british holocaust poetry: songs of experience literary sources associated with childhood to structure that return of repressed
childhoodtrauma.
What Peter Lawson calls Mayer’s ‘ghastly playfulness’^92 masks a more astringent
bitterness than is to be found in either Gershon’s or Kramer’s poetry. Yet all
three poets adapt English verse forms to show what is hidden behind the mask of
self-controlled Englishness adopted by British Jews. In Gershon’s ‘I Was Not There’,
the speaker’s mind ‘refuses to conceive|the life the death’ her parents must have
experienced. Here the absence of punctuation suggests that her persona’s imagina-
tion balks at the living death, or life-in-death of the camps, but recognizes what she
is averting her mind from. Yet the very next poem in the sequence, ‘Race’, claims
that every living Jew has ‘in imagination seen|the gas-chamber the mass grave|the
unknown body’ that was their own.^93 That distinguishes her state of mind from that
of theKindanalysed in Lotte Kramer’s sonnet ‘Cocoon’, whose ‘willed amnesia’
is guaranteed by her husband ‘to stifle terror, exile, fear’.^94 The tweedy English
husband has turned her into an ‘English wife’, through a love which is implied to be
as stultifyingly destructive as it is protective, since it prevents her from metamorph-
osing into a full human being. Paranoia, too, is revealed. In Gershon’s ‘Home’, the
German-Jewish woman who is like one of ‘them’ in England is nevertheless terrified
of them as ‘potential enemies’, remembering that her childhood playfellows would
have killed her if she had stayed in Germany.^95 Yet the masquerade of Englishness
that hides a German past does not only stifle fear and pain. Alongside the threat, the
pogrom of daily life, as Gershon calls it, were also instances of extreme kindness and
joy. They too can be rediscovered through a poetry that draws on the German chil-
dren’s story tradition. Lotte Kramer’s ‘The Shoemaker’s Wife’ recounts the story of
a witch-like German woman who secretly defied her anti-Semitic husband and sons
to come at night with mended shoes.^96 In ‘The Town’, Gershon alludes to the story
of the Pied Piper. She returns to the place that drove her family out and unexpectedly
‘my own crippled childhood broke|from streets and hillsides like a dancer’.^97
Nevertheless, despite their potentially dramatic material, Kramer’s sonnet
‘Scrolls’ explains the refusal to make spectacular the terror, exile, and fear, which
motivates the distancing of all the British Holocaust poets. In a poem that pre-
dates the founding of the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, she
imagines a scenario 2,000 years into the future.^98 Just as the discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls has unearthed evidence associated with the mass suicide that ended
the Battle of Masada and the Jewish revolt against the Romans, sacred in Jewish
(^92) Lawson, ‘Three Kindertransport Poets’, 91.
(^93) Gershon, ‘Race’, inWe Came as Children, 178.
(^94) Kramer, ‘Cocoon’, in Lawson (ed.),Passionate Renewal, 220.
(^95) Gershon, ‘Home’, ibid. 253.
(^96) Kramer, ‘The Shoemaker’s Wife’, in Schiff (ed.),Holocaust Poetry,7.
(^97) Gershon, ‘The Town’, inWe Came as Children, 175.
(^98) Kramer, ‘Scrolls’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse, 201.