PRISM • AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATORS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATORS • A ROTHMAN FOUNDATION PUBLICATION 2495 Amsterdam Avenue AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATORS New York, NY 10033 www.yu.edu/azrieli EDITOR DR. KAREN SHAWN, Yeshiva University, New York, NY ASSOCIATE EDITOR DR. MOSHE SOKOLOW, Yeshiva University, New York, NY EDITORIAL BOARD DARRYLE CLOTT, Viterbo University, La Crosse, WI DR. KEREN GOLDFRAD, Bar-Ilan University, Israel YESHIVA UNIVERSITY • AZRIELI GRADUATE SCHOOL OF JEWISH EDUCATION AND ADMINISTRATION BRANA GUREWITSCH, Museum of Jewish Heritage– A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York, NY (Ret.) DR. DENNIS KLEIN, Kean University, Union, NJ DR. MARCIA SACHS LITTELL, School of Graduate Studies, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Pomona DR. CARSON PHILLIPS, York University, Toronto, Canada DR. DAVID SCHNALL, Yeshiva University, New York, NY DR. WILLIAM SHULMAN, President, Association of Holocaust Organizations, New York, NY DR. SAMUEL TOTTEN, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville DR. WILLIAM YOUNGLOVE, California State University, Long Beach ART EDITOR DR. PNINA ROSENBERG, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa; The Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Israel POETRY EDITOR DR. CHARLES ADÈS FISHMAN, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities, State University of New York ADVISORY BOARD STEPHEN FEINBERG, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Ret.) DR. LEO GOLDBERGER, Professor Emeritus, New York University, NY DR. YAACOV LOZOWICK, Israel State Archivist YITZCHAK MAIS, Historian, Museum Consultant, Jerusalem, Israel DR. MORDECAI PALDIEL, Yeshiva University, New York, NY DR. ROBERT ROZETT, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel MARK SARNA, Second Generation, Real Estate Developer, Attorney, Englewood, NJ DR. DAVID SILBERKLANG, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel DR. MARLENE W. YAHALOM, Director of Education, American Society for Yad Vashem DR. EFRAIM ZUROFF, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem, Israel AZRIELI GRADUATE SCHOOL DEPARTMENT EDITORS DR. CHAIM FEUERMAN DR. JEFFREY GLANZ DR. MOSHE KRAKOWSKI DR. RONA MILCH NOVICK SPRING • VOLUME 2016 8 DR. DAVID PELCOVITZ DR. LAYA SALOMON DR. ILANA TURETSKY ART DIRECTOR EMILY SCHERER STEINBERG, Yeshiva University, New York, NY PROJECT MANAGER STEVEN SCHLOSS, Yeshiva University, New York, NY COPY EDITOR DAVID B. GREENBERG, Jerusalem, Israel SPRING 2016 VOLUME 8 ISSN 1949-2707 PRISM_cover_flat_2016.indd 1 2/16/16 12:28 PM Contents Cover Wall of Hope 63 Cissi Klein’s Memorial: A Portrait LYN ROBINSON in Bronze (art history) PNINA ROSENBERG 1 Introduction K AREN SHAWN 68 Anne (personal narrative) VA NESSA WA LTZ 3 The Tomatoes (poetry) TERESA MOSZKOWICZ-SYROP 70 Moments: Separation and Return (memoir) 4 The Apple (short story) LORE BAER JENNIFER ROBERTSON 72 My Father’s First Day in America 6 Name Tag (poetry) (poetry) NORITA DITTBERNER-JAX JOHN GUZLOWSKI 8 Zofia Nałkowska: Medallions 74 A Portrait in Poetry: Writing From and the Bonds of Life the Testimony of Roman Kent (historical research) (pedagogy) JENNIFER ROBERTSON HOLLY MANDELKERN 14 In the Darkness (short story) 80 Life: Survivor Portraits ZOFIA NAŁKOWSKA (photo essay) 16 Shimon and Lily; Marlite KELLY LEE WEBECK (testimony poetry) 87 Chocolate (poetry) BREINDEL LIEBA KASHER ELIZABETH ROSNER 18 Janusz Korczak, Educator: 88 Moments: Hunger (memoir) Teaching Humanity in the Face FREIDA HARRIS of Evil (historical research) SARA EFRAT EFRON 89 My Mother Doesn’t Know Who Allen Ginsberg Is (poetry) 24 Moments: Early Memories ALAN KAUFMAN (memoir) MYRA HERBST GENN 92 Freedom Dancers (poetry) GAIL FISHMAN GERWIN 26 Portraits: The Last Transport From the Bedzin-Sosnowiec Ghetto, 1943 94 “Is the Holocaust Even My Story (photo essay) to Tell?” Portrait of Thandeka, ANN WEISS a Black South African Holocaust Educator (biography) 41 A Portrait of a Student in a Hebrew BRENDA GOUWS Preschool in Bedzin, Poland with JOHAN WASSERMANN (historical research) GALIA SHENBERG and MIRIAM YESHAYA 102 My Son Returns From Auschwitz (poetry) 46 Moments: Memories of Hiding in STEPHEN HERZ France (memoir) CLAIRE SCHUSCHNY 103 Majdanek (poetry) ELIZABETH SPALDING 48 Helena’s Haggadah (poetry) MARJORIE AGOSÍN 105 The Earth Has Not Forgotten: A Journey to Poland 50 The Sternbuchs: Portrait of a (photo essay) Rescue Team (historical research) DEBBIE TEICHOLZ GUEDALIA BRANA GUREWITSCH 111 The Undarkened Window 56 The Yiddish I Know (poetry) (poetry) CHAIA HELLER RAJZEL ZYCHLINSKY 57 Yiddish (poetry) 112 Settings (poetry) SEYMOUR MAYNE ARNO ROLAND 58 Rajzel Zychlinsky: 114 About the Contributors Writing in Her Mother’s Tongue (literary research) 117 Acknowledgements, Credits, KARINA VON TIPPELSKIRCH Permissions SPRING 2016 • VOLUME 8 iii “Despite its minimalism and simplicity of language,” writes Karina von Tippelskirch, “Rajzel Zuchlinsky’s poetry possesses existential depth and the ability to capture the world in its smallest details.” This portrait introduces us to “one of the greatest Yiddish poets of the 20th century.” Follow this reading with Chaia Heller’s “The Yiddish I Know” (p. 56), Seymour Mayne’s “Yiddish” (p. 57), and Zychlinsky’s “The Undarkened Window” (p. 111). Karina von Tippelskirch Rajzel Zychlinsky: Writing in Her Mother’s Tongue ajzel Zychlinsky (1910–2001) is considered one of Zychlinsky’s early poetic imagery originates in the familiar the greatest Yiddish poets of the 20th century and a world around her. The intimacy of the domestic scene, Rmaster of the small poetic form. When the 18-year- however, contrasts with the modernist austerity of the old poet made her debut with a poem in the Yiddish news- poem. Indeed, Yiddish literary critics noted Zychlinsky’s paper Folks-tsaytung in 1928, no one could have imagined proximity to both French surrealism and the Introspectivist that she would become one of the few surviving Jewish movement in American Yiddish poetry, In-Zikh (Groezinger, poets of Poland. In the five books of poetry she published 2015, p. 272; von Tippelskirch, 2000, pp. 29–31, 39–40). after the Holocaust, Zychlinsky paid tribute to Eastern “Mother” is one of the only two poems in Lider that Europe’s destroyed Yiddish culture and memorialized the directly address another person: All of the others are lyrical murder of many of the Jewish people and of her own family, monologues. This speaks to the fact that Zychlinsky was, which haunted the poet for the rest of her life. from the beginning, a solitary writer. Throughout her life, In the foreword to her first book,Lider (Poems), pub- she joined no literary, social, or political group. Spending lished in Warsaw in 1936, Itzik Manger (1936) recalls how much of her time alone, she was an ardent reader of Yiddish, Zychlinsky arrived on the poetry scene like “a flurry Polish, French, German, and, later, Russian and English. As smelling of plum blossoms and birds flapping with their a young author, she was aware of the literary currents of wings over autumnal scenery” (p. 3). Manger, by that time her time, but in poetry, as in life, she insisted on forging one of the most influential modern Yiddish writers, com- her own way. Her poetic style was simple and unadorned, pared her poems to Japanese utas and tankas, short poems her voice clear and distinctly feminine. Zychlinsky never- written in free verse. He then offered a sparse inventory theless shares the characteristics of many a “New Woman” of the tropes used in Zychlinsky’s poems: “The mother, in the era between the fin-de-siècle and the 1930s, about the cat, the willow, the cloud, the poplar, the beggar, the which Linda Nochlin (2012) writes in her introduction to child, the well” (p. 3). One of her most often-quoted poems, The New Woman International: “Mother” (in Yiddish, “Mame”), illustrates how the author, with just a few images, evokes the intimate relationship What all New Images of the New Woman do have in between mother and daughter: common, flapper or vamp, political revolutionary or suffragette, is a heartfelt rejection of woman’s tradi- Mother, / you have made a fire. / Little pieces of wood tional role as it was defined by every society in the / you have blown into a sun. / You hear my hair world: rebellion against oppressive notions of the thanking you: / Thank you, thank you. / But outside, “womanly” understood to be a life devoted to subordi- the wind still wails. / Take it, mother, into your apron nating one’s own needs and desires to those of men, / and rock it to sleep. / The wind will believe you, / family, and children. (p. vii) and like a lamb / will close its eyes. (Zychlinsky, 1997, p. 177)1 Zychlinsky’s lyrical miniatures often return to the 58 PRISM: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATORS same images and themes, finely depicting them from ever- During this period, it was Manger’s Khumesh-lider (Bible new perspectives. The image of her mother is a leitmotif Songs; Roskies, 2011) that inspired her to read the Torah. in her work. Yet, as this essay will show, it shifted dra- Although the motive for her bible studies was a literary matically during and after the Holocaust. one, it provided a secular way for her to stay close to the religious world of her mother. The fruits of Zychlinsky’s ZYCHLINSKY’S CHILDHOOD INFLUENCES Torah reading surface in her second book, Der regn zingt Rajzel Zychlinsky grew up in Gabin, a small town of almost (The Rain Sings), published in Warsaw in 1939, on the eve of 6,000 inhabitants in central Poland, 77 miles northwest of World War II; of the 37 poems, a substantial portion have Warsaw. In 1921, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica biblical themes. Following Manger’s example, these poems (2007), almost half of the town’s population was Jewish. empathetically explore several overlooked and destitute Dvoyre (Deborah) Zychlinsky, the poet’s mother, was women, such as Leah, Hagar, and Tamar. The last poem, deeply religious; for generations, her family had produced however, foreshadows the violent expulsion that would soon respected rabbis. She chose to remain in Poland while her become the author’s own fate.