Kaddish: Before the Holocaust and After

by Jane Yolen

Overview

Recipient of the Sophie Brody Award (2022) for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature, for works published the previous year in the US, presented by the American Library Association (ALA). Kaddish is the first and only poetry collection to have received the Sophie Brody Award. 

Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is recited in a time of deep sorrow. In it, the sacredness of the Almighty One is affirmed. In her new gathering of sixty poems, award-winning author Jane Yolen gives us a feminist view of Biblical themes and personalities such as Eve, Sarah, David and Goliath. The poems then morph into those about the Holocaust and after. Yolen's unflinching and stark record of the many death camp horrors serve as reminders of that era's brutality and the unrelenting suffering visited upon an innocent people. “Knowing means remembrance,” Yolen writes—as each poem becomes a memorial, a teaching, a warning for our and future generations. Her book concludes: “... no Jew truly escapes/that time, those places,/unscarred, unscathed./I have no numbers on my arms,/But I have studied the charts,/the cities, the deaths,/till I know them by heart.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780998601090
Publisher:	Holy Cow! Press
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Jane Yolen, called the "Hans Christian Andersen of America" because of her work with fairy tales, is also a fine poet. Kaddish is her 13th book of poems for adult readers. In March, 2021 her 400th book was published. She works across all genres--children's books and adult books: science fiction, fantasy, historical novels, storybooks, short stories, cookbooks, music books, nonfiction, anthologies, collections--even a novel in verse. She has written musicals, and the lyrics for many bands.

She writes a poem a day which she sends to over a thousand subscribers. Six colleges and universities have given her honorary doctorates for her body of work. Her latest awards have been from the Jewish Book Council, the World Fantasy Association, a Massachusetts State Book Award, and a nomination by the USA for the International Astrid Lindgren Award. She lives in New England and in Scotland. If you need to know more about her, visit her website at: www.janeyolen.com. She is the author of three previously published poetry books from Holy Cow! Press: "Things to Say to a Dead Man: Poems at the End of a Marriage and After" (2011); "Ekaterinoslav: One Family’s Passage to America" (2012); and "The Bloody Tide: Poems about Politics and Power" (2014).

Read an Excerpt

Rusulka

She rises from the water, arms raised,
drops flooding her long, red hair that so recently was as fluid as the river.
She looks at the shore’s stoic banks still covered with withered stalks,
birch weeping openly into the weir.
She stares at the farmland beyond,
where nothing grew last season,
or the season before, the farm’s family fled.
She has been too long beneath the rills,
uncalled, unremembered, forgetting her old promises of the much-needed rain.
She pulls herself into a weeping tree.
Unseen Cossacks cast their fish-hooked net,
drag her out, fling her into the furrows.
They call her Jew, spread her legs,
leave her on the ground, far from the river.
She dries from the inside out, too quick for tears.
The farm languishes, the river disappears.
So we treat our guardians, our stories,
our land, our world.

Un-seeing

How to un-see the photograph:
three men, one playing accordion,
eight smiling women in uniforms,
taking a brief break.
They pose, grin, hide the cigs,
(it was the forties, you know)
trade anecdotes about work:
who dropped dead in fright,
how many they lost to starvation.
The fourth ofen had a Fehlfunktion.
That photograph title?
“Laughing at Auschwitz,”
while Anne Frank wastes away there dreaming of writing if only she had some paper,
if only she had a pen,
if only she had some time.

Kaddish

It is all here, you know,
the darkness, the light,
though sometimes difficult to know which is which.
My people escaped the Tsar’s Fists,
to find ourselves free of the Shoah as well.
But no Jew truly escapes that time, those places,
unscarred, unscathed.
I have no numbers on my arms,
But I have studied the charts,
the cities, the deaths,
till I know them by heart.
Knowing means remembrance.
We Jews may be short much of the time.
But our memories,
our memories are long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents WOMEN’S MIDRASHIM G-d’s Carton Light First Woman: Lilith Eve’s Navel What About Goliath Sarai/Sarah Hagar in the Wilderness Judges 4:21 Given Leave Hidden Figures An Interview with J Rusulka The Lamed-Vov That Old Anti-Semite Jakob Grimm G-d as Trickster THE SHOAH’S MANY VOICES The Child, the Bears, the War: 4 Views 1. Jewish Child with Teddy Bear, Poland 1935 2. That Boy 3. I Know This Child 4. Only A Photograph Kristallnacht in Hamburg Alphabet of Evil Blue the Color of Hope: On the Ship St. Louis Return to the Reich: On the Ship St. Louis Even Dachau Is Only A Place Majdanek: Winter 1941-1942 Ich Bin A Yood Photograph of a Dead Child on a Ghetto Street In the Lodz Ghetto at Dinner Acorns Sewer Rat Mengele Twin Experiment For A Child Dying of Typhoid in a Labor Camp What the Oven Is Not Holocaust Stories Un-Seeing AFTER EFFECT Dialogue Elie Wiesel Is Dead When We Were Put In Camps Yellow Star: A Song Without Music Silver Shirts Return Tzimmes Darkness Descendent Messenger Slouching Towards Bethlehem Talking Auschwitz Open Letter to John Galliano The Rivers of Babylon: In Memoriam The Widow Mandlestam On Viewing a Photograph of Donald at the Western Wall MITZVAHS AND MIRACLES Lulek and the Rabbi: April 11, 1945 The Trochenbrod Miracle No Escape If One Child Is Saved This Is the Miracle I Witness Kaddish

Editorial Reviews

"Jane Yolen's poems of witness and warning will grab you by the heart and squeeze. There's no turning away, especially from the narratives of Holocaust horrors, thankfully leavened by notes of hope. Bridging past and present through voices that bring both to life, Yolen reminds us that the Jewish memory is long, and makes us grateful for it."—Nikki Grimes, author of Ordinary Hazards, a memoir in verse; Winner, 2017 Children's Literature Legacy Medal

"In Kaddish: Before the Holocaust and After, Jane Yolen leads the reader to a place where “men are shot for being cold/for sneezing, for freezing,” where “a minyan of bones/dances the hora,” where the showers have “walls too thick/the gas too quick.” These are necessary poems of witness, reminding the reader that “we are all broken/we are all glass.” Life is precious. Life is fragile. Will humankind ever learn from its mistakes? These fine poems forbid us to forget and beg us to do better. They are more relevant today than ever before."—Lesléa Newman, author of I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father

"In Kaddish: Before the Holocaust and After, Jane Yolen expertly weaves together figures of the Jewish faith like Goliath, Sarah, and Esther, alongside story characters such as Rumpelstiltskin, Anansi and Raven, all interconnected with known and unknown victims of the Holocaust. Calling upon a variety of poetic forms, Yolen takes the reader on a questioning journey through Jewish history, universal notions of motherhood, and the stark lens of the photograph, showing us 'This, the story / no one wants to tell, / must be told.' Full of anguish and insight, her poetry reveals that '… story sticks / when memory fails,' a powerful witness to both inhumanity and hope."—Sylvia Vardell

"In her poem, 'Shoes: Holocaust Museum, Washington DC,' Jane Yolen writes: 'I walk with foreknowledge into the museum, /sure it has nothing to teach me.' After all, hasn’t she already written two of the classic Holocaust novels of our time, as well as numerous poems and yes, picture books on the subject? This is how I felt opening KADDISH: Before the Holocaust and After, Yolen’s latest collection of poems. I’ve already read most of the 400 plus (no typo) books she has written; including all of her poetry for adults. And I’ve taught and lectured about Poetry of the Holocaust. What could possibly be left to learn?

'So why now,' the second stanza of Shoes, continues, 'am I stunned, undone, incapable of moving on?' And that is how I felt as I closed the volume, 'stunned and undone' and, as Yolen says in another poem: 'uplifted, gifted, strengthened, /given breadth and breath.'

After a career that has garnered every conceivable kudo, how can a poet keep pushing herself, digging deeper, and finding new ground to plow? This collection was heartbreaking and breathtaking. Kaddish starts with creation itself, and brings us up to date with the January 6th, 2021 attempted coup in our own country. In between there is Midrashim, mitzvahs, miracles, martyrs, mishigas, and a love of language underscored by the knowledge of what words can do. I can do no better than to end by quoting from this book once again: 'These are the stories/no one wants to tell/ but must be told/…because story sticks /when memory fails.'”—Rich Michelson, owner of the Michelson Gallery in Northampton, Mass, is a much-published poet and children's book writer, and former poet laureate of Northampton.

From the Publisher