Today I helped Rachael with a paper for a UCLA literature course and I read some poetry by Abraham Sutzkever, who is considered by many to be “the greatest poet of the Holocaust.” The poem that we read and analyzed is called “How?”

It reads:

How?

How will you fill your goblet
On the day of liberation? And with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark keeing you have heard
Where skulls of days glitter
In a bottomless pit?

You will search for a key to fit
You jammed locks. You will bite
The sidewalks like bread,
Thinking: It used to be better.
And time will gnaw at you like a cricket
Caught in a fist.

Then your memory will resemble
And ancient buried town
And your estranged eyes will burrow down
Like a mole, a mole….

Vilna Ghetto, February 14, 1943
Translated by Chana Bloch

This is such a richly evocative poem, which says so much in so few words. The most striking line for me: “Like a cricket caught in a fist.” What a succinct and perfect way to describe a feeling of total powerlessness.

Many believe Abraham Sutzkever deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature. After reading several of his poems today, I concur.

Sutzkever died at 96 in 2010.