Voices of Pain, Cries of Silence

Why This Book?

Poetry is tragedy through which the being of humankind transpires according to the modes of the Insurmountable. It is situated at the limit of the unsayable. Poetry is neither tears nor tearful song. It is the possible saying of impossible Events ...¹

Poetry of the Shoah² has been an established field of international scholarly research since the 1980s when Holocaust Studies came into their own as an academic discipline, yet there can be no doubt that the field has also become increasingly canonical. There are now numerous studies on the poetry written in many different languages—Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, English—by victims such as Miklós Radnóti, Itzhak Katzenelson, and David Vogel; survivors such as Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Dan Pagis, Abba Kovner, Abraham Sutzkever, and János Pilinszky, Jewish (and non-Jewish) non-deportees contemporaneous with the war or second-generation writers such as Nelly Sachs, Charles Reznikoff, Sylvia Plath, Tony Harrison, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, William Heyen, Lily Brett, Karen Gershon … Yet there exists too a considerable body of Francophone or French-language poetry that has been almost entirely overlooked or frankly ignored by literary historians and scholars.

One needs only to consult some of the major anthologies in English of “Holocaust Poetry” published at the end of the twentieth century, containing translations of poetry from many different languages, to ascertain how the existence of French-language poetry has been completely ignored,³ for example Stewart J. Florsheim’s Ghosts of the Holocaust: An Anthology of the Second Generation (1989), Hilda Schiff’s Holocaust Poetry (1995), Aaron Kramer’s The Last Lullaby: Poetry from the Holocaust (1998), and Marguerite M. Striar’s Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (1998).⁴ Even the more recent anthology by Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght, Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology (2019) contains no French poets except André Sarcq writing on the persecution of homosexuals during the war.⁵ In France or the Francophone world, such anthologies are either inexistent or, if they do exist, contain mainly poems translated into French from other languages.⁶

This striking absence or neglect is even more surprising given the specific historical, cultural, and intellectual context of France and its wartime past, the “Vichy syndrome” as the French historian Henry Rousso famously put it in 1987, the past that refuses to pass (away) or disappear. And indeed, occupation, collaboration, resistance, and deportation have become key interrelated terms when approaching any aspect of France’s experiences during the Second World War. The last forty years in France, for instance, have seen high-profile war-crime trials (Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, Maurice Papon, as well as the trial-that-was-not-to-be with the assassination of René Bousquet), contributing to the further erosion of the Gaullist myth of “la France résistante” already considerably shaken by the end of the 1960s. Ground-breaking French cinematic documentaries since the war (Alain Resnais, Marcel Ophuls, Claude Lanzmann …), while clearly reflecting and indeed shaping historiographical trends, have also maintained the war, deportation, and the Shoah on the French intellectual horizon, while Resistance poetry (Aragon, Éluard, Desnos …) is now both celebrated and institutionally consecrated. More importantly, French and Anglo-American literary scholars dealing with the war continue to privilege Jewish and non-Jewish French-language prose narratives and testimonies on the concentration and extermination camps by writers such as Elie Wiesel, Anna Langfus, Piotr Rawicz, David Rousset, Robert Antelme, Charlotte Delbo, and Jorge Semprun,⁷ as well as a younger generation of writers such as Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, and Henri Raczymow,⁸ while the innumerable contemporary works of fiction in French on the Second World War and the Shoah have exacerbated the interminable aesthetic and ethical debates on the complex relationship between fiction, history, and memory (a debate relaunched after Jonathan Littell’s 2006 Goncourt prize-winning Les Bienveillantes).⁹ All of this, I would say, but still there has been no substantial study, in English or in French (or in any other language for that matter, to my knowledge), of Francophone Jewish poetry of the Shoah.

It is true that certain Jewish poets such as Benjamin Fondane have entered the French-language canon of what some critics increasingly refer to as “concentrationary literature” (though there is no evidence that Fondane was able to write anything at all during his internment and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz where he was gassed shortly afterward), while the large corpus of poetry composed in French mainly by non-Jewish Communists, Gaullists and non-politically affiliated resistance fighters incarcerated during the war in Vichy and Nazi prisons, transit camps and concentration camps, occasionally overlapping with that of Jewish poets, was subjected to close critical scrutiny by myself in Beyond the Limit-Experience: French Poetry of the Deportation, 1940–1945 (2002). Indeed, the present research monograph, aiming to fill the gap in the literary historiography of French-language writing on the Shoah, was initially conceived while researching Beyond the Limit-Experience more than twenty years ago. In a sense, this is a belated complementary study to my earlier book and will, I hope, spur further research into at least some of the neglected poets I resurrect in the present corpus.

The Corpus

There is a corpus then, one I have patiently identified and assembled over the last twenty years to constitute a constructed object of study: Francophone Jewish Poetry of the Shoah. But what is it exactly? A few working definitions might clarify.

Francophone: because many of the authors discussed were born outside France (Poland, Romania, Russia, Germany, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia), or later settled in Francophone countries such as Switzerland and Belgium, or the province of Quebec, but they all chose to express themselves in French. There are of course poets in the corpus who were born and raised in France, even if their parents were originally born elsewhere. But the transnational aspect of this poetry is best captured in the term Francophone, by which I mean French-language or French expression, and France, I recall, is also a Francophone country. On the other hand, even though many of the poets we shall encounter are bilingual (Polish-French, Romanian-French, German-French, Turkish-French), sometimes even trilingual (French-Arabic- Hebrew, Polish-French-English), this study does not take up the issue of multilingualism and remains firmly focused on the poetry the authors wrote in French.

Jewish: the present study does not engage with the interminable questions raised since the 1960s related to the literary debates on expressions such as “Jewish writer of the French language,” “French writer of Jewish origin,” “French Jewish writer,” or even “Jewish writer” in general.¹⁰ This study, rightly or wrongly, cuts through such quandaries and takes as Jewish, authors who were born as such (through matrilineal descent, according to traditional orthodox Jewish law—there will be one exception), or were considered as such by others (Nazis and antisemites on the whole, in Sartrean terms the Jew in the eyes of the hostile other), regardless of their personal identification with the Jewish people or religion. In fact, Albert Memmi’s passing footnote in his 1962 Portrait d’un juif in which he suggested distinguishing between judéité, judaïcité and judaïsme,¹¹ is now largely accepted, and indeed many authors in this study would identify with Memmi’s description of judéité, the fact and manner of being Jewish. Others grew up observant, sometimes abandoning Jewish practice and sometimes resuming it, while yet others were born to totally assimilated Jewish parents and held at best a tenuous relationship to Jewish personhood and its cultural, ethnic, religious, political, and genealogical dimensions. Yet by personal or familial experience, by the fact of being Jewish, whether or not they felt Jewish, all the poets herein discussed, generational differences notwithstanding (and even when certain poets, as we shall see, were deported as political resistance members and not as Jews), take the Shoah or their personal deportation as a subject of their poetry.

And finally, the Shoah (1933–1945): the systematic persecution, marginalization, discrimination, and killing in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators of six million Jews condemned to death by starvation, forced labor, bullets, hanging, deadly injections or gas, for the sole reason of being born or considered Jews.

In a word, the poems in this study were written in French; their authors were (or are) Jewish; and they wrote either during the war or after it, either dealing with their own demons and personal histories or with the Shoah in general.¹² Some of these poets were deported. Some were murdered. Some survived. Others were hidden children or young adolescents in France or elsewhere.¹³ They belong to what Steven Jaron has termed the “liminal generation” whose members share in common a condition at once historical, existential and psychical, occupying a Freudian Zwischenreich, an “in-between”—between childhood or adolescence and adulthood, Judaism and Christianity, memory and history, fiction and historiography, French citizenship within the Republic and Jewishness.¹⁴ For her part, Susan Rubin Suleiman has coined the term of the “1.5 generation,” referring to child survivors of the Shoah who were “too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, and sometimes too young to have any memory of it at all, but old enough to have been there during the Nazi persecution of Jews,”¹⁵ subsequently identifying these writers, psychoanalysts, and historians as Georges Perec, Raymond Federman, Berthe Burko-Falcman, Boris Cyrulnik, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Saul Friedlander,¹⁶ but there are many more. Other poets belong to the post-Shoah or second generation (born after 1945), though to complicate matters the latter term has been adopted even by some poets who were born in the decade before the war but were not deported and who do not consider themselves “survivors.”¹⁷ As we shall see, finally, there are poets who used poetry to testify to their experiences during the war or to express their assessment of the Jewish genocide in the immediate post-war period, and others who would wait thirty to forty years before revisiting their past in poetic form.

A final word here on the main part of my title, Voices of Pain, Cries of Silence. Depending on the subject-positions of individual poets, their personal experiences and geographical locations, the poetic voices we shall encounter in this study oscillate between expressing and stifling the pain of suffering, allowing the cries of silence to reverberate simultaneously in what is articulated and remains unsaid. There is of course a measure of generalization in these remarks in a corpus that is far from homogeneous and cuts through critical categorization, as we shall see, but the notions of voicing pain and crying silence nevertheless best encapsulate, I believe, some of the many contradictory positions assumed and challenged by Francophone Jewish poetry in relation to the Shoah.

Poetry Matters

There is of course one further key-term in Voices of Pain, Cries of Silence: Francophone Jewish Poetry of the Shoah that I have not just addressed: Poetry, and why it matters. The various compilers and commentators of the previously cited English-language anthologies on poetry of the Shoah have all attempted in their own way to answer this seemingly disingenuous question. Gerald Stern, for example, in his foreword to Stewart J. Florsheim’s anthology of poetry by the second generation of English-language poets poses a whole series of paratextual but also aesthetically related questions regarding such poetry, not just concerning what a Shoah poem is or should be, or what demands and freedom the Shoah as an unprecedented cataclysm allows it, but how readers are supposed to react to a whole series of feelings expressed: intensity, passion, anger,¹⁸ to which I would add mourning and visible or between-the-lines trauma. In her more general anthology of twentieth-century poetry of witness, Against Forgetting, Carolyn Forché argues that “poetry of witness reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion. It often seeks to register through indirection and intervention the ways in which the linguistic and moral universes have been disrupted by events.”¹⁹ Such poetry would serve a social function. Hilda Schiff’s better-known anthology Holocaust Poetry would go one step further and assign such poetry an historical function. “While the contents of this book,” she writes,

in no sense mirror an historical survey of what occurred during the Holocaust, they are nevertheless a fundamental aid to historical understanding. The more or less contemporaneous literature of any period of history is not only an integral part of that period but it also allows us to understand historical events and experiences better than the bare facts alone can do because they enable us to absorb them inwardly. In involving ourselves in the authentic literature of the Holocaust, we come as close as we can to entering psychologically into those unique events as they were actually felt by those individuals who experienced them.²⁰

Such a position would evidently exclude from the category of the “authentic,” poems written by second or third-generation “postmemory” poets, a notion to which I shall return shortly and which Schiff fails to address. For her part, Marguerite M. Striar not only defends poetry as a legitimate response to the Shoah but echoes the psychological element of Schiff’s assessment, writing that

Many poets have probed their subconscious, their memories, or drawn from their dreams. Although there is ideological content in these poems, their primary effect is emotional, whether the poet speaks from personal experience or in the persona of someone who was there but cannot speak for him- or herself.²¹

As with Schiff, Striar would indicate that a poem of the Shoah is intimately connected to the question of presence (at the scene of the crime, so to speak), again neglecting issues of postmemory or post-generational memory, and all the ethical problems raised by the vicarious witness, as we shall see shortly. Finally, Boase-Beier and de Vooght explain that for them, with perhaps some measure of deeply ingrained (or desired?) humanist thought, poetry of the Shoah “might help readers who are less familiar with the many people who suffered, and are still suffering. Perhaps—because poetry engages the reader’s emotions in a way that documentary writing cannot—it might also help us examine our thoughts and ways of behaving.”²² Perhaps the most eloquent response, however, and certainly the most engaging and intellectually challenging, as to why poetry matters in the context of the Shoah, belongs to Susan Gubar in her 2003 Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew. While lamenting at the time of her study the lack of critical assessments of poetry of the Shoah (and notably of course of the English-language corpus she studies), Gubar writes that poetry “abrogates narrative coherence and thereby marks discontinuity. By so doing, it facilitates modes of discourse that denote the psychological and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the calamity without laying claim to experiencing or comprehending it in its totality.”²³ Poetry of the Shoah, she continues, or at least the post-Shoah English- language corpus she is concerned with, provides “spurts of vision, moments of truth, baffling but nevertheless powerful pictures of scenes unassimilated into an explanatory plot,”²⁴ yet it also uses “interpretive insistence” and a sustained “act of attention” in order “to respond to or analyze preexistent literature; to fill in lacunae in the historical record; to curse evil or praise good; to witness against wrongdoing; to caution against ignorance and amnesia, which result in unteachability; and to underscore the central significance of what is deemed to be a decisive convulsion in culture.”²⁵

I should state that my reading of much of the post-war Francophone Jewish poetry of the Shoah often tends to concur with some of Gubar’s insights. One can find, for instance, as we shall see, a similar accusatory and imprecatory quality in the verse by child survivors, a comparable particularity of details and an awareness by certain poets, as I shall argue, of linguistic limitations, yet at the same time the recourse to familiar rhetorical figures or specific Jewish liturgical and scriptural traditions. Moreover, many poems in my own corpus would correspond to Joseph Brodsky’s view about what distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature, distinctions mentioned in passing by Gubar²⁶ but which subsequently structure her whole approach to her subject.

Verse, writes the Russian-born poet and essayist Brodsky in his essays On Grief and Reason (1995), taps three kinds of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and what he calls the “prophetic mode of revelation,” while “gravitating primarily toward the second and third.”²⁷ Brodsky’s first cognitive distinction, the analytical, will become apparent in the chapters that follow in poems that clearly lay claim to the documentary; the second, the intuitive, seeps through in verse that strives to recreate an atmosphere, often by impressionistic touches; and the third, the prophetic mode of revelation, would manifest itself in the poetry most rooted in Jewish scriptural tradition. Although I have adopted a very different methodological approach to that of Gubar via Brodsky, as I shall set out in the final section of this introduction, it is certainly worth mentioning that the latter issue of Jewish scriptural tradition (biblical or literary paradigms) is raised too by the Yiddish literature specialist Rachel Ertel in her Dans la langue de personne: Poésie yiddish de l’anéantissement, which I have already noted. Analyzing the aesthetic and moral problems encountered in the poetic representation in Yiddish of the genocide of European Jews, “the lack of concepts,” writes Ertel, “the incompatibility between words and forms to express this event have forever taken hold in the conscience of all those who broach it. Because whatever one does, whatever one says, one is led to use preexistent forms of expression to express an unprecedented cataclysm.”²⁸ Morally, adds Ertel, citing Adorno as a point of reference (more of whom shortly), the risk in question for poetry, “through its function of catharsis and sublimation, is to become complicitous with the same barbarism”²⁹ it seeks to express. To try to resolve this contradiction, Ertel continues, Yiddish poetry, well-versed in the Jewish “tradition” of persecution and suffering, often has recourse to biblical and historical paradigms: the Flood, the sacrifice of Isaac, slavery in Egypt, the breaking of the Tablets of the Law, the wandering in the desert, the sufferings of Job, the lamentations of Jeremiah and other apocalyptic visions of Israel’s prophets, exile, persecution, pogroms—all of which, by analogy, will have allowed these Yiddish poets to say the unsayable: “The more the reality to express was beyond the grasp of language, the more it was unsayable, the more the poets felt disconcerted by their inability to formulate the unformulable, the more they felt the need to have recourse to a culturally coded writing, a sort of refuge for their word, a password between the community of the dead and survivors.”³⁰

While we shall certainly encounter such paradigms in Francophone Jewish poets of the Shoah, we should not lose sight of what distinguishes my corpus from those of Gubar (English-language post-war poetry) and Ertel (Yiddish poetry), namely the fact that the French-language corpus is not only dominated by former internees, deportees, and child survivors—begging the question of course, as we shall see, of the future of “generational memory” and Francophone Jewish poetry of the Shoah—but that much of it (but not all) is written in a very particular French historical, cultural, intellectual, and national context. All of which leads us to further questions.