Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust

Any crime against humanity, regardless of proportion, revives the age-old question: How are we to learn from what has happened, lest atrocity repeat itself? In response, scholars labor to record ever more accurate and complete histories; archivists gather countless memoirs for posterity; logicians ponder causal relations and motives; and psychologists and sociobiologists scrutinize human aggression and passivity. Yet how can we keep history alive without becoming inured to it? Perhaps these poets know. Of all that has been written about the Holocaust, nothing is likely to surpass this heroic composition in power or in fidelity. Nothing is likely to tell the story better. In this symphonic work, Charles Fishman draws together an extraordinarily rich chorus of voices that represent the American response to the Holocaust. Fishman has listened to these voices as if they were his own, as if in this close attentiveness he would discover the record of his own complex relationship with that fatal epoch. Indeed, this arresting composition flows like an elegiac collection by a single author. Two brief thematic sequences are prelude to three long movements that track the Holocaust from the terrifying pogrom known as Kristallnacht through the decades immediately following the Holocaust, to the present. This surprising, significant, and deeply engaging orchestration provides most eloquent witness. Charles Fishman is Distinguished Service Professor of English and Humanities at SUNY Farmingdale, where he has directed the Visiting Writers Program since 1979. Among other awards and honors, he has received three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and the Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His five published books of poetry include Mortal Companions, The Death Mazurka, and Zoom. Catlives: Sarah Kirsch’s Katzenleben, a translation of poetry with Marina Roscher, was released by Texas Tech University Press in 1991.