International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust

• To purchase used copies of Binem Heller’s Dos lid iz geblibn (The Song Alone Remains) or works by Aaron Zeitlin, contact our Book Department at orders@bikher.org
• Order the Leksikon fun Yidishn teater/Biographical Dictionary of Yiddish Theater from our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.
• Of related interest, see Awakening Lives:Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland Before the Holocaust by Jeffrey Shandler, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and Marcus Moseley (available in our Bookstore).

Yiddish poet and dramatist Aaron Zeitlin survived the khurbn (the Yiddish word for Holocaust) through an invitation to an American production of his play Esterke in 1939. The rest of his family, many of his friends and almost an entire culture was obliterated during his stay in New York. When news of the Holocaust’s devastating extent reached America in 1945, Zeitlin set down the following six lines:

I know that in this world no one needs me,
Me, a word-beggar in the Jewish graveyard.
Who needs a poem, especially in Yiddish?

In the spirit of these lines we honor January 27th, the United Nations’ recently-decreed “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.” Bearing witness to the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II is an important responsibility but it is equally essential to commemorate the victims who perished along with their art and their world.

After the destruction of Eastern European Jewry, many survivors tried to preserve what was lost by compiling literary anthologies and memorial volumes. It is only on the written page that the work of many victims of the Nazi genocide survives.

One of the first anthologies to appear was Binem Heller’s Dos lid iz geblibn (The Song Alone Remains). Published in Warsaw in 1951 by a group of Jews attempting to repatriate in Poland, Heller’s anthology reflects the image of Zeitlin’s word-beggar, standing among the ruins of Jewish Warsaw. Although, as Heller states in his introduction, “it is hard to find as tragic a collection of poetry in literature,” the anthology celebrates the beauty and complexity of modern Jewish life and stands as a snapshot of Jewish literary culture taken before the murder of the 37 featured poets.

Another attempt to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust was the fifth volume of Zalmen Zylbercweig’s six-volume magnum opus, Leksikon fun Yidishn teater/Biographical Dictionary of Yiddish Theater. The fifth volume or Kadoyshim band/ Volume of the Martyrs is a massive work in itself, collecting the biographies of hundreds of murdered actors and preserving the details of their impact on Jewish dramatic culture. Zylbercweig acknowledged the work of yizkor books which memorialized the Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, but felt he needed to dedicate an entire volume of his reference work to losses suffered by Yiddish theater alone. Photographs of the subjects head the biographical entries – sad ghosts that stand forever immortalized in the context of their talent and art.

Both works attempt to capture Yiddish cultural life as it was between the two World Wars. The artists portrayed in these anthologies are in their primes, at a time when Jewish art and culture was flourishing in Europe and when the horror of a holocaust could never have been imagined. While reading the poetry in Heller’s book or about the subjects of Zylbercweig’s volume, it’s easy to forget that these brilliant young men and women were victims, their vitality and genius consigned to the printed page.

Through these anthologies we are given an opportunity to touch the ephemeral, in Zeitlin’s words, of those who perished in the Second World War and to find beauty in what seems hopeless.

-Aaron Rubinstein