Poet­ry

Broth­er Sal­vage: Poems

Rick Hilles
  • Review
By – November 11, 2011
How does a young writer con­nect to the depths of anguish and hope of the Holo­caust? In Broth­er Sal­vage: Poems, Rick Hilles trans­lates poet­ry writ­ten by a Holo­caust sur­vivor, Tadzik Stab­holz. Amchu” best exem­pli­fies this col­lec­tion of genizah” or hid­den, sacred doc­u­ments of Judaism in which Tadzik smug­gles a Leica cam­era into the War­saw ghet­to. The viewer’s nar­ra­tive record can­not help but sear the reader’s soul, Now/​his left hand moved over the faces, the way/​he tend­ed them when they were still alive,/and he scanned the wreck­age of a shelledout/​hos­pi­tal for any­thing that might hold back/death…The sud­den fusion of pur­pose and frenzy/​a kind of mad­den­ing ecstasy/​that held him wide awake in the night­mare…” The dead are again memo­ri­al­ized into life and light in Yom HaShoah in Flori­da,” inter­weav­ing the trees, Span­ish stream­ers and piñatas, and home­com­ing parades with the walk, selec­tion, and smoke of Tre­blin­ka. While there are oth­er con­tem­po­rary poems bring­ing into focus Hilles’ fas­ci­na­tion with the roman­tic Novalis and Cather­ine Blake, this review­er was riv­et­ed by the poignan­cy of these Holo­caust poems. It is said that the world must remem­ber” or nev­er for­get.” How can that effec­tive­ly pre­vent anti-Semi­tism or any oth­er act of mass geno­cide? When human­i­ty is men­tal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly touched to the core with real­is­tic accounts, then per­haps they will be moved to do more than just observe and remark about an expe­ri­ence far beyond their knowl­edge. Broth­er Sal­vage does just that.
Deb­o­rah Schoen­e­man, is a for­mer Eng­lish teacher/​Writing Across the Cur­ricu­lum Cen­ter Coor­di­na­tor at North Shore Hebrew Acad­e­my High School and coed­i­tor of Mod­ern Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture: A Library of Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism, Vol. VI, pub­lished in 1997.

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