Constructing the Literal:
An Experiment in Using Holocaust Art to Illuminate
Holocaust Poetry
Gail Ivy Berlin
United States
2
Table of Contents
1. Constructing the Literal: An Experiment in Using Holocaust Art to
Illuminate Holocaust Poetry......……………………………………………........3-24
2. Interpreting Holocaust Poetry through Painting: An Exercise…………………..7
3. Text of Nelly Sachs’s poem, “But Look”………..………………………………8
4. Student Annotations of Unclear Passages in “But Look”……………………......9
5. Appendix A: “But Look”: A Hyperlinked Text with Images as Gloss …............17
6. Appendix B: Holocaust Art: Some Starting Places…………..………………….20
7. Appendix C: Holocaust Poems Paired with Paintings by Samuel Bak: Some
Suggestions for Glossing Poetry with Art……………………………………….22
8. Works Cited………………………………………………………………………24
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Constructing the Literal:
An Experiment in Using Holocaust Art to Illuminate Holocaust Poetry
The teaching of literature, if it can be done at all, is an extraordinarily complex and
dangerous business, of knowing that one takes in hand the quick of another human being.
(George Steiner, Language and Silence, p. 65)
While teaching an introductory graduate course on the Holocaust in literature last
fall, I became aware of a set of difficulties in teaching Holocaust poetry that I had not
forseen.1 The first difficulty stems from the fact that our usual techniques of literary
analysis, applied in usual ways, may produce monstrous readings. The second difficulty
is that our usual ways of reading lead us toward abstract formulations and away from the
literal, concrete events that poetry of the Holocaust struggles to capture. Let a single
example from my class embody both these principles. While examining Paul Celan’s
poem “Death Fugue,” we came upon the line, “as smoke you will rise into air/ then a
grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined.” One student, using tried and
true techniques of traditional close reading, produced an interpretation that ran something
like this: “The rising smoke is an ascension, perhaps showing a blessing as the Jews rise
into heaven where they will have a spacious grave.” I found this interpretation
problematic. As we discussed it in class, I tried to make clear that rising smoke, within
the context of Holocaust poetry, is no benediction, and a spacious grave in the air is no
divine gift. In Celan’s poem, these lines do not and cannot have a spiritual dimension of
this sort. Together, the class and I fought our way back to the submerged literal level of
the poem: murdered Jews, cremated and reduced to smoke, are dead and have no grave.
The smoke is smoke and the dead can look forward to no sweet tomorrow. To build a
structure of optimistic piety upon the words “rising” and “unconfined”—as traditional
close reading in fact encourage us to do—is to deform what Lawrence Langer has called
“the moral architecture of language” (Art from the Ashes
1
557).
The student’s
My sincere thanks to the members of my class on Holocaust Literature, ENGL 766, taught in the Fall of
2004, at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Their courage in tackling the literature of the Holocaust and
their appreciation for this literature gave me the courage to teach it. A special thanks to Heather Duda, Lee
Hobbs, and Willie Steele for their willingness to meet with me during the summer to discuss Holocaust
poetry one more time.
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interpretation is monstrous because it misses the concrete events that Celan’s language
tries to evoke and the ethical dimension that these events imply.
Yet the student who produced this interpretation is a person of good will, bright,
sensitive, empathetic, engaged, and alive to injustice. She came to the poem having read
Holocaust histories, chronicles, memoirs, and diaries and was familiar with the shape of
events during the Holocaust. What allowed her to produce a reading that so easily
jettisoned the moral dimension of the poem? How did she miss the outrage at the poem’s
center?2 In part, her interpretation was derailed by her buoyant optimism, an optimism
shared by most in the class. As a teacher, one can hardly wish to crush optimism. Yet
this optimism obscures the poem’s truth. As Annette Kolodny explains, “We appropriate
meaning from the text according to what we need (or desire)” (qtd. Rabbinowitz 19). My
student desired hope and read the text through this shining veil. Beyond this, however,
she was betrayed precisely by her years of academic training as a reader and interpreter
of literature.
The problem of how to read Holocaust literature is not a new one. Alvin H.
Rosenfeld’s article, “The Problematics of Holocaust Literature,” first written in 1974, is
still fresh today in its 2004 reprinting. Rosenfeld points out that “we lack a
phenomenology of reading Holocaust literature, a series of maps that may guide us on
our way” (28). He points out that:
We are yet to develop the kind of practical criticism that will allow us to record,
interpret, and evaluate Holocaust literature with any precision or confidence . . . It
would seem a radical misapplication of method and intention to search through
literary accounts of Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto for covert Oedipal
symbols, class struggle, revealing patterns of imagery and symbolism, mythic
analogies or deep grammatical structures. (28)
As an example of the sort of “radical misapplication” he means, Rosenfeld provides a
comparison of two poems entitled “Smoke,” one by Henry David Thoreau and one by
Jacob Glatstein. The poem by Thoreau is rich in metaphoric invention. His poem
begins:
2
This student is by no means alone in producing this sort of interpretation. A colleague at another
university reported to me the interpretation of a student who had read Night in high school and who now
believed that the snow covering the dead bodies of Jews symbolized “innocence.”
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Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest . . .
In this poem, as Rosenfeld notes, smoke is not smoke, but metaphor that we are meant to
decode (34).
Indeed, our usual notion of interpretation is the act of “construing
something else from the signs physically present in the text” (E.D. Hirsch Jr., qtd. in
Rabinowitz 17). Texts, we learn early on, mean something other than what they literally
say. And so we use the literal level of a text as a springboard to other higher insights. But
in Glatstein’s poem, Rosenfeld reminds us, the smoke cannot be read in this way.
Glatstein’s poem begins:
From the crematory flue
A Jew aspires to the Holy One.
And when the smoke of him is gone,
His wife and children filter through.
Rosenfeld notes emphatically that Glatstein’s smoke “has nothing at all to do with
metaphor. . . . To read this poem at all, we must disown the figurative use of language . . .
and interpret literally. . . .[Within the context of Auschwitz and the Holocaust,] the
flames were real flames, the ashes only ashes, and the smoke always and only smoke. . . .
They can only ‘be’ or ‘mean’ exactly what they in fact were: the death of the Jews” (36).
What does this mean for the teacher of Holocaust poetry? It means in part that we
cannot simply teach Holocaust poetry as usual—placing it in historical context,
examining literary antecedents, and elucidating cultural referents; we also have to
unteach, to block the usual techniques of reading that leap to mind, causing us to reach
for the metaphoric or symbolic when the literal is required. We also need to focus upon
what is all too easy to ignore: the plain, unadorned literal level of the text. Because
events of the Holocaust were so extreme, the literal level of a poem is not always easy to
comprehend. Often, it has to be pieced together from the string of images with which a
poet provides us. This is particularly true for poets who survived those times.
To help avoid traditional responses and to help focus on the literal, I devised an
exercise that I hoped would help students enter a poem without taking the usual routes.
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My plan involved pairing poems with images from Holocaust art with the hope that this
detour into art would short-circuit the usual literary responses. I chose works of art to
illuminated specific words or images within the poem rather than as glosses on the poem
as a whole. Three students , Heather, Lee and Willie, helped me to pilot this exercise in
which one poem by Nelly Sachs was paired with some paintings by Samuel Bak. We sat
down together for what I surmised would be a thirty-minute session, but ended up
discussing Sachs’s poem in the context of Bak’s art for two hours before cutting our
discussion short.
I began by presenting the students with a set of instructions and the text of Nelly
Sachs’s poem, “But Look,” chosen because it is in fact a difficult poem whose referents
are not at all immediately transparent. It is hard to determine exactly what is happening
within it, or to whom. With a poem such as this, it would be possible to shift from the
question, “What does this poem mean?” to “What is happening here?” Copies both of
Sachs’s poem and of the exercise appear below. I held back, at first, the paintings chosen
to accompany this text, Bak’s works “Ghetto” (1976), (in Painted in Words) and “Home”
(1992) (in Landscapes of Jewish Experience, p. 57), available to the students in black and
white photocopies, although I had color prints with me as well.
Interpreting Holocaust Poetry through Painting: An Exercise
A. First approach to the poem
1. Read the poem through.
2. Next to each stanza, provide a one or two-sentence summary of what’s
happening.
3. Jot down any particular historical situations or events that you recognize.
4. Identify and underline anything in the poem that you found difficult, ambiguous,
or confusing.
5. Generate a few questions that you think would help you to interpret the poem.
B. Approach to the paintings
1. Note the title of the painting.
2. What is your gut reaction to the painting? What feelings does it elicit?
3. What does the painting covey about its subject, as suggested by the title? What
kinds of information does it provide?
C. Returning to the poem
1. Treat the poem as if it were a painting. What does it tell us?
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2. Does reading the poem in this way allow you to answer any of your questions?
But Look
But look
but look
man breaks out
in the middle of the marketplace
can you hear his pulses beating
and the great city
on rubber tires
girded about his body—
for fate
has muffled
the wheel of time—
lifts itself in the rhythm of his breathing.
Glassy displays
broken raven-eyes
sparkle
the chimneys fly black flags
at the grave of air.
But man
has said Ah
and climbs
a straight candle
into the night.
Available in Nelly Sachs/ O The Chimneys: selected Poems, including Eli, a Verse Play.
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.)
After reviewing the instructions and reading the poem aloud, I asked students to
annotate the poem, identifying the events or action in each stanza and underlining
anything they found to be unclear. Their annotations appear bellow.
Student Annotations of Unclear Passages in “But Look”
Key:
Heather: red text
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Lee:
Willie:
yellow highlighting
underlined text
But Look
But look
but look
man breaks out
in the middle of the marketplace
can you hear his pulses beating
and the great city
on rubber tires
girded about his body—
for fate
has muffled
the wheel of time
lifts itself
in the rhythm of his breathing.
Glassy displays
broken raven-eyes
sparkle
the chimneys fly black flags
at the grave of air.
But man
has said Ah
and climbs
a straight candle
into the night
Why but? Why repetition?
Like disease or epidemic.
Perhaps hope? They’re surrounded.
A man escapes Nazis? Resistance?
Trucks loaded with people? Trucks
that gassed people?
Sounds are silenced by speaker’s own
thoughts/fears. Time is slowed? silenced?
Breathing his last?
Could this be gas inhalation?
Kristallnacht? Destruction in marketplace.
Ravens are around. Marketplace.
Smoke as a flag (waving) Smoke coming
from the chimneys. Burning of bodies and
ash?
Ah-ha? or a sound of resignation?
Could this be a last gasp?
Candle as smokestack?
Are candles crooked?
Description sounds like one of the ghettos
Smoke stack images of the camps
What is the great city on rubber tires?
What does the “straight candle” represent?
The literal level poses a considerable challenge in this poem. It is difficult to
orient in time and space. The “great city” is never identified. (Is it Jerusalem? Heaven?
Paris?) “Man” is not defined. (Is it a Jew, a Nazi, or mankind in general?) Action seems
suspended, as if time had frozen a moment before something momentous happens. (But
what?) No clues are given as to tone. (Is the “ah” of the last stanza an expression of
satisfied comprehension or the last breath of a dying man?) As students attempted to
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come to grips with this poem, they provided not summaries of each stanza, as I had
anticipated, but questions and provisional readings—fine places to start. Their notations
indicated that they were indeed thinking about possible events in the Holocaust to which
the images could refer, but the pattern of events from stanza to stanza did not yet form a
coherent whole for them. They sensed fear and violence in the poem, but could not
pinpoint its source. Were we in a marketplace round-up? Were we witnessing an escape
from a ghetto? Were trucks carrying people off? Were there gas vans approaching on
rubber wheels? Was it Kristallnacht? Were bodies being burned to ash? In this initial
reading, the students make little attempt to connect these disparate images and events,
although the marketplace was noted as the setting for both the first and second stanzas.
In our ensuing discussion, we surveyed areas of difficulty, notably the first stanza,
after man “breaks out” in the market place and the toneless “ah” of the last stanza. Then
we moved on to consider what was clearest. Students agreed that the broken, glassy
displays of the second stanza seemed to represent Kristallnacht while the grave of air
could float above the crematorium chimney of a concentration camp. At this point,
however, no one considered why Kristallnacht and death camps should be juxtaposed.
Lee suggested a connection between smokestacks and candles, and this served as a
transition to Samuel Bak’s painting, “Home,” which I now presented to students for the
first time.
“Home” is a picture painted in three distinct zones. At the bottom is the “home,”
a tiny solid structure encased in—and almost effaced by—a larger, crumbling edifice
embedded in a bleak and truncated cityscape. One large, dark window is open, and here
we can see two Sabbath candles looking very much like industrial smokestacks with
plumes of smoke. In the next layer, above the houses, a great wall of gray stone blocks
rises, and before it, two broken smokestacks, situated right behind the home. Above the
straight edge of the wall, at the top of the painting, twin smokestacks trailing clouds of
smoke rise ominously in a grim, yellowish sky.
Although I was familiar with the commonplace that today’s students are facile
and comfortable in navigating images, I had not realized the degree to which this is true,
even among students in their twenties. I am not arguing that comfort with visual media
has spawned an age of instant art critics, but that students may find art inviting in a way
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that the printed word is not. My students approached the paintings with a greater spirit of
confidence and adventure (for lack of better words) than they did the verbal structure of
the poem.
As their comments at the end of the session made clear, they found poetry
intimidating while art was “easier to go in and talk about.” As one student put it, reading
poetry is rather like looking at a painting by Escher: “You follow the steps round and
round to end up at the same place you started. You read yourself in circles. You don’t
want stanzas to be so confusing and circular, with no clear stopping point.” The artwork,
however, provided “a shot of courage.”
Perhaps the greatest advantage of working with Bak’s painting “Home” is that
students were able to see and draw connections among the three sections of the painting
as they had not initially been inclined to do with the three stanzas of “But Look.” In
“Home,” they saw the wall first as a dividing line, next as a division between ghetto and
camp, and finally as a wall joining ghetto and camp, suggesting a progression. They
noted that the candles signified Sabbath and that on this Sabbath, everything had stopped,
except for the chimneys of the camp, hidden from view behind the wall. The candle
sticks, because of their visual similarity to the smokestacks, became prophetic. Finally,
Heather read the painting as a progression from home, to ghetto, to camp and from
Jewish faith to the cremation of Jews.
The golden sky provided a number of challenges, and it is here that the drive to
maintain an optimistic reading came through most clearly. Did the yellow represent
sunrise or sunset? they wondered. Did it imply that heaven was a better place, or was it a
sunset for a murdered community? Perhaps the people had become “mist” (the word
“smoke” was avoided at this juncture), rising up to rejoin the universe. Or (a desperate
reading) perhaps you could read the painting top down, in which case the candles could
be survivors. But when I asked for a gut reaction to the image, all were finally,
sometimes reluctantly, able to agree that it was “depressing.” “The home is completely
destroyed.”
And the smoke is smoke.
Next, I confronted the class with two more of Samuel Bak’s paintings, entitled
“Ghetto” (1976) and “The Ghetto of Jewish History” (1996), both variations on the same
theme. My intent in choosing these images was not to imply that the setting of the first
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stanza was a ghetto (which it is not), but to elucidate the word “middle” in line four, a
word that had not been perceived as problematic during the students’ first reading of the
poem. And indeed, taken strictly literally, the word “middle” seems clear enough—a
designation of a central location.
But the word within Sachs’s poem has ethical
implications as well and designates a moral space, a public arena for violence. We are
about to witness—and called to witness—a still-unspecified, fateful act of violence at the
center of a marketplace, at the center of a city, surrounded by the usual, indifferent,
everyday noises of the circling traffic. And, when the violence of the marketplace is
juxtaposed with the chimneys of Auschwitz later in the poem, we are invited to judge. I
hoped that juxtaposing Bak’s ghetto with Sachs’s marketplace would help students grasp
the moral implications of this “middle-ness.” As Susan Gubar notes in her recent book,
Poetry After Auschwitz, poetry—through its “spurts of vision, moments of truth, baffling
but nevertheless powerful pictures of scenes”—“facilitates modes of discourse that
denote the psychological and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of calamity”
(7).
The same may be said of painting, especially the poetic and symbolic painting of
Bak.
In both versions of Bak’s “Ghetto,” a surface of slabs gives way to reveal a pitlike structure in the shape of a Jewish star in which we can glimpse the crumbling
buildings of the ghetto. As Lawrence Langer notes in his commentary on the 1996
version, “Neither eye nor imagination has any way of escape” (Landscapes of Jewish
Experience, 42). In the 1976 version, the star-shaped opening into the ghetto is sunk
amidst a square structure of stone blocks impenetrably packed together, some bearing
pointed roofs or spires, none with doors, and with every visible window bricked or
boarded shut. As with Sachs’s marketplace, Bak’s ghetto is at the heart of a city and thus
constitutes an indictment of that city.
From Bak’s images of Jewish ghettos, the students derived a sense of
claustrophobia. The ghetto, surrounded by slabs of stone, appeared as a “Jewish grave
with rocks placed on it.” Students gained a sense of absolute limit: “This is how much
space you have.” “The world has shrunk to that hole, and there is nothing beyond that
hole.” The steeple towering over the ghetto, to the left of the painting, lead them to see
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the image as “a Christian element surrounding the Jewish ghetto and encompassing
Jewish life. The only way to escape is up [through the crematory chimneys].”
A return to “But Look” in the wake of considering Bak’s images produced a new
set of questions and concerns and allowed students to focus upon the poem in a new way.
I asked the students to read the poem now as if it were a painting and this approach
seemed to give them a new measure of confidence as they returned to the vexing first
stanza. Who is this man who has “broken out” in the marketplace? And what exactly is
he doing? Is he escaping from a ghetto? speaking out against injustice? resisting? Is the
man in the first stanza the same as the man in the concluding stanza? Time cut short the
fullness of this discussion and the idea of the man in the marketplace as someone
instrumental in bringing about the violence of Kristallnacht did not surface. But students
were able to view the central stanza as prophetic, moving from Kristallnacht to
Auschwitz as a kind of cause and effect. And they were now able to view the poem as a
progression of events in history. A first attempt at reconstructing this history suggested a
move from ghetto (stanza one) to Kristallnacht (stanza two) to concentration camp
crematorium (stanza three)—not quite a workable sequence, since the Night of Broken
Glass preceded ghetto construction historically.
A little fine-tuning produced a
progression from Kristallnacht at the fateful moment before the violence burst forth
(stanza one) to the moment after the shop windows of Jewish businesses lay shattered
(stanza two). The broken windows as “broken raven-eyes” suggest the ravenous nature
of a violence that delights in carrion and desires more. They presage the death camps
(end of stanza two and stanza three). The motion of this poetry, and of much Holocaust
poetry authored by survivors, is not from textual sign to metaphoric interpretation but
from a reconstruction of nearly incomprehensible literal events to ethical engagement
with the implication of those events.
Was the art work at all helpful to this process of interpretation? I perceive two
chief benefits. First, students relaxed as I asked them to “treat the poem as if it were a
painting.”
Second, perhaps because of their reading of the paintings, their second
readings of the poem were differently focused. Because Bak’s painting “Home” is like a
striated cliff face in which we can read an archeology of events, students were
encouraged to look for a similar archeology of events in the stanzas of “But Look.” The
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poem had become a layering of chronology and place capable of being deciphered. And
in this layering, where the marketplace of Kristallnacht touches the chimneys of
Auschwitz, a space for moral judgment opens. In this way, the painting served as a model
for reading.
While the overly optimistic readings I had hoped to short circuit did surface,
particularly in our examination of Bak’s “Home,” the mood of the painting itself
militated against settling for an interpretation of smoke as benediction. Reading the
candles as survivors became less possible, too, because that entailed reading the painting
from the top down, moving backward chronologically from crematorium to home. But
finally what may best help students avoid morally vacuous interpretation is simply an
often repeated reminder to attend to the literal first.
Determine what’s happening.
Symbols there may be, but students must learn first to distinguish what may count as a
symbol and what may not.
Can such a time-intensive exercise fit the demands of a usual class structure,
where spending two to three hours in an encounter with one poem is not generally
possible? Clearly, the structure of the encounter would have to be modified, perhaps by
covering a few lines of a poem along with an accompanying image at the start of a series
of classes devoted to Holocaust literature. But I would keep the juxtaposition of poetry
and art, and I would probably add documentary photographs to the mix as well (as I do in
the hyperlinked version of “But Look,” below). It should also be possible to create
similar exercises in combining Holocuast poetry with art drawing upon the works of
other poets and artists. To facilitate this process, I provide three sets of materials in the
appendices, below. The materials are:
•
a list of some starting places in art of the Holocaust
•
a list of poetry paired with images
•
a version of Nelly Sachs’s “But Look” linked to suggestive images, both art and
documentary photographs.
If you find these materials useful, or if you have any other combinations to suggest, I
would be glad to know. I can be reached at [email protected].
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Appendix A
“But Look”
A hyperlinked text with images as gloss
But look
but look
man breaks out
in the middle of the marketplace
can you hear his pulses beating
and the great city
on rubber tires
girded about his body—
for fate
has muffled
the wheel of time—
lifts itself in the rhythm of his breathing.
Glassy displays
broken raven-eyes
sparkle
the chimneys fly black flags
at the grave of air
But man
has said Ah
and climbs
a straight candle
into the night.
Available in Nelly Sachs/ O The Chimneys: selected Poems, including Eli, a Verse Play.
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.)
Sources for Hyperlinks:
“Middle” is linked to Samuel Bak’s “Ghetto” (1976) available in Samuel Bak, Painted in
Words—A Memoir. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2000.
“Broken raven-eyes” is linked to an image of a shattered storefront in a Jewish-owned
shop available atThe Jewish virtual Library:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/storefront.html
“Grave of air” is linked Samuel Bak’s painting, “Smoke,” available at the Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota:
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Samuel_Bak/Samuel_Bak__Gall
ery_II_/Smoke.jpg
15
“A straight candle” is linked to Samuel Bak’s,“Home” (1992). Available in Samuel Bak
and Lawrence L. Langer, Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings by Samuel Bak.
Boston: Pucker Gallery; with Brandeis University Press, 1997.
16
Samuel Bak, “Ghetto” (1976). Available in Samuel Bak, Painted in Words—A Memoir.
Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2000. Compare also Bak’s “The Ghetto of Jewish
History.”
(Return to Text)
17
Samuel Bak, “Home” (1992). Available in Samuel Bak and Lawrence L. Langer,
Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings by Samuel Bak. (Tauber Institute for the
Study of European Jewry Series, 25). Boston: Pucker Gallery in association with
Brandeis University Press, 1997. (See also Crematorium IV at Auschwitz)
(Return to Text)
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Appendix B:
Holocaust Art: Some Starting Places
“Above all, we have been put under an obligation to remember, to record events and facts, to
describe people and characters, images, and important moments; to record in writing, drawing,
and in painting—in any way and in any means available to us.”
--Avraham Tory, the Kovno Ghetto (Formerly Poland, now in Lithuania)
Art as Documentation: Works Created During the Holocaust
Some Ghetto Artists:
Zvi Kadushin, photographer (Kovno)
Esther Luria, artist (Kovno)
Source:
The Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto. USHMM, Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1997.
A Statement of Despair:
Felix Nussbaum (German Jew; died in Auschwitz, 1944). “The Refugee” (1939) Paints
the feeling of being at a dead end while in the Saint Cyprien internment camp (France).
Source: http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/exhibitions/nussbaum/nussbaum_5.html
Art as Witness: Works Created After the Holocaust
Art by a Liberator:
Private Tolkachev at the Gates of Hell: Majdanek and Auschwitz
(A Russian liberator paints scenes from Majdanek and Auschwitz)
Source: http://www.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/tolkatchev/home_tolkatchev.html
Art as Memoir: Some Works by Survivors:
Alfred Kantor, painter and survivor of three camps, Terezin, Auschwitz, and
Schwartzheide. Paints his memories while in a DP camp in 1945.
Source: The Book of Alfred Kantor: An Artist’s Journal of the Holocaust. New York:
Schoeken, 1987.
Joseph Bau, Polish Jewish survivor of Plaszow and Auschwitz. His wedding was
featured in the film, Schindler’s List. Wrote and illustrated a memoir. Became an artist
and animator in Israel.
Sources: Joseph Bau, Dear God, Have You Ever Been Hungry. Arcade, 1998.
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Joseph_Bau/joseph_bau.html
(Note: The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota
maintains an excellent Holocaust-related website, including a Virtual Museum with
exhibition, at http://www.chgs.umn.edu).
Art as Memory:
Henry Koerner (Austrian Jewish survivor). “My Parents” (a surreal portrait)
Source:
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Absence_Presence/absence_pres
ence.html
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Samuel Bak (A child prodigy, who first displayed his art in the Vilna Ghetto at age nine;
now an artist of international fame. He survived the Vilna Ghetto, together with his
mother. Only two-hundred Jews survived Vilna.) Extraordinary symbolic paintings.
Sources:
http://www.puckergallery.com/samuel_bak.html. (Superb site)
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Witness___Legacy/Arts__Survivors/Samuel_Bak/samuel_bak.html
Samuel Bak, “Speaking about the Unspeakable” (Slide Lecture, 2002)
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Samuel_Bak/samuel_bak.html
Samuel Bak, et al. Between Worlds: The Paintings and Drawings of Samuel Bak from
1946 to 2000. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2002.
Samuel Bak. Painted in Words: A Memoir. Boston: Pucker Arts Publications and
Bloomington, IN: Indiana U., 2002.
Barbara Loftus (Second-generation survivor. Her mother, the sole survivor of her
family, was sent from Germany to England via the Kindertransport.) “A Confiscation of
Porcelain” (A series of painted images forming a narrative about the Nazi appropriation
of her family’s china, shortly after Krystal Nacht.)
Source:
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Absence_Presence/General_Tou
r__Absence_Presence/Barbara_Loftus/barbara_loftus.html
Art as Political Commentary
Arthur Szyk (Jewish illustrator who became a political cartoonist in 1939 in response to
the increasing threat of Hitler. He was born in Lodz, moved to England in 1939 and then
to the U.S. in 1940, where he became a citizen. Portrayed the Nazi persecution of Jews.)
Sources:
The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk. USHMM, 2002.
Arthur Szyk Society: http://www.szyk.org. (Contains links to the USHMM exhibit on
Szyk)
Arthur Szyk: Artist for Freedom (Exhibit at the Library of Congress)
(http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/szyk)
Ben Shawn (American Jewish Artist. Did poster art and Time Magazine covers during
WW II.)
Source:
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Absence_Presence/General_Tou
r__Absence_Presence/Ben_Shahn/ben_shahn.html
Zbigniew Libera (Polish artist): Lego Concentration Camp
Source:
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Absence_Presence/General_Tou
r__Absence_Presence/Zbigniew_Libera/zbigniew_libera.html
20
Appendix C
Holocaust Poems Paired with Paintings by Samuel Bak
Some Suggestions for Glossing Poetry with Art
Poems:
Art:
Nelly Sachs, “Night, Night”
Samuel Bak, “Alone,” “Journey”
Nelly Sachs, “But Look”
Samuel Bak, “The Ghetto” (1976),
“Home,” “Smoke”
Nelly Sachs, “Petrified Angel”
Samuel Bak, “Dreaming Angel”; Albrecht Durer,
“Melancholia”
Paul Celan, “There Was Earth
Inside Them”
Samuel Bak, “Les Adieux”
Miklós Radnóti, “Dreamscape”
Samuel Bak, “Open and Closed,” “Under the Trees,
Dark Rumors”
Miklós Radnóti, “Root”
Samuel Bak, “Roots,” “Sefarim Bet,” “Under the
Trees”
Jacob Glatstein, “Cloud Jew”
Samuel Bak, “Flight,” “Othyoth,” “Green Shul”
Sources for the Poems:
Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, ed. Lawrence Langer, New York: Oxford,
1995. This anthology contains all the poems listed above except “But Look” and
“Petrified Angel.”
Nelly Sachs: O The Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including Eli, a Verse Play. New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1967. “But Look” and “Petrified Angel” may be found here.
Sources for the Art
Print Sources:
Painted in Words: A Memoir. By Samuel Bak. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2000.
Contains “Ghetto” (1976 version).
Samuel Bak: Landscapes of Jewish Experience. Ed. Lawrence L. Langer. Boston:
Pucker Gallery, 1997. This book contains “Alone,” “Journey,” “Ghetto” (1996 version),
“Home,” “Smoke,” “Flight,” and “Othyoth.”
21
Samuel Bak: Return to Vilna. Ed. Jeanne Gressler. Commentary by Lawrence L. Langer.
Boston: Pucker Gallery, 2002. This exhibition guide contains “Open and Closed,”
“Under the Trees,” “Dark Rumors,” “Roots,” “Sefarim Bet,” and “Green Shul”
Web Sources:
http://www.puckergallery.com Site of the Pucker Gallery, Boston.
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/indexNS.html Site of the Center for Genocide and
Holocaust Studies at the University of Minnesota.
“Les Adieux” may be found at http://www.puckergallery.com/adieux_enl.html
“Dreaming Angel” appears as part of Bak’s lecture, “Speaking about the Unspeakable,”
reproduced along with its accompanying slides, at the website of The Center for
Genocide and Holocaust Studies at the University of Minnesota.
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Samuel_Bak/DreamingAngela.jp
g
“Angel of Travelers” and Rembrandt’s Melancholia appear as parts of the same lecture
and slide show:
Angel of the Travelers:
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Samuel_Bak/Samuel_Bak__Gall
ery_III_/angeloftravellersa.jpg
Rembrandt’s “Melancholia” appears as part of the same lecture.
http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Visual___Artistic_Resources/Samuel_Bak/Samuel_Bak__Gall
ery_III_/Melancholia.JPG
22
Works Cited
Alvin H. Rosenfeld. “The Problematics of Holocaust Literature.” In Literature of the
Holocaust. Ed. Harold Bloom. Bloom’s Period Studies. Philadelphia: Chelsea
House Publishers, 2004. 21-47.
Bak, Samuel. “The Ghetto of Jewish History.” In Painted in Words: A Memoir. Boston:
Pucker Art Publications, 2000.
Bak Samuel and Lawrence L. Langer. Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings
(Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series, 25). Boston: Pucker
Gallery in association with Brandeis University Press, 1997.
Celan, Paul. “Death Fugue” in Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology, ed. Lawrence
Langer, New York: Oxford, 1995.
Gubar, Susan. Poetry after Auschwitz. Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 2003.
Langer, Lawrence L., ed. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York:
Oxford, 1995.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of
Interpretation. Ithaca NY: Cornell, 1987.
Sachs, Nelly. “But Look.” In Nelly Sachs/ O The Chimneys: selected Poems, including
Eli, a Verse Play. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.
Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the
Inhuman. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1998.