british holocaust poetry: songs of experience their exile and orphaning: Gershon was the earliest, aged 36, Mayer was 43, and
Kramerwas 50.^69
As Bryan Cheyette has complained in his studies of Jewish prose writers, Jewish
authors in Britain are oppressed by a sense of the dominating culture: ‘It is almost
as if Jewish writers in Britain had to combat an all-encompassing Englishness’;
but he identifies narrative strategies that they have developed ‘to resist an over-
bearing Englishness fixed in [a particular conception of] the past’.^70 Eva Figes and
Lore Segal, both child refugees from Nazified Europe, have left autobiographical
accounts of the repressive effects of their English education. The native-born Elaine
Feinstein overcame her problems with the English poetic tradition by learning from
Ahkmatova and other Russian poets whose work she translated. However, German
was the mother tongue for the majority of theKinder-transportees (who tended to
be assimilated Jews and not fluent in Yiddish or Hebrew). This created particular
problems for them both because of the Holocaust and because of the anti-German
prejudice they encountered in Britain. Kramer wrote of first being branded ‘Jew’ in
Germany and then sneered at as ‘German’ in England, an experience reported by
other child refugees such as Eva Figes and Sylvia Rogers.^71 As Gershon reflected in
‘The Children’s Exodus’: ‘being taught|to hate what we had loved in vain|brought
us lasting injury.’^72 They were not only bound by a sense of gratitude to Britain
(as Gershon mentions in the Foreword to her collective autobiography and Kramer
expresses in such poems as ‘Dover Harbour’^73 ); they were also constrained by the
dominant representations of their exile to Britain as a heroic tale of rescue and
escape, rather than of irretrievable loss.^74 The English master-narrative of the war
actually did them harm.
Thus, at first sight their poetry may seem unadventurously English almost to the
point of inertia. All threeKindertransportpoets draw on popular English traditions
for their verse forms: where Gershon mainly employs lines which end-stop and
have the four strong stresses and mid-rhymes of Anglo-Saxon verse, Mayer’s simple
(^69) To take examples of proseKindermemoirs, Lore Segal was aged 36 when she publishedOther
People’s Housesin 1964, and Eva Figes was about 40 when she wroteLittle Eden: A Child at War
(London: Faber, 1978).
(^70) Bryan Cheyette, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland:
An Anthology(Lincoln, Nebr.: Nebraska University Press, 1998), p. xxxv; my interpolation.
(^71) Kramer, ‘Equation’, in Lawson (ed.),Passionate Renewal, 213; Figes,Little Eden;SylviaRogers,
Red Saint, Pink Daughter 72 (London: Andr ́e Deutsch, 1996).
73 Gershon, ‘The Children’s Exodus’, inWe Came as Children, 171.
Kramer, ‘Dover Harbour’, in Lawson (ed.),Passionate Renewal, 216.
(^74) For a discussion of representations of theKindertransportexperience in film that celebrate it as
a tale of redemptive rescue, see Beate Neumeier, ‘Kindertransport: Childhood Trauma and Diaspora
Experience’, in Behlau and Reitz (eds.),Jewish Women’s Writing of the 1990s and Beyond, 61–70; and
for a discussion of dominant narratives of escape in British Second World War literature, see Mark
Rawlinson, ‘British Culture and the Holocaust’,Cambridge Quarterly, 25/1 (1996), 1–25. Gershon’s
prose concerning theKindertransportexperience is discussed by ChristophHouswitschka, ‘ ‘‘What I
was going to be I already was: a writer’’ ’.