claire m. tylee
rhyming quatrains resemble hymns, nursery rhymes, and the ballads adapted by
Blake,Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Kramer tends to sonnet form. They share
a surface politeness of tone. It is notable how unhistrionic their verse is, especially
when compared with Plath’s; they do not make their own pain spectacular. On the
contrary, Gershon’s unpunctuated lines often feel distinctly flat. Yet this apparent
emotionless of form indicates a public carapace hiding private responses that shock
against the expectations of normal decorum. So it is not surprising to discover
that Gershon claims Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon as her English mentors:
‘I feel as if I had always known them.’^75 This, I think, is partly because of their
sympathy for the grief and pain caused by war, but more because they had found
ways to reveal shocking, repressed emotional memories in a plain language. The
very numbness of her writing is an indication of the trauma.
For instance, Gershon’s joyless poem ‘A Jew’s Calendar’^76 starts with a date in
1941 when ‘all remaining German Jews|were exiled to the Russian Front’, gradually
to recount that nothing else is sure about the fate of this Jew’s parents. In 1945, she
checked the Red Cross lists that name the German Jews ‘not dead’, and when she
could not find their names, ‘so glad was I’. Why on earth is this? It is because she
will not have to compensate them for their suffering. This makes her glad, so that ‘I
did not grieve for them’. The perversion of feeling is expressed through a linguistic
inversion that recalls a similar shock in Blake’s poem ‘A Poison Tree’—‘glad I
see|My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree’^77 —but there that thrill of revenge at
least seems naturally human. It is left for the reader to judge that the unthrilled
blankness expressed by Gershon is unnatural, yet one more result of Nazism.
On the other hand, in her more famous poem ‘I Was Not There’, she complains
that she was not there when her parents set out from home for the last time
and, although there was nothing she could have done to save them, ‘I must atone
because I live’.^78 The poem rhymes and assonates with the words ‘home’, ‘camps’,
and ‘death’, and the third stanza ends with the apparently irrelevant line ‘the ground
is neutral underneath’. This picks up an earlier claim that the day her parents left,
the dawn ‘was neutral was immune’. Similarly, an impatient, rejecting response to
what the precise facts were—‘what difference does it make now’—is echoed in the
final line of the poem, that it is no defence to say ‘it would have made no difference’
even had she been there. The apparent immunity to any feeling other than guilt
contrasts with traditional elegies in English that the poem summons up, such as
Wordsworth’s Lucy poems—‘Oh!|The difference to me!’—where the dead loved
one is now ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,|With rocks, and stones, and
(^75) See Lawson, ‘Three Kindertransport Poets’, 88, where he cites the foreword to Gershon’sCollected
Poems(London: Gollancz, 1990), 2, and her unpublished memoir, ‘A Tempered Wind’ (1992), 163–4.
(^76) Gershon, ‘A Jew’s Calendar’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse,
177–8. 77
William Blake, ‘A Poison Tree’, inComplete Writings, 218.
(^78) Gershon, ‘I Was Not There’, in Schiff (ed.),Holocaust Poetry, 133–4.