Gestapo Crows
Holocaust Poems
Hardback and Paperback: 108 pp.
Published: 1993
Price: $18.95, $12.50
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This book, dealing with Holocaust Victims, Refugees, Second-Generation "Survivors," and Today’s Family, is narrated by an American Jewish poet, son of neither victims nor survivors, who does not presume to speak for the dead but rather to the living — one human plea for universal peace.
Praise:
One cannot but respond with deep emotion and affection to the anguish and pain one finds in your poems. Granted, words are often unable to express the ineffable; but isn’t poetry the art of transcending words?
— Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and author of Night
These magnificent poems are an assault on our complacency, our sleeping memories. Every line . . . reminds us that each of us died in the ovens of the holocaust. . . . Brodsky’s poetic voice is a haunting, anguished triumph of memory over evil.
— Stephen B. Oates, author of With Malice Toward None
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Crimes Against Humanity
This inordinately early morning,
An argentiferous mist
Lifts between sky and trees,
Enfencing his eyes' tormented horizon.
He has no idea why he's driving south,
Unless it's to elude sleep's neo-Nazis,
Stalking alleys and side streets
Of the ghetto from which he's perpetually retreating —
He had not one extra second
To grab possessions
During their blitzkrieg last night-mare
Or to act upon his Wiesenthal dreams.
Conceivably, he's being too dramatic,
Stating the case with ironic hyperbole.
Probably, this ominous mist, now crimson,
Portends nothing less nor more
Than the severe thunderstorm
His radio's been forecasting repeatedly
These past three hours.
Yet perhaps he's actually fled this time,
Not to elude Nazis
But to hunt down his fugitive hallucination,
Extradite and punish it
For crimes against his humanity.
To read my interview with Charles Adès Fishman, about my writing on the Holocaust, please click here.
