark contrast to the light and melodious tone that typified Katzenelson's pre-Holocaust lyrics, the language of this poem is violent, bitter, sarcastic, and often deliberately crude. The poet who once translated Heinrich Heine into elegant Hebrew has been replaced by a poet writing in the tradition of Chaim Nachman Bialik's haunting Kishinev pogrom poems. Unlike Bialik, however, Katzenelson writes from within the disaster. His is a writing against time: the pace is breathless, the sentences fragmented, the repetitions frantic. At the same time, as if to stave off the end, the verses steadily increase in length; by the end of the poem they have literally doubled in length, and the prosodic frame is stretched to the breaking point. Chronology, too, no longer holds. Thus, the early days of the German occupation (canto 10) are remembered long after the deportations and the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto have begun to be described (cantos 4 and 5). What holds—and holds the poem together—is the rigorous discipline of textual form: fifteen cantos of fifteen four-versed stanzas each, each tightly framed by end-accented cross-rhymes. This form remains consistent from the first verse to the last.

Of all the unresolved questions in this poem, the one that most haunts it is the question of God. As the poet bitterly notes, God has disappeared as his people are being slaughtered: "No God, you heavens, lives in you!" The paradox is that, despite his absence, he is omnipresent in the text. For, according to the Hebrew tradition of gematria, the hermeneutic rule establishing the numerical equivalence of letters, 15 signifies God: vh . In the doubling of the number 15 (15 15-stanza cantos), God thus reappears as the poem's structuring principle. And so, in writing "as if there were a God," the poet reinscribes God as the wager on which creation is founded.

—Angelika Bammer