DISCOVERING CENTRAL EUROPE BOOKS
In this respect, you have to keep in mind where and when the poem was written, in the midst of genocide. So when he testifies about what is going on, it amounts to a political message transgressing the limits of literature. Exactly. While I was writing my book, it occurred to me that almost wherever Nazism threatened the Jews, their very first reaction was that they had to document what was happening. Even if they would not survive, the documents should testify. he lost his family and relatives, except for his elder son. In a condensed form, he lived through all the events that were witnessed by Polish Jewry. Those events that he did not experience himself, he at least heard about, since he was a member of the group of intellectuals that had tasked itself with gathering and maintaining a historical record. In short, Katzenelson knew a great deal. Some parts of his poem are astonishing. It seems unusual that he was able to gather this vast amount of knowledge about events in Poland from within a seemingly isolated environment. Gathering this knowledge had a specific purpose for him, since he was aided in escaping from the ghetto in order to testify about what was transpiring. Exactly, his friends sent him from the ghetto to the outer world, so that he, as a literate person, could testify to the situation. At last, he left Warsaw and was taken to northern France with a Honduran passport, where he was put in a socalled transit camp in July of 1943. In this camp, prisoners were held for a potential swap. There, in Vittel, he desperately wanted to write about what had happened. At the beginning, he couldn’t work due to fatigue and the monstrous humiliations of his circumstances. Moreover, he felt that he did not possess the words to express what he had seen. It was during the fall, while deportation was looming, that he began to write the poem in which he wanted to tell everything. He finished it in January of 1944. Soon after, in March, he was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. The poem consists of 15 verses, and is quite varied for its genre. It starts out as a traditional song with minor modifications and then changes into "a news chronicle song". This latter form is an ancient genre used to publically narrate events. Katzenelson could not know how the war would end. He wrote on behalf of the exterminated Jewish people, for the Jewry living overseas and in Palestine, and humankind at large. There are also dramatic elements in the poem, when for example, he describes the death of Adam Czerniaków, the leader of the Warsaw ghetto. The poem also employs the non-literary form of testimony. With incredible precision, Katzenelson describes what happened to him and to the others around him in the Warsaw ghetto. Sometimes you can feel that the lines are staggering because of the pain, though not in the bad sense. They reflect the poet’s trepidation.
How did Katzenelson’s poem survive? He made several copies. One was smuggled into Palestine in the handle of a suitcase by one of his colleagues, who was exchanged for a German prisoner. Another copy, in a bottle, was buried by the trunk of a tree and later recovered by a friend who survived. This is why it could be published in Paris in April of 1945, even before the war ended. The book you are working on bears the title Footnote. How does it relate to Katzenelson and his poem? Initially, as I used to do in other cases of translating, I wanted to write an essay about the author and the circumstances in which the poem was written. Pushing deeper into the subject, I found myself overwhelmed by the reality that was before me – not only the murder of people but the annihilation of a whole culture. And it was this non-existent culture that continued to capture my attention and efforts. I felt that writing once more about how the people were killed would amount to another act of murder. Instead, against the intentions of the murderers, I set out to bear witness to what has been lost. What characteristics of Jewish culture are we talking about? Besides orthodox and traditional Jewish culture, there was a robust, modern secular Jewish culture, which, because it was polyglottal, was open to the whole world. By the beginning of the 20th century, this culture was about to create institutions, just like other European nations had been striving to do earlier. The particularity of this culture is that it was not confined to one country. It did not have a country as such. The world of the Yiddish language, broadly speaking, comprised of territories from Moscow to Berlin: there were newspapers published in Yiddish in both cities. But being more precise, it was a population living in small towns, from Belarus to Central Poland, and from Riga to Odessa. Your presentation of this world is highly unusual. As I said, when I began to understand what had been lost, I knew that I had to render it visibly. But the question was how it ought to be done? I’m not a historian, nor am I a novelist. I therefore wanted to provide some kind of intellectual approach, because culture, which is a conscious reflection on the world, cannot be depicted in a naïve or fairytale-like manner. In this spirit, I decided to select some segments of the culture in question. I was surprised by the richness of the educational system, the plethora of schools and intellectual currents, which often complemented or sometimes overlapped each other. Because I did not want to repeat myself, I had to 95