Peretz MARKISH:

The Lovers of the Ghetto (extract)

Frenzy for blood and wine. Night falls
Suddenly on the ghetto: it is the executioner’s night —
The last, perhaps? A tumult surges up
As if each body, sensing the holocaust,
Then broke loose in a carnal torrent.
When from bound limbs the suffering streams
The senses wake, torn, from their torpor.
And the eyes of the ghetto, blazing pupils,
Like roses upon the filth will bloom.
And two by two they long to embrace and die,
And cross, entwined, the river of death,
Each bearing the other hung at the neck like a stone
So as to sink the quicker into the grave.
And lo, through the traps, the ditches,
The threat everywhere of the hunters lying in wait,
Breaking the iron vise of the barbed-wire enclosures,
The underground loves rise up in the ghetto.

David SFARD

Born in 1907 in Melnitsa (Volhynia), son of a rabbi, he studied philosophy in Warsaw and in Nancy. A leading figure of progressive poetry in prewar Poland. The wave of antisemitism that began to rage in Poland from 1968 onward, under the guise of anti-Zionism, led him to leave his country and settle in Israel. His subject is the reminiscence of a once-flourishing Jewish life, of tragedy and of rebirth, in a controlled style where, however, the serene meditation takes on, after the drama of 1968, heart-rending accents.

“DAYS OF DREAD”

(…)

Each hour is full of menace,
At every threshold fear keeps watch,
The night waits in terror
For the sky to turn its face to blue.

Wandering from town to town goes
The terrible and cruel idol,
Tangling roads and alleyways,
Snaring every step.

In the open air a fly drifts
At the frozen crest of the convents,
On every spire a dream of spring
Awaits, like a gallows, its rope.

All the roads have gone blind
And all the footsteps
Are weary of wandering
In the depths of effacement.

The truth, only the nights tell it,
The days that are born of darkness
Go to lose themselves in darkness,
The dawns lie as they please.

I seek you in the middle of the night,
My heart is drowning
In ponds of sorrow………

Nelly SACHS

Nobel Prize in Literature (1966).

Excerpt from Brasier d’énigmes et autres Poèmes (Brazier of Enigmas and Other Poems) (Denoël, 1967).

O NIGHT

O night where the children weep
night of the children marked out for death!
To sleep there is no longer any way.
Dreadful keepers
take the place of the mothers,
hold clenched in the muscles of their hands a treacherous
death,
walls and rafters are sown with it…
There is no longer any place where the nests of horror are
hatched.
It is anguish and not milk that the child drinks at the
mother’s breast.

If only yesterday the mother
led, pale moon, her son to sleep,
in one arm the doll
whose cheeks’ red is worn away with kisses,
in the other the stuffed animal
that in love came back to life,…
Now a wind of death blows
that as it passes turns the shirts back over the hair
through which no comb will pass again.