BOOKS DISCOVERING CENTRAL EUROPE
HAD I NOT TREATED LIFE, I COULD NOT HAVE SPOKEN ABOUT THE DESTRUCTION AN INTERVIEW WITH THE POET AND TRANSLATOR ZOLTÁN HALASI interview conducted by MÁTÉ ZOMBORY
T
he encounter with Jizchak Katzenelson’s famous poem “Song of the Murdered Jewish People” proved to be decisive for Zoltán Halasi. After translating the poem into Hungarian, he continued his work in the form of research and is currently striving to recover and capture the East-European world of the Yiddish language, which was destroyed during WWII. In this conversation, we talked about his research, which will materialize in his book Footnote. 94
The book you are working on began with your translation of Jizchak Katezenelson’s poem, “Song of the Murdered Jewish People”. What were the circumstances in which Katzenelson wrote this poem? Katzenelson was a professor and poet from Łódź, and he spent most of his adult life writing plays and occasionally poems. His works were published in Hebrew. He was a Zionist and convinced socialist, but he was also familiar with religious culture, as he taught Bible classes in the school where he worked. Interestingly, or perhaps we should say tragically, in 1939, after the Germans invaded his country, this school became the headquarters of the Gestapo. From this point forward, Katzenelson had to stay in hiding. He went to Warsaw, where 400-500 000 Jews were living in the ghetto. He started to write more and more poems, increasingly (and at last only) in Yiddish. He thereby changed his poetic language. The vernaculars of the Warsaw ghetto were Polish and Yiddish. So Katzenelson, after having written his poems, read them to those who lived in the ghetto. During the years he spent there, VISEGRAD INSIGHT 1|2012