Why, asks Jay Ladin in his opening paragraph, have critics shied away from Holocaust poetry? Perhaps, he posits, because "it is difficult to judge the form (good poetry) without also appearing to judge the content (good Holocaust?). As a result, in discussions of Holocaust poetry, the message tends to render the medium moot—or at least to intimidate participants into noncommittal tact." How can one get around this "noncommital tact," so as to discriminate between good and not-so-good Holocaust poetry, between poetry that matters and poetry that is negligible? Ladin's own answer, based on a series of useful analyses of individual poems, is that a Holocaust poem "works" if it is "aesthetically ambitious." But since one could apply this criterion to any and all poetry, it leaves us more or less where we began with a related question Ladin poses, "Can or should [there] be Holocaust poetry at all," given the notion, advanced by Elie Wiesel and others, that the Holocaust is "literally beyond verbal representation"?

The issue of Holocaust poetry reminds me of the current, frequently asked question, why isn't there more good poetry on the war in Iraq? Or again, why didn't the Vietnam War produce more good poetry? My own response to these questions is twofold. First, I don't believe poetry can ever be classified according to subject matter, whether that subject matter is love, war, the class struggle, or even the Holocaust. This is not to say that there aren't important poems on all these subjects, but that their importance is never (as Ladin himself implies in his assessments) based on subject matter as such. Secondly—and more important—the notion that a given poet decides as a matter of will to write a war poem or love poem or Holocaust poem and that he or she will succeed if the poem in question is sufficiently "aesthetically ambitious," seems to me to go against the very notion of how poems and other literary works are actually written.

Samuel Beckett is a case in point. I have argued elsewhere[1] that Beckett's own experience in the French Resistance and in his postwar Red Cross stint in Normandy, where it was his assignment to rebuild the hospital in Saint-Lô, laid the groundwork for Waiting for Godot and the Trilogy, written in the immediate postwar years. In 1946, in other words, a writer in his early forties, who for years had struggled to find his voice and his particular donnée, suddenly found himself able to tap into a wealth of narrative and dramatic material that demanded to be written. Indeed, in the early short stories like "The Calmative" and "The End," Beckett's landscapes and references allude overtly to the particulars of the Resistance and his years of hiding in southern France. Later, these references become more elliptical but the fact remains that Beckett is perhaps our great poetic chronicler of World War II, even though he never talks overtly about war.

The case of Paul Celan is similar, although critics, knowing his biography, have easily identified Celan as a Holocaust poet. The few overt Holocaust poems like "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue") were rejected by the poet himself, who did not want this particular poem reprinted in his later collections, fearing it was too histrionic, too overtly about the death camps. And his later poems are so oblique, fragmented, and elliptical, what with their neologisms and shorthand discourse, that a reader who has not been informed about Celan's biography can hardly identify them as referring to the Holocaust. Night thoughts, death thoughts, thoughts of dissolution against the backdrop of bleak landscapes: these do not necessarily point to the Holocaust. Like Beckett, Celan could hardly help writing out of his experience, which happened to be that of a German-speaking Jew, raised in what had been an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Jew subjected first to the Nazi horrors (specifically the deportation and murder of his parents) and then to the Soviet ones, an Eastern Jewish poet who became a citizen of France, married a Christian, and in his later years suffered from severe bouts of mental illness—an illness that culminated in suicide when he was only fifty.

Is Celan a great Holocaust poet? Yes, of course, although I prefer to think of him simply as a great poet. In Celan's case, at least, the label is meaningful, connecting, as it does, the man who suffered and the poet who wrote about that suffering. Experience—and here I disagree with both Ladin and Susan Gubar, as presented by him—is central to the formation of any poetry. Indeed, the notion that the modern and contemporary poets Ladin cites—a list of twenty-six poets from Auden to C. K. Williams— are the authors of Holocaust poems strikes me as totally improbable. Auden, to take the first name, wrote brilliant political poems that dealt with his wartime experience, beginning with the Spanish Civil War, but these are hardly Holocaust poems. As for the post-Auden generation, whose poets may well try to imagine what it must have felt like to be at Auschwitz or Dachau, the very category of Holocaust poetry makes me nervous. For who can read himself or herself into such a condition?

Great poems of war and revolution—say, Yeats's "Easter 1916"—are born of conflict. "We make," said Yeats, "of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." "Easter 1916" is never sure whether it approves of the Irish rebels or is critical of their grand gesture. Just so, Celan's "Todtnauberg," which most commentators have taken to be a critique of Heidegger, was read by Heidegger himself as a tribute of sorts. One writes, that is to say, not Holocaust poems but this particular Holocaust poem, which in the case of "Todtnauberg," has everything to do with Celan's admiration for an indisputably great philosopher—a philosopher who furthermore has taken an interest in his own poetry—even as his particular Jewish experience makes it impossible for him to forgive the older man. All these personal feelings find a way into Celan's political-cultural poem.

Can a contemporary poet then write about the Holocaust? It is the "about" that must be qualified. Tolstoy's War and Peace is strictly speaking about the Napoleonic War. But of course what it is really about is the "form of life," to use Wittgenstein's term, of the Russian aristocracy of Tolstoy's own time, an aristocracy on the eve of profound change and revolution. The Napoleonic war is merely the occasion for Tolstoy's brilliant fiction, and no one who wants to learn what the political ethos of early nineteenth-century warfare was would turn to Tolstoy. Just so, when contemporary poets write what they call Holocaust poems, they are really writing about something else—perhaps a strong sense of exile and displacement, as in Charles Simic's poetry (Simic was a refugee not from the Nazis but from the Soviets), perhaps the precarious conditions of Israel in the post-Holocaust, as in Dan Pagis's lyric. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, but we cannot characterize these poets as Holocaust writers.

Does this mean, as Susan Gubar fears in Poetry after Auschwitz, that the Holocaust will be forgotten, and that hence we need to be more attentive to Holocaust poetry? The loss of Holocaust memory, I would argue, has less to do with the neglect of such poetry than with the unspecificity of our public discourse about the Holocaust. As a refugee from Hitler's Vienna in 1938, my fervent wish is that more historians, literary critics, or art historians would deal with the specifics of the Nazi years from 1933 on, when Hitler first came to power. The crimes committed in those years were already mini-Holocausts—certainly this was the case of Kristallnacht (1938), but I find that most Americans now, as then, have a clear idea of what was happening. When, for example, Paul De Man was shown to have written for the Fascist press in Belgium on the eve of World War II, I heard many academics say that, well, after all, De Man's articles antedate the gas chambers and perhaps he really didn't know about the crimes already committed against the Jews. The fact is that everyone knew or could have known since the newspapers and radio faithfully reported all the iniquities and humiliations in question. By the time of the German Olympics (1936), attended by so many foreign dignitaries, including poets, who found the public spectacle impressive, the worst was already happening. The young John Berryman, for example, travelling in Germany in the summer of '36, was impressed by the theatre and pageantry he witnessed and remarked on the grandeur of the new Nazi stadium at Heidelberg. And the impending Holocaust was wholly misunderstood by the American Jews of the Partisan Review circle, who preached noninvolvement in the war until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 finally made them see the light.

We must, then, continue to inform ourselves about the Holocaust and its origins. I was glad to see that Yad Vashem, the new Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, begins with the 1880s when Zionism was born and shows how the Holocaust itself was no more than the culmination of a process that had begun decades earlier. Then, too, the Holocaust should be studied against that other Holocaust, the Stalinist one, with its own death camps and torture chambers. And, as it happens, there is a great poetry that came out of that time of terror—the poetry of Akhamatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, and their circle.

Why the Russian Terror has been poetically so much richer than the Nazi Holocaust or the various American wars is a fascinating question. I suspect it has to do with the place of poetry in pre-Stalinist Russia vis-à-vis its place in pre-war Germany or in contemporary America. If poetry is central to a given culture—as it was in Modernist Russia—inevitably the cataclysmic events of the day—in this case the Terror—will find its way into that poetry. But it cannot be forced. Ladin's question, "Should poets write about the Holocaust?" might be restated, substituting "could" for "should."

And I would say no: a contemporary Holocaust poem is either anachronistic or it is not really about the Holocaust but about something else for which Holocaust imagery provides an entrance.

NOTES

1. "In Love with Hiding: Samuel Beckett's War," Iowa Review, 35:1 (2005), 76-103.return to text