claire m. tylee
history for 2,000 years, so in the future scrolls might be discovered in Poland, or
burntclothing, a letter, or ‘some scraps of verse’, preserved in the mud. Then she
envisages the prurience of the researchers, curators, and exhibition crowds, that will
result in a ‘book of dredged tears’, an exhibition room cluttered with ‘sores’, and
the queues of bored people vicariously ‘poaching’ emotion off the backs of other
people on Sunday afternoons. The final couplet is condensed, but it suggests that
she burns uselessly with hidden rage at this profane cultural wasteland, identifying
herself with the victims of the massacre who fall blazing from their wailing wall.
The sonnet is compressed, and the very difficulty of unpacking it suggests that
it is an example of what Rowland would term ‘awkward poetics’. Neither the Jews
nor the Holocaust are directly identified, and some knowledge of Jewish culture is
required to decipher the allusions. The final image, for me, conjures up photos of
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when some of the rebels leapt to their death in the
burning city rather than surrender to the Nazis. However, the point I wish to make
is that the difficulty here is not to do with the aesthetic problem of how to represent
the Holocaust itself, but with the political problem of how to represent it to a culture
where it is so alien, and where that alienates the poet. The self-consciousness comes
from that sense of alienation. Kramer is uncompromising. Yet she, like the other
Holocaust poets, has revealed her inner thoughts honestly to an English public,
however unpalatable they may be, and in so doing has testified to her survival in
thefaceofpersecution.
Lest that should appear to give this essay a redemptive ending, remember that
theKinder-poets have stressed the costs of their survival: their sense of guilt, loss,
loneliness, and alienation, and the traumatic ideas they cannot expunge. (It was not
by chance that Gershon’s chosen pen-name means ‘stranger in a strange land’.) Like
Plath’s, Hill’s, and Paulin’s, their poetry is a testament to the Holocaust, but their
poems are seldom pleasurable, and they are hard-won. Gershon characterizes her
own artistic legacy in ‘Afterwards’. This implicitly alludes to a poem about women’s
creativity by another Jewish woman writer, Adrienne Rich in ‘Aunt Jennifer’s
Tigers’. There, like women of the past, Aunt Jennifer has endured the terrifying
ordeal of her marriage by embroidering imaginative tapestries. The poem ends
by predicting that, ‘When Aunt is dead’ and her trials are over, ‘the tigers in the
panels that she made|Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid’.^99 By contrast,
Gershon prophesies that, ‘When I am dead my orphaned memories|will squat
about the world like refugees’.^100 What I have tried to do in this essay is to take
these discomfortingKindertransportpoems in, and to welcome them as an integral
part of the canon of British war poetry, of no less worth than the war poems by
more widely known poets such as Hill, Paulin, and Plath.
(^99) Adrienne Rich, ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’, in Gilbert and Gubar (eds.),Norton Anthology of
Literature by Women, 2025.
(^100) Gershon, ‘Afterwards’, inGrace Notes(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), 9.